Thursday, February 27st, 2020.
11:00 am.
Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, Room A1.
Abstract:
Perry (2012) and Korta and Perry (2011) have argued for the importance of acknowledging different truth-conditional contents of utterances to deal with classical problems in the philosophy of language. My present work is an attempt to acknowledge this multiplicity of contents in order to deal with problems related to evaluative statements, i.e., statements that are used to make evaluations, or that carry an evaluation with their use. I focus on statements used to assess literary works and, after developing my account of them, I present and discuss some consequences of my view for disagreements about literature. In consequence, my presentation will have two parts. In the first part, I present an analysis of the multiple truth-conditional contents of evaluative statements. The multiplicity of truth conditions comes from a variety of factors at play with regard to the utterance whose truth value is to be assessed. In order to figure out which factors are relevant when considering literary evaluative statements, I will take into account some characteristics of predicates whose use seems to indicate that an evaluation is being made, such as ‘wonderful,’ ‘mediocre,’ ‘nice,’ ‘formless,’ or ‘elegant.’ In particular, following Stojanovic (2016) and Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016), I will take those predicates to be gradable and multidimensional. In the second part of the presentation, I will argue that my analysis of the truth conditions of evaluative statements is suitable in order to give a proper picture of certain disagreements about literary value. More to the point, I will argue that among the variety of contents of a given utterance, the one that results from taking into account all the information agreed upon by the parties involved will be the most relevant one when it comes to explaining disagreements.
I analyze the work of different critics discussing the novel The Well of Loneliness by Marguerite Radcliffe Hall. The case of study allows me to illustrate the variety of factors that might and usually play a role in the process of literary evaluation. The case of study is especially illuminating. The Well of Loneliness was published in 1928, it is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Stephen Gordon, a wealthy English woman that suffers intensely from being rejected by the persons around her and society in general because of her -in its author’s words- “sexual inversion.” It is the first novel published in English on this topic, and it has been largely known as the lesbian novel. Not surprisingly, a huge controversy surrounded the novel after its publication. Opinions vary from those who defends the literary value of the novel to those who “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel” (Douglas, 1928/2001).
REFERENCES:
Cepollaro, Bianca, and Isidora Stojanovic. 2016. “Hybrid Evaluatives: In Defense of a Presuppositional Account.” Grazer Philosophische Studien 93: 458–88. https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-09303007.
Douglas, James. 2001. “A Book That Must Be Suppressed.” In Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, 36–38. New York: Columbia University Press.
Korta, Kepa, and John Perry. 2011. Critical Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511994869.
Perry, John. 2012. Reference and Reflexivity. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Stojanovic, Isidora. 2016. “Expressing Aesthetic Judgments in Context.” Inquiry 59 (6): 663–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208922.