The problem of value disagreement and contextualist, relativist and metalinguistic attempts of solving it are laid out. Although the metalin-guistic account seems to be on the right track, it is argued that it does not suffi ciently explain why and how disagreements about the meaning of evaluative terms are based on and can be decided by appeal to existing social practices. As a remedy, it is argued that original suggestions from Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" ought to be taken seriously.

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... he resulting dual aspect theory of meaning can explain value disagreement in much the same way as it deals with disagreement about general terms. However, the account goes beyond Putnam's by not just defending a version of social externalism, but also defending the thesis that the truth conditional meaning of many evaluative terms is not fi xed by experts either and instead constantly contested as part of a normal function of language.