Abstract: I offer a simple-minded analysis of presupposition in which if a sentence has a presupposition, then both that sentence and its negation logically entail the presupposition; and in which sentence with failed presuppositions are neither true nor false. This account naturally generates an analysis of what it takes to disagree and what it takes to be at fault in a disagreement. A simple generalisation gives rise to the possibility of disagreements in which no party is at fault, as is be required by leading theories on predicates of taste.
There is a podcast of me giving the talk at the Aristotelian Society.
Updated 13 April 2013: final draft
Parsons, Josh. 2013. “Presupposition, Disagreement, and Predicates of Taste.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113: 163–73. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9264.2013.00350.x.
Until September 2016 I am a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College and an Associate Professor in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty. From then on, I'll be a Senior Adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
My intellectual interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics, and of course transport policy.
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