The role of value judgements in the coordination of choices

Recent work on evaluative discourse and judgements of taste in particular has focused on active interpersonal disagreements and less on agents being in a state of disagreement. I content that the former type of disagreement is the basic one and that the persistence of such disagreements is a key feature that requires explanation. I explore the communicative import of judgements of taste and the expressive dimension of such speech acts, based on an explanation of why we get involved in disputes about taste in the first place, why they can persist, what acceptance or rejection of such judgements consists in. I am going to defend that the use of the simple, semantically articulated proposition that a is F, characterized by an unrelativized truth predicate and not enriched by personal standards or perspectives offers a plausible semantic approach to sentences used in the unfolding of and subsequent interpersonal management of such disagreements. They function as focal points in a coordination game. The model shows that personal standards or perspectives are, contrary to a widely shared assumption in the debate, not the entities or objects that require coordination. What is shared are projects that require the coordination of the participant’s individual strategic choices.