Tastes and the Ontology of Impersonal Perception Reports
Friederike Moltmann
October 2021 

Sentences such as Chocolate tastes good have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include The violin sounds / looks strange as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as It feels / seems like it is going to rain. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects (the taste of chocolate is good, the sound of the violin is great, the look of the violin is beautiful) also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006253 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	J. Wyatt, J. Zakkou, and D. Zeeman (eds): Perspectives on Taste. Routledge
keywords:	impersonal verbs, logophoricity, perception verbs, taste judgments, ontology, faultless disagreement, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v4 [October 2021] v3 [September 2021] v2 [October 2021] v1 [October 2021]
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