NEW AGE RELATIVISM AND EPISTEMIC POSSIBILITY: THE QUESTION OF EVIDENCE<sup>1</sup>

Wright, Crispin

doi:10.1111/j.1533-6077.2007.00133.x

Cited by 25 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Why exactly would one endorse truth---relativism in any domain of discourse? After all, as Cappelen & Hawthorne (2010) 2 I'm following here Maria Baghramian's (forthcoming) terminology; Cappelen & Hawthorne (2010) refer to this recent movement in analytic philosophy of language "analytic relativism" while Wright (2007) refers to the position as "New Age Relativism." 3 For some defences of truth---relativism about predicates of personal taste, see Lasersohn (2005), Stephenson (2007) and Kölbel (2003).…”

Section: Truth---relativism Contextualism and Disagreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And the relevant standard at play in the context of assessment is not uniquely determined by the context of use. As Crispin Wright (2007) has put it: vary [the context of assessment] and the truth value of the utterance can vary, even though the context of its making and the associated state of the world remain fixed. This is a somewhat simplistic view of the truth---relativist position, but it will do for now.…”

Section: Truth---relativism Contextualism and Disagreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disagreement, Relativism and Doxastic Revision

Carter

2013

Erkenn

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I investigate the implication of the truth---relativist's alleged 'faultless disagreements 1 ' for issues in the epistemology of disagreement. A conclusion I draw is that the type of disagreement the truth---relativist claims (as a key advantage over the contextualist) to preserve fails in principle to be epistemically significant in the way we should expect disagreements to be in social---epistemic practice. In particular, the fact of faultless disagreement fails to ever play the epistemically significant role of making doxastic revision (at least sometimes) rationally required for either party in a (faultless) disagreement. That the truth---relativists' disagreements over centred content fail to play this epistemically significant role that disagreements characteristically play in social epistemology should leave us sceptical that disagreement is what the truth---relativist has actually preserved.

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Section: Truth---relativism Contextualism and Disagreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Truth---relativism Contextualism and Disagreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disagreement, Relativism and Doxastic Revision

Carter

2013

Erkenn

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“…3 The lion's share of the work of developing the broad approach has of course been carried by John MacFarlane (2003aMacFarlane ( , 2003MacFarlane ( unpublished, 2005aMacFarlane ( , b, 2007,but significant, and significantly different, developments have also been made by, for example, Max Kölbel, Mark Richard and Peter Lasersohn in the researches cited in the list of References. For misgivings about the underlying semantic assumptions, see Cappelen and Hawthorne, forthcoming. For various specific difficulties with the approach, both local and general, and misgivings about its motivations, see Hawthorne (2007), Wright (2006Wright ( , 2007 and forthcoming, and Moruzzi and Wright,forthcoming. 4 It is, of course, a crucial issue whether the contents of utterances that are the bearers of assessmentrelative truth values in a given region of discourse could be anything very like propositions as traditionally conceived-whether, for example, there is any good sense in which a pair of thinkers in different assessment contexts who each comprehendingly accept a particular such claim as true, can be said to agree.…”

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confidence: 98%

Fear of relativism?

Wright

2008

Philos Stud

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1To many in or on the edges of the Academy, ''Relativism'' is a word with overtones of sinister iconoclasm, representing a kind of intellectual and ethical free-for-all in which the traditional investigative virtues of clarity, rigour, objectivity, consistency and the unbiased pursuit of truth are dismissed as illusory and the great scientific constructions of the last 200 years, together with our deepest moral convictions, rated merely as 'our way of seeing' the world, more elaborate and organised but otherwise on all fours with the cosmology and customs of primitive tribes.In his short book, Paul Boghossian aims to address, and to expose as bankrupt, the idea that there is even a coherent, let alone defensible philosophical stance about truth and knowledge that can underwrite these 'pluralist', or 'postmodernist' tendencies. But since it is crucial to his project that his style of discussion makes it available to non-specialists, much of the recent more technical, less emotional debate within analytical philosophy about relativism's renaissance as a particular form of semantic theory is passed over unmentioned. Part of my aim in what follows is to illustrate how Boghossian's discussion connects quite straightforwardly with relativism in its contemporary analytical philosophical livery-what I have elsewhere called New Age relativism 1 -and how some of his critical arguments may be presented in that setting. My main contentions will be, first, that when relativism about epistemic justification, and about morals, are couched in the currently canonical sort of form, they still remain in range of artillery that

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“…See also[10,21,72], and[13] for critical discussion of the problem of modal disagreement and whether it promotes relativism.…”

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confidence: 99%