Xiv*-Making Sense of Relative Truth

Abstract

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.

Sense and Insensibility Or Where Minimalism Meets Contextualism

“…In contrast to some forms of radical relativism-e.g. the position recently put forward by MacFarlane (2003MacFarlane ( , 2005-though, we shall argue that there is a privileged or default situation relative to which the minimal semantic content should be evaluated. This privileged situation is fixed by cognitive facts concerning speakers and hearers, but also by noncognitive relations between the grasp of content and the world.…”

Epistemology without metaphysics

“…5 What I'm advocating for normative terms is very different from contextual relativism, so different that in my 1994 paper I decided not to call it 'relativism' at all, and to label it a kind of expressivism (though one very different from old-fashioned versions of expressivism, in that it gives evaluative statements a cognitive role). But John MacFarlane (2005) has recently introduced the term 'assessor-relativism' for what seems at first blush to be just this sort of thing. My understanding may not fully coincide with his-more on this below, especially in Section 10-but I will use his term nonetheless.…”

Deflationary Truth, Ordinary Truth and Relative Truth

“…Of course, there are interesting (and difficult) issues regarding the relativistic notions of immediate pragmatic relevance: once speech acts such as assertion are understood in terms of these notions, it is not clear whether we may still think of them as aiming to, or as being (constitutively) normed by, truth or correctness (Evans (1985), MacFarlane (2005), García-Carpintero (2008), Field (2009)), so that it is not clear whether we can still make sense of assertion as a norm-governed practice (Caso (2014), Greenough (2011), MacFarlane ( 2014)) or we have to make sense of assertion under a different way of conceptualizing it-e.g., in terms of commitments rather than aims (MacFarlane ( 2005)). More recently, Gariazzo (2016Gariazzo ( , 2019 has claimed that assessment-sensitivity can be made sense of only piecemeal, taking one area of discourse at a time, and that usual ways of doing so are not successful.…”