Disagreement and the speaker’s point of view

Abstract

This article defends an intentionalist solution to cases of disagreement. Unlike conventionalist approaches, the paper shows that the truth-value of some sentences is shifted and relative to the concrete way the assertion is made. Unlike relativist accounts, it argues that cases of subjective meaning are just apparent, and really express normative content as included in embedded sentences. The paper advocates for a solution based on what I call the speaker’s point of view, which understands disagreement as expressing the speaker’s perspective in conversation about a particular matter without constraining the truth-value of the sentences of our natural language. Consequently, the speaker’s utterance is a speech act necessarily related to the interlocutor’s utterance, which is another speech act, since only by integrating the level of the communicative function into a dialogic interaction the real meaning of the utterances can completely show up.