Online research in philosophy

According to one sort of epistemic relativist, normative epistemic claims (e.g., evidence E justifies hypothesis H) are never true or false simpliciter, but only relative to one or another epistemic system. In chapter 6 of Fear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian objects to this view on the ground that its central notions cannot be explained, and that it cannot account for the normativity of epistemic discourse. This paper explores how the dogged relativist might respond.

In this note, I consider various precisifications of the slogan ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’. I provide counter-examples to each of these precisifications (assuming an epistemic probabilistic relevance notion of ‘evidential support’).

One of Weatherson's main goals is to drive home a methodological point: We shouldn't be looking for deductive arguments for or against relativism – we should instead be evaluating inductive arguments designed to show that either relativism or some alternative offers the best explanation of some data. Our focus in Chapter Two on diagnostics for shared content allegedly encourages the search for deductive arguments and so does more harm than good. We have no methodological slogan of our own to offer. Part of what we were trying to do was to clearly articulate what the relevant issues even are. Often relativism is characterized in a way that is offhand and sloppy. The relativist, we are told, accepts 'disquotational truth' for various kinds of claims but denies that they are 'true simpliciter'. What exactly is going on here? Do the relevant distinctions even make sense? Before engaging in various abductive manoevers we need to get much clearer about what it is that we are trying to argue for and against. That said we are perfectly happy with the kind of inductive enterprise that Weatherson sketches. For our part, we were fully aware (and indeed explicit) that the 'agreement' diagnostic does not ‘deductively’ settle all of the relevant disputes. A significant part of Chapter Four is dedicated to something in the vicinity of Weatherson's project. Note, indeed, that our diagnostics are even stated using the ideology of 'providing evidence' – hardly the basis for a straightforwardly deductive argument for or against relativism. Finally, though, we should point out that we are not hostile to deductive arguments against relativism. A philosopher's evidence is theory-laden and in part owes itself to epistemic powers that his or her opponents may not acknowledge. In short, their evidence may not always have the hallmarks of 'evidence neutrality' --- evidence that their opponents would recognize as such. We are perfectly open to there being compelling deductive arguments against relativism from such evidence..

What different relativist claims about a given domain are to be distinguished? Which of them is best placed to account for intuitive facts about disagreement in that domain? In a recent paper in this journal, ‘Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism’ (2004), Max Kölbel distinguishes two forms of relativism, andargues that one of them, indexical relativism, faces problems in accounting for disagreement. In the first part of this discussion I present my own taxonomy of relativist positions in a given domain, which is based on David Lewis’s 1980 essay, and I compare it with Kölbel’s and other recent suggestions. In the second part, I argue that the presuppositional defence of indexical relativism against related objections that I have elaborated elsewhere is also effective against Kölbel’s recent charges.

How are reasons and evidence interrelated? According to one prevalent view, reasons and evidence are equivalent: evidence is a reason, and a reason is evidence. On another view reasons and evidence are conditionally related: if there is evidence, then there is a reason. On a different view reasons and evidence are disjunctively related: reasons or evidence can be substituted for each other. In this paper, I argue against these common views, and I defend the view that reasons and evidence are conjunctively related: evidence and reasons are distinguishable yet inseparable. I argue reasons and evidence are distinct because they come apart in certain cases, and I argue reasons and evidence are inseparable because only when properly conjoined are they capable of yielding correct verdicts on important cases in epistemology.

How are reasons and evidence interrelated? According to one prevalent view, reasons and evidence are equivalent: evidence is a reason, and a reason is evidence. On another view reasons and evidence are conditionally related: if there is evidence, then there is a reason. On a different view reasons and evidence are disjunctively related: reasons or evidence can be substituted for each other. In this paper, I argue against these common views, and I defend the view that reasons and evidence are conjunctively related: evidence and reasons are distinguishable yet inseparable. I argue reasons and evidence are distinct because they come apart in certain cases, and I argue reasons and evidence are inseparable because only when properly conjoined are they capable of yielding correct verdicts on important cases in epistemology.

David Lewis, Stewart Cohen, and Keith DeRose have proposed that sentences of the form S knows P are indexical, and therefore differ in truth value from one context to another.1 On their indexical contextualism, the truth value of S knows P is determined by whether S meets the epistemic standards of the speakers context. I will not be concerned with relational forms of contextualism, according to which the truth value of S knows P is determined by the standards of the subject Ss context, regardless of the standards applying to the speaker making the knowledge claim. Relational contextualism is a form of normative relativism. Indexical contextualism is a semantic theory. When the subject is the speaker, as when S is the first person pronoun I, the two forms of contextualism coincide. But otherwise, they diverge. I critically examine the principal arguments for indexicalism, detail linguistic evidence against it, and suggest a pragmatic alternative.

Recently, contextualism about epistemic modals and predicates of taste have come under fire from advocates of assessment relativistic analyses. Contextualism, they have argued, fails to account for what we call "felicitous insensitive assessments". In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption that has remained in the background in most of the debate over contextualism and relativism. Finally, we briefly argue that the resulting contextualist account is at least as plausible as the relativist alternative and should be carefully considered before contextualism is abandoned for relativism.

For some relativists some of the time the evidence for their view is a puzzling data pattern: On the one hand, there's evidence that the terms in question exhibit some kind of content stability across contexts. On the other hand, there's evidence that their contents vary from one context of use to another. The challenge is to reconcile these two sets of data. Truth relativists claim that their theory can do so better than contextualism and invariantism. Truth relativists, in effect, use an argument to the best explanation: they present data they claim to be able to handle better than any competing theory2.

The setting of relativistic ideas about truth in the general style of semantic-theoretic apparatus pioneered by Lewis, Kaplan and others has persuaded many that they should at least be taken seriously as competition in the space of explanatory linguistic theory, a type of view which properly formulated, may offer an at least coherent — and indeed, in the view of some, a superior —account of certain salient linguistic data manifest in, for example, discourse about epistemic modals, about knowledge and about matters of taste and value, and may also offer the prospect of a coherent regimentation of the Aristotelian "Open Future" (along with, perhaps, the Dummettian ’anti-real’ past.) My main purpose here to enter a reminder of certain underlying philosophical issues about relativism — about its metaphysical coherence, its metasemantic obligations, and the apparent limitations of the kind of local linguistic evidence which contemporary proponents have adduced in its favour —of which there is a risk that its apparent rehabilitation in rigorous semantic dress may encourage neglect.