Have You Ever Been Experienced? The Evidential Basis for Subjective Judgment

Consider a situation in which my friend Kim presents her two cats with a new brand of cat food. Hoshi, who eats anything, devours the food, but Nikko, who is very picky, takes one sniff and walks away. Observing this behavior, Kim says “This new food is not tasty.” I can report on this episode by uttering either (1a) or (1b), but not (1c).

(1) a. Kim doesn’t believe the new food is tasty, because Nikko won’t touch it.

b. Kim doesn’t consider the new food tasty, because Nikko won’t touch it.

c. Kim doesn’t find the new food tasty, because Nikko won’t touch it.

The difference between (1a-b) and (1c) is that the latter but not the former presupposes that Kim has tasted the food.  This is a special case of a more general requirement associated with “subjective” predicates like ‘tasty’ and ‘beautiful’ that the individual whose judgment provides the basis for claims about whether an object satisfies these predicates must have experience of those features of the object that are relevant to the judgment:  how it tastes, how it looks, etc.  My goal in this talk is to show that the experience requirement can be derived as an evidential condition on subjective judgments, given a pragmatic model of subjectivity as sensitivity to what Kennedy and Willer (2016) call “counterstances:”  alternative ways of resolving uncertainty about meaning.

References

Kennedy, C. and M. Willer. 2016. “Subjective attitudes and counterstance contingency.”  Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26.