Language and Dialogue 5:2 (2015), 224–246. doi 10.1075/ld.5.2.02col
issn 2210–4119 / e-issn 2210–4127 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Disagreement and the speaker’s point of view
Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana
Te University of Texas at Austin
Tis article defends an intentionalist solution to cases of disagreement. Unlike
conventionalist approaches, the paper shows that the truth-value of some sen-
tences is shifed 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. Te
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.
Keywords: Disagreement, dialogic stance, speech act, speaker intention,
perspective, meaning, truth-value, truth-conditions
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
Tat the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
(W. Stevens, Tirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird, 1938)
A number of scholars have argued that the linguistic meaning of a sentence is suf-
fcient to determine the truth-conditions of an utterance. Ten, a proposition has
one and only one truth-value independently of the context of utterance. Tis is to
say, truth-utterance is invariant context-by-context. Every time two speakers ut-
ter conficting sentences about the same situation then, one and only one of them
is speaking truthfully and the other one is at fault. Otherwise, if both expressed
propositions are true, the two sentences are about diferent situations and they are
not defnitely contradictory. Nevertheless, everyday conversation (what usually