Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When two people disagree about matters of taste, neither is in the wrong: There is nothing contradictory in a dialog where one interlocutor says 'The rollercoaster was scary!' and the other responds 'No, it was not scary.' This contrasts with disagreements about objective facts. This phenomenon is known as faultless disagreement, and is central for theorizing about subjective expressions. Faultless disagreement is typically assumed to stem from subjective expressions having a special semantics. We present evidence that people’s judgments of faultless disagreement are sensitive not only to the lexical content of a sentence, but also to the broader discourse context (properties of the interlocutors in the dialog) and to extra-contextual factors (participants’ own attitudes about that particular domain). These results problematize arguments that faultless disagreement stems directly from the semantics of subjective lexical items.