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Notes
Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) Subsequent references are indicated parenthetically. By relativistic content, I mean that which is truth evaluable, is the object of attitudes like assertion and belief, and (is the sort of thing) whose truth value is relative to something that is not fixed simply by picking a possible world.
In what follows I say nothing about the discussion in CH’s Chapter 3 of “temporally neutral” content. I agree with the spirit of much of what they say there (though not with everything they say about some of my juvenilia). I agree in particular that an adequate account of the syntax of the tenses and various anaphoric devices shows that there is precious little motivation for temporally neutral content. ‘Temporalism and Eternalism Revisted’ in Richard (forthcoming), contains an extended discussion of this issue.
I say nothing about CH’s discussion of “binding arguments” against certain versions of relativism about predicates of taste because I have already discussed the matter in Chapter 5 of When Truth Gives Out (Oxford University Press, 2008).
The idea is that the report is understood as equivalent to, even as having a syntax well represented by, Kavalier and Clay λx(x said that a bar local to x serves absinthe). Of course, this helps with predicates of taste (or with other putative examples of relativistic content such as ‘tall’) only if we are willing to posit argument places in the predicates that are typically not manifest.
More exactly, they ascribe to these authors a reliance on this argument:
Usually or always, different users of S can be reported as having said the same thing with a sentence of the form the users said that S. So usually or always different uses of S have the same content.
Neither Cappelen and LePore nor Stanley argue for relativism.
See, for instance, Richard (2004, pp. 216, 218).
The idea is that Coach and Normal associate different properties, P and Q, with ‘tall’ and the reporter uses ‘tall’ to express a property true of those who are both P and Q, false of those who are neither, and otherwise undefined.
Note that the critical case is one in which Coach and Normal have these dispositions after a reference class (or a property determining such) is associated with the predicate: The question to ask is: If Joe thinks anyone over 6′4″ is tall (when the relevant class is high school basketball players) but Coach thinks that no one under 6′8″ is tall (for this class), do Coach and Normal disagree? It seems to me obvious that they do. It also seems to me obvious that if each one’s use is accommodated in a conversation about someone who is 6′6″, each speaks truly when one says the person is tall and the other says he is not. See Richard (2004, 2008, Chapter 4).
CH observe that there is a sense of ‘disagree’ (an ‘activity sense’) on which we say that x disagrees with y when x objects to something that y says, or says ‘I disagree’; in this sense of ‘disagree’ we “disagree” even in a case in which: you and I agree that my pants are orange; you say to me ‘your pants are orange’; I in my wretched deafness take you to have said ‘your pants are on fire’ and consequently say ‘no they’re not!’. While we do use the verb ‘disagree’ in such cases, we also say that in such cases that there “isn’t really a disagreement.” I ignore this use of disagree since it seems irrelevant to the debate about relativistic content.
Here I am in agreement with John MacFarlane (2007b), who uses an example like this (as well as one like the ‘temporal relativist’ example several paragraphs back). There is overlap between MacFarlane’s view and my own of disgreement, though they are distinct. I won’t here compare MacFarlane’s formulation to my own.
Cappelen and Hawthorne criticize this sort of example because they think that, since one of the objects in the example is non-existent, there can’t be any disagreement in the example:
…even if we unrestrict our quantifiers as far as possible, the [claim that each of two individuals in different worlds accepts some proposition P] does not entail that there are two individuals that accept P. After all, on the most standard metaphysical picture, there is no use of ‘everything’ so unrestricted that ‘everything that exists actually exists’ comes out false. (p. 64)
Perhaps it is true “on the most standard metaphysical picture” that ‘everything that exists actually exists’ can’t be understood as false. But we all perfectly well understand and, outside of the metaphysics class, think ‘there are more things that we can (and do) talk about than exist actually’; it’s hard to see how this could be true without the sort of relaxation in which CH refuse to engage. More importantly, the example in the text and the one following it are really devices to make vivid the fact that we all grasp immediately the idea that beliefs with the same content may be about different situations and, when they are, we do not take them to disagree.
Note in this regard that even those who think that nothing exists but the presently existing would describe modern dentists, who think that men and women have the same number of teeth, as disagreeing with Aristotle, who thought that women had fewer teeth in men. We are quite capable of seeing whether one existent and one non-existent belief do or do not agree or disagree with one another.
Which is not to say that one will get a truth value relative to any circumstance—vagueness or (perhaps) the absence of an object may scotch the evaluation.
I am of course here assuming that circumstances involve “perspectives”, which are (in part) determined by things like standards for applying the notion of wealth.
CH specifically set disgust judgments involving moral evaluation to the side.
For the record, I think that cases involving adjectives like ‘rich’ discussed in Richard (2004, 2008) provide the strongest case for relativistic content. In these examples: different standards for ‘rich’ are associated by speakers in two different conversations; uses involving those standards are accommodated in each conversation (with the adjective’s “reference class” constant across conversations); we have strong intuitions of disagreement across conversations. It is of course particularly unappealing to postulate covert ‘judge arguments’ as occurring in adjectives like ‘rich’ (or, for that matter, in phrases like ‘rich for a 21st century New Yorker’).
It is worth pointing out that nobody seems to have ever defended a “blanket relativism” about judgments of taste. It is no part of the agenda of those who think that words like ‘fun’ have relativistic content to say that on no occasion is ‘fun’ is elliptical for ‘fun for me’. The point in the text is that given (what Sect. 2 suggests is) a proper understanding of the nature of disagreement, relativists are not committed to the claim that whenever two people endorse incompatible contents they thereby disagree.
I have changed the details of the example to make the situation involved one we can imagine actually happening (CH’s example involves a talking animal). It is probably relevant that in CH’s example it is natural to assume that it would be common knowledge between Brutus and Volturius that Volturius’ assessments of disgustingness and deliciousness were very different from Brutus’s and Cassius’s.
Those who think the example’s point can be avoided by reading the ascription de re should construct variants in which ‘friend’ plays a predicative role while not occurring within an expression that could be interpreted as a singular term.
How is my utterance of ‘I’m not so sure [that your friends are at the Senate]’ to be understood in this case? Obviously in terms involving the principle discussed in the text: Given that principle and the fact that it is presupposed that Cinna and Casca are Caesar’s friends, the principle licenses me if I believe that Cinna and Casca are at the Senate to utter ‘I think that your friends are at the Senate’. My saying that I am not so sure about that is clearly supposed to convey to Caesar that I don’t think that his friends are there. If we suppose that ‘I think your friends are at the Senate’ is only felicitous and not true, exactly what principle licenses the negation in this case is not altogether clear. But it is well known that we often use negation to convey the denial of something only pragmatically associated with the negated sentence.
These remarks are of course relevant to the interpretation of Brutus’ utterance of ‘I don’t [think you’ll find something delicious in the gumbo]’ in the original example.
References
Cappelen, H., & Hawthorne, J. (2009). Relativism and monadic truth. Oxford: Oxford University.
Cappelen, H., & LePore, E. (2003). Context shifting arguments. In J. Hawthorne & D. Zimmerman (Eds.), Philosophical perspectives 17 (pp. 25–50). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Cappelen, H., & LePore, E. (2004). Insensitive semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Egan, A., Hawthorne, J., & Weatherson, B. (2005). Epistemic modals and relative truth. In G. Peter & G. Preyer (Eds.), Contextualism in philosophy (pp. 131–169). New York: Oxford University.
Hawthorne, J. (2004). Knowledge and lotteries. New York: Oxford University.
MacFarlane, J. (2005). Assessment sensitivity of knowledge attributions. In T. Szabo & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology 1 (pp. 305–323). New York: Oxford University.
MacFarlane, J. (2007a). Semantic minimalism and nonindexical contextualism. In G. Preyer & G. Peter (Eds.), Content and context. Oxford: Oxford University.
MacFarlane, J. (2007b). Relativism and disagreement. Philosophical Studies, 132, 17–31.
Richard, M. (2004). Contextualism and relativism. Philosophical Studies, 119, 215–242.
Richard, M. (2008). When truth gives out. USA: Oxford University.
Richard, M. (forthcoming). Meaning in context: collected papers. Oxford University Press.
Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interest. Oxford: Oxford University.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Nancy Bauer for comments and to a seminar on contemporary relativism at Tufts in Fall 2009 for spirited discussion.
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Richard, M. Relativistic content and disagreement. Philos Stud 156, 421–431 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9687-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9687-9