LingLunch : Inés Crespo

Inés Crespo (IJN)
Subjectivity and the semantics of relative gradable adjectives

Abstract : Consider relative gradable adjectives like 'tasty' and 'long', and some of the sentences we can produce with them. In English you can say, for instance, "This cake is tasty" or "This is a long book". We can enter into disputes which are hard to settle. It appears that no one has the upper hand because 'tasty' and 'long' are, in some sense, subjective. Formal semanticists and philosophers of language have recently paid much attention to the subjectivity of adjectives like 'tasty' because the intuitive analysis of a taste dispute challenges the traditional truth-conditional approach to meaning.
We argue that to get a grip on how subjectivity enters into the meaning of gradable adjectives, one has to adopt a more encompassing view of meaning than the truth-conditional one. The subjectivity in the meaning of 'tasty' or 'long' is explained by the fact that the cognitive agent is an embodied agent who signals her affective responsiveness. We thereby signal how people can act, and how they expect others should act. Through the notion of affordance (Gibson 1979) we can specify the meaning of a claim like "This cake is tasty" through the action possibilities it signals. If time permits, we will sketch an update system, a simplified model showing the mechanics of embodied intentionality in how agents interpret sentences like the ones above, and some other ones as well.