Cappelen and Hawthorne tell us that the most basic, explanatory notion of truth is a monadic property of propositions. Other notions of truth, including those applying to sentences, are to be explained in terms of it. Among them are those found in Kripkean, Montagovian, and Kaplanean semantic theories, and their descendants – to wit truth at a context, at a circumstance, and at a context-plus-circumstance. If these are to make sense, the authors correctly maintain, they must be explained in terms (...) of the monadic notion of truth. (1-2) I thought that this was the received view, but the authors indicate otherwise. They describe possible-worlds semantics as making it “very natural to think of the foundational mode of evaluation for propositions as truth relative to worlds.”(7) I disagree. The natural way to understand possible worlds-semantics is to take world-states to be certain kinds of properties, and to take the truth of p at w to be the fact that p would be true (i.e. would instantiate monadic truth) were the universe to instantiate w. The authors add that it is somewhat natural to take “the actual truth of a proposition as [being] a matter of the proposition getting the value ‘true’ relative to a distinguished world -- the actual world.” (7) If this means that being actually true is being true at the actual world-state @, this isn’t just natural, it is unassailable -- as long as one doesn’t erroneously identify being true with being actually true. Since Cappelen and Hawthorne don’t do this, I take us to be on more or less the same page. Others, apparently, aren’t. We are told that “a number of the participants in the relevant disputes [about relativism] seem to take it for granted that philosophical semantics has somehow shown that the semantic value of sentences cannot be evaluated for truth or falsity simpliciter, since truth and falsity hold of a proposition relative to a world.” (77-8) We are also told: 1 Contemporary Analytic relativists reason as follows: ‘Lewis and Kaplan have shown that we need to relativize truth to triples of .. (shrink)

Some authors have recently claimed that relativism about knowledge sentences accommodates the context sensitivity of our use of such sentences as well as contextualism, while avoiding the counterintuitive consequences of contextualism regarding our inter-contextual judgments, that is, our judgments about knowledge claims made in other contexts. I argue that relativism, like contextualism, involves an error theory regarding a certain class of inter-contextual judgments.

Some authors have recently claimed that relativism about knowledge sentences accommodates the context sensitivity of our use of such sentences as well as contextualism, while avoiding the counterintuitive consequences of contextualism regarding our inter-contextual judgments, that is, our judgments about knowledge claims made in other contexts. I argue that relativism, like contextualism, involves an error theory regarding a certain class of inter-contextual judgments.

It is sometimes said that our age is an age of relativism. For example, Paul Tillich has expressed his “uneasiness about the victory of relativism in all realms of thought and life today.” Karl Popper tells us that “the main philosophical malady of our time is an intellectual and moral relativism, the latter being at least in part based on the former.” What Popper refers to as “intellectual relativism” consists in part in a doctrine about truth which is sometimes expressed (...) as “There is no such thing as absolute truth.” At other times it is expressed by saying “truth is relative.”. (shrink)

There seem to be topics on which people can disagree without fault. For example, you and I might disagree on whether Picasso was a better artist than Matisse, without either of us being at fault. Is this a genuine possibility or just apparent? In this paper I pursue two aims: I want to provide a systematic map of available responses to this question. Simultaneously, I want to assess these responses. I start by introducing and defining the notion of a faultless (...) disagreement. Then I present a simple argument to the conclusion that faultless disagreement is not possible. Those who accept the argument have to explain away apparent cases of faultless disagreement. Those who want to maintain the possibility of faultless disagreement must deny one of the argument's premisses. The position I want to promote belongs to the latter category and is a form of genuine relativism. (shrink)

The relativist's central objection to contextualism is that it fails to account for the disagreement we perceive in discourse about "subjective" matters, such as whether stewed prunes are delicious. If we are to adjudicate between contextualism and relativism, then, we must first get clear about what it is for two people to disagree. This question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. A partial answer is given here; although it is incomplete, it does help shape what the relativist must (...) say if she is to do better than the contextualist in securing genuine disagreement. (shrink)

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.

If it is not now determined whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow, can an assertion that there will be one be true? The problem has persisted because there are compelling arguments on both sides. If there are objectively possible futures which would make the prediction true and others which would make it false, symmetry considerations seem to forbid counting it either true or false. Yet if we think about how we would assess the prediction tomorrow, when a sea (...) battle is raging (or not), it seems we must assign the utterance a definite truth-value. I argue that both arguments must be given their due, and that this requires relativizing utterance-truth to a context of assessment. I show how this relativization can be handled in a rigorous formal semantics, and I argue that we can make coherent sense of assertion without assuming that utterances have their truth-values absolutely. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the kind of evidence that might be adduced in support of relativist semantics of a kind that have recently been proposed for predicates of personal taste, for epistemic modals, for knowledge attributions and for other cases. I shall concentrate on the case of taste predicates, but what I have to say is easily transposed to the other cases just mentioned. I shall begin by considering in general the question of what kind of (...) evidence can be offered in favour of some semantic theory or framework of semantic theorizing. In other words, I shall begin with the difficult question of the empirical significance of semantic theorizing. In Sect. 2, I outline a relativist semantic theory, and in Sect. 3, I review four types of evidence that might be offered in favour of a relativistic framework. I show that the evidence is not conclusive because a sophisticated form of contextualism can stand up to the evidence. However, the evidence can be taken to support the view that either relativism or the sophisticated form of contextualism is correct. (shrink)

Michael Dummett; VIII.—Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.1.

Michael Dummett; VIII.—Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.1.

Michael Dummett; VIII.—Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.1.

The paper looks at three big ideas that have been associated with the term “relativism.” The first maintains that some property has a higher-degree than might have been thought. The second that the judgments in a particular domain of discourse are capable only of relative truth and not of absolute truth And the third, which I dub with the oxymoronic label “absolutist relativism,” seeks to locate relativism in our acceptance of certain sorts of spare absolutist principles. -/- The first idea (...) is well illustrated by the famous cases drawn from physics, but is ill suited for providing a model for the sorts of relativism about normative domains that have most interested philosophers. -/- The second idea – according to which it is the truth of certain judgments that is relative – seems subject to a very difficult dilemma. -/- The final idea provides a coherent model of cases like etiquette but is not plausibly applied to the moral or epistemic domains. (shrink)