Truth Without Objectivity

Kölbel, Max

doi:10.4324/9780203870181

Cited by 197 publications

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“…9 I show how to do so, and present the semantics more rigorously, in Schroeder (2008 b). 10 See Hale (1993), Kölbel (2002), and Schroeder (2008 a) for discussion of this point. 11 Schroeder (2008 b).…”

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How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem with Negation

Schroeder

2008

Nous

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Expressivists have a problem with negation. The problem is that they have not, to date, been able to explain why 'murdering is wrong' and 'murdering is not wrong' are inconsistent sentences. In this paper, I explain the nature of the problem, and why the best efforts of Gibbard, Dreier, and Horgan and Timmons don't solve it. Then I show how to diagnose where the problem comes from, and consequently how it is possible for expressivists to solve it. Expressivists should accept this solution, I argue, because it is demonstrably the only way of avoiding the problem, and because it generalizes.Once we see how to solve the negation problem, I show, it becomes easy to state a constructive, compositional expressivist semantics for a purely normative language with the expressive power of propositional logic, in which we can for the first time give explanatory, formally adequate expressivist accounts of logical inconsistency, logical entailment, and logical validity. As a corollary, I give what I take to be the first real expressivist explanation of why Geach's original moral modus ponens argument is genuinely logically valid. This proves that the problem with expressivism cannot be that it can't account for the logical properties of complex normative sentences. But it does not show that the same solution can work for a language with both normative and descriptive predicates, let alone that expressivists are able to deal with more complex linguistic constructions like tense, modals, or even quantifiers. In the final section, I show what kind of constraints the solution offered here would place expressivists under, in answering these further questions.

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How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem with Negation

Schroeder

2008

Nous

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“…And here the relevance of the slightly stronger conclusion I took pains to support above is apparent: Since felicitous denial does not require that the utterances semantically encode any truth-conditional content, the felicity of Alphie's assertion and Betty's denial does not require that δ be fixed in the context. 16 For semantic and pragmatic arguments against the radical context-sensitivity of PPTs, see Kölbel (2002), Lasersohn (2005), and MacFarlane (2007,2014). Collins (2013) presents compelling syntactic arguments against indexicalist analyses of PPTs.…”

Section: A Critical Review Of Two Alethic Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Non-Alethic Approach to Faultless Disagreement

Clapp

2015

Dialectica

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This paper motivates and describes a non‐alethic approach to faultless disagreement involving predicates of personal taste (PPTs). In section 1 I describe problems faced by Sundell's indexicalist approach, and MacFarlane's relativist approach. In section 2 I develop an alternative, non‐alethic, approach. The non‐alethic approach is broadly expressivist in that it endorses both the negative semantic thesis that simple sentences containing PPTs do not semantically encode complete propositions and the positive pragmatic thesis that such sentences are used to express evaluative mental states. Finally, in section 3 I explain how the non‐alethic approach explains faultless disagreement.

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“…20. For some arguments, see Kölbel 2002Kölbel , 2004MacFarlane 2003, forthcoming;Richard 2004;and Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson, forthcoming. 21.…”

Section: Quantify Over Contexts: One Should Assert At C U Only Whatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Xiv*-Making Sense of Relative Truth

MacFarlane¹

2005

Proc Aristotelian Soc

242

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The goal of this paper is to make sense of relativism about truth. There are two key ideas. (1) To be a relativist about truth is to allow that a sentence or proposition might be assessment-sensitive: that is, its truth value might vary with the context of assessment as well as the context of use. (2) Making sense of relativism is a matter of understanding what it would be to commit oneself to the truth of an assessment-sensitive sentence or proposition.A nalytic philosophers tend to regard relativism about truth as hopelessly confused, easily refuted, and even a sign of deficient intellectual character. This attitude is not entirely unreasonable. Proponents of relativism have focused much more on motivating their doctrine than on making sense of it, or even stating clearly what it is to be a relativist about truth. But if relativists have underestimated the difficulties here, their opponents have overestimated them. It is possible to make good sense of relativism about truth-or so I hope to show.In the first part of this paper, I will try to say exactly how the relativist's position should be stated. Relativism about truth, I will argue, is the view that truth (of sentences or propositions) is relative not just to contexts of use but also to contexts of assessment. The philosophical challenge is to explain what this talk of 'truth relative to a context of assessment' means. In the second part of the paper, I will meet this challenge-not by giving a definition (that is not how one should expect to illuminate fundamental concepts like truth), but by giving assessmentrelative truth a role to play in a normative account of assertion. My account will settle precisely what one has to argue in order to defend the claim that a certain sentence or proposition is assessment-sensitive.

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Truth Without Objectivity

Cited by 197 publications

References 0 publications

How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem with Negation

How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem with Negation

A Non-Alethic Approach to Faultless Disagreement

Xiv*-Making Sense of Relative Truth

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