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What does it take to enter into the circumstance?

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Notes

  1. In my view, the rejection of a contention like this is what negatively characterizes radical relativism as defended by MacFarlane (2003, 2005, inter alia) and Lasersohn (2005), see for discussion López de Sa (2009).

  2. This is not to be confused with the terminology in MacFarlane (2003, p. 329), which refers to tuples of features of context and coordinates of (Lewisian) indices.

  3. Some may distinguish different kinds of content, relative to different sorts of points of evaluation (maybe only moral contents are true relative to worlds and moral viewpoints, say)—although some others may think that the category of objects of attitudes better be somehow uniform.

  4. This would of course require various sorts of finessing I am not in a position to carry out here.

  5. Some may want to identify the content of s at c with “what is said” by s at c. I tend to side with Lewis here: “Unless we give it some special technical meaning, the locution ‘what is said’ is very far from univocal. It can mean propositional content, in Stalnaker’s sense (horizontal or diagonal). It can mean the exact words. I suspect it can mean almost anything in between” (Lewis 1980, p. 41). As I read Lewis, according to him para-contents are not suited for playing the role of “what is said” by s at c either. That is why there is no semantic advantage in positing para-contents as the semantic values of sentences in context.

  6. I have tried to defend a Lewisian version of indexical contextualism from this objection, by exploiting presuppositions of commonality to the effect that the addressee is relevantly like the speaker of the context (López de Sa 2003, 2008). Max Kölbel seems recently to be more sympathetic to such a view, see his (Kölbel 2007) rejoinder to my (2007) discussion of his (Kölbel 2004) paper, and also Kölbel (2009).

  7. Some use ‘relativism’ for the contention that there are further parameters in points. A recent example is: “Relativism is here understood to be the claim that sentences of some category express propositions the truth of which is relative to a parameter over and above the standard world parameter” (Kölbel 2009). As I argue in (2011), according to such usage, both moderate non-indexical contextualism and radical relativism proper qualify. As I say there, following the lead of Wright (1992), I myself would prefer to call all attempts to endorse appearances of faultless disagreement ‘relativisms,’ and then to distinguish moderate (indexical and non-indexical) contextualist versions of relativism from radical ones, see footnote 1.

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions were presented in Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, St Andrews, and Stirling. Thanks to audiences in these occasions and to Manuel García-Carpintero, Max Kölbel, John MacFarlane, Peter Pagin, Clas Weber, Brian Weatherson, Elia Zardini, Dan Zeman, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal. Research partially funded by projects FFI2008-06153 and Consolider-Ingenio CSD2009-0056 (MICINN), and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. FP7-238128.

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  1. ICREA at Departament de Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència & LOGOS Universitat de Barcelona, Montalegre 6, 08001, Barcelona, Spain

    Dan López de Sa

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López de Sa, D. What does it take to enter into the circumstance?. Philos Stud 159, 147–153 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9695-4

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