Pluralism for Relativists: A New Framework for Context Dependence

Abstract

Relativism about truth can take various forms. The interesting relativism, according to MacFarlane, is what he calls assessment-sensitivity. To show that usual forms of relativism in semantics don't enter the interesting territory of relativism and thus to motivate assessment-sensitivity, MacFarlane puts considerable time distinguishing assessment-sensitivity from non-indexical contextualism. The difference is brought about by considering retraction data. For this paper, by considering retraction data, we argue that whether speakers think that they should retract a taste utterance they made in the past does not have a clear answer. 1 The intuition and the data suggest that some people do think it appropriate to retract a previously made taste utterance and some people don't. Given this variance, we suggest a framework for context-dependence, which makes room for both assessment-sensitivity and non-indexical contextualism. Whether a given utterance is relativist in the assessment-sensitive way or in the non-indexical contextualist way, we think, depends on the interpreter of the utterance. This accounts for the variance in the judgments concerning whether one should retract a past taste utterance or not. In this paper, we spend more * This is part of an ongoing project. Many thanks to