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Research project This project investigates different forms of disagreement and objective pretensions outside straightforwardly descriptive discourse. The primary focus is on moral disagreement, but also on conditionals, epistemic modals, and matters of taste.
Moral judgments, conditional claims, epistemic modals, and taste all seem to display different degrees of subjectivity, where different judges are concerned to assess different facts. Nevertheless, judges seem to be in some sort of disagreement, and their judgments to aspire to various kinds of objectivity. The main question of the project is how to understand this complex picture. Evidence suggests that pragmatic factors affect the extent to which we take to judges to be in disagreement over an issue, and affect whether we think that if one is right, the other must be wrong. The project investigates how these pragmatic factors function.