Relativism about Truth

Edited by Jonny McIntosh (Balliol College, Oxford, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford)
About this topic
Summary Philosophers have often claimed that truth is in some way relative. However, whether such a claim is coherent, and if so, how exactly it should be understood, is a matter of some controversy. To a first approximation, the idea is that the bearers of truth (e.g. propositions, utterances, sentences-in-context) may be true relative to some parameter and not others. Contemporary debate, informed by work in formal semantics, often focusses on attempts to motivate some form of relativism about truth by appeal to particular linguistic phenomena, like predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and future contingents.
Key works Contemporary debate generally focusses on proposals formulated within frameworks arising out of work by David Kaplan (1989) and David Lewis (1980). John MacFarlane's work, arguing for what he calls assessment sensitivity, is central. See his 2003 and 2007, for example. Other key contributions include, on the pro-relativist side, Lasersohn 2005Stephenson 2007, and Egan et al 2005, and, on the anti-relativist side, Cappelen & Hawthorne 2009. One worry that is sometimes raised about relativism is that it makes language somehow impossible. One influential version of the worry is raised in Evans 1985. MacFarlane responds in various places, including his 2003. Arguably, the worry can be traced to Plato, and his discussion of Protagorean relativism in the Theaetetus. For a classic discussion of this, see Burnyeat 1976
Introductions MacFarlane 2012
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  1. Richard on truth and commitment. [REVIEW]John MacFarlane - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (3):445 - 453.
    Richard on truth and commitment Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-9 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9795-1 Authors John MacFarlane, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
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  2. Assessment Sensitivity about Future Contingents, Vindication and Self-Refutation.Corine Besson & Anandi Hattiangadi - manuscript
    John MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism – Assessment Sensitivity – provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: statements about the future that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and solves the puzzle, Assessment Sensitivity is ultimately self-refuting.
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  3. Relativism issues: The econocracy against multiple-choice questions.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    This paper draws attention to a worry concerning what the book The econocracy says about multiple-choice questions versus essays. They face a problem reminiscent of the problems facing various kinds of relativism.
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  4. What is the difference between conceptual and moral relativism? Rejecting the nature-value contrast, with help from Joseph Raz.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    I aim to undermine an account of the difference between conceptual and moral relativism according to which conceptual relativism focuses on the description of nature and moral relativism on values. I do so with some help from Joseph Raz.
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  5. Epistemic Modalities and Relative Truth.John MacFarlane - manuscript
    I want to discuss a puzzle about the semantics of epistemic modals, like “It might be the case that” as it occurs in “It might be the case that Goldbach’s conjecture is false.”1 I’ll argue that the puzzle cannot be adequately explained on standard accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, and that a proper solution requires relativizing utterance truth to a context of assessment, a semantic device whose utility and coherence I have defended elsewhere for future contingents (MacFarlane..
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  6. Non-indexical contextualism, relativism and retraction.Alexander Dinges - forthcoming - In Jeremy Wyatt, Dan Zeman & Julia Zakkou (eds.), Perspectives on Taste. London: Routledge.
    It is commonly held that retraction data, if they exist, show that assessment relativism is preferable to non-indexical contextualism. I argue that this is not the case. Whether retraction data have the suggested probative force depends on substantive questions about the proper treatment of tense and location. One’s preferred account in these domains should determine whether one accepts assessment relativism or non-indexical contextualism.
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  7. Assessment Relativism.Filippo Ferrari - forthcoming - In Martin Kusch (ed.), Routledge Handbook to Relativism.
    Assessment relativism, as developed by John MacFarlane, is the view that the truth of our claims involving a variety of English expressions—‘tasty’, ‘knows’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘might’, and ‘ought’—is relative not only to aspects of the context of their production but also to aspects of the context in which they are assessed. Assessment relativism is thus a form of truth relativism which is offered as a new way of understanding perspectival thought and talk. In this article, I present the main theses of (...)
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  8. Relativism. [REVIEW]Ali Hossein Khani - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly:1-3.
  9. The truth about assertion and retraction: A review of the empirical literature.Markus Kneer & Neri Marsili - forthcoming - In Alex Wiegmann (ed.), Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit.
    This chapter reviews empirical research on the rules governing assertion and retraction, with a focus on the normative role of truth. It examines whether truth is required for an assertion to be considered permissible, and whether there is an expectation that speakers retract statements that turn out to be false. Contrary to factive norms (such as the influential “knowledge norm”), empirical data suggests that there is no expectation that speakers only make true assertions. Additionally, contrary to truth-relativist accounts, there is (...)
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  10. Definition and Dispute: A Defence of Temporal Externalism.Derek Ball - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Many of our deepest disagreements turn on matters of definition. Philosophers discuss the definitions of knowledge, art, truth, and freedom, and social and political questions about personhood, health and disease, marriage and gender are also commonly thought of as turning in part on definitions. This book contributes to our understanding of how we engage with questions and disagreements of this kind. It argues that disputes about matters of definition are not just about the meanings of words or our concepts, and (...)
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  11. Perspectivalism about temporal reality.Bahadir Eker - 2023 - Synthese 202 (2):1-29.
    It is usually agreed that reality is temporal in the sense of containing entities that exist in time, but some philosophers, roughly those who have been traditionally called A-theorists, hold that reality is temporal in a far more profound sense than what is implied by the mere existence of such entities. This hypothesis of deep temporality typically involves two ideas: that reality is temporally compartmentalised into distinct present, past, and future ‘realms’, and that this compartmentalisation is temporally dynamic in the (...)
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  12. On truth, language and objectivity.Florian Franken Figueiredo - 2023 - In Robert Vinten (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 25-38.
    In this chapter I discuss Roger Trigg’s contribution to this volume on Wittgenstein, concepts, and human nature. Trigg shares many of the basic assumptions that form the methodological framework of cognitive science of religion (CSR) arguing that Wittgenstein’s later work shares common ground with presumptions, commitments, and accounts in cultural studies that are usually rejected by proponents of CSR. In particular, he challenges Wittgenstein’s notion of truth, that he sees under the threat of radical relativism. Against his view I argue (...)
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  13. Relativism and Two Kinds of Branching Time.Dilip Ninan - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):465-492.
    This essay examines the case for relativism about future contingents in light of a distinction between two ways of interpreting the ‘branching time’ framework. Focussing on MacFarlane (2014), we break the argument for relativism down into two steps. The first step is an argument for something MacFarlane calls the "Non-Determination Thesis", which is essentially the view that there is no unique actual future. The second step is an argument from the Non-Determination Thesis to relativism. I first argue that first step (...)
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  14. Can truth relativism account for the indeterminacy of future contingents?Corine Besson & Anandi Hattiangadi - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-23.
    John MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: assertions about the future that express propositions that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and aims to solve the puzzle, his truth relativism is not apt to solve the problem of future contingents. We argue that (...)
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  15. Objective description in physics.Hans Halvorson - 2022 - In Tomas Marvan, Hanne Andersen, Hasok Chang, Benedikt Löwe & Ivo Pezlar (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology. London: College Publications.
    I argue against the claim -- advocated by Albert Einstein, Bernard Williams, and Ted Sider, among others -- that a description is objective only if it says how the world is in itself. Instead, I argue for the claim -- inspired by comments of Niels Bohr -- that a family of descriptions is objective only if they co-vary with their respective descriptive contexts. Moreover, I claim that "there is a shared objective reality" simply means that it is possible to satisfy (...)
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  16. Gadamer's Historically Effected and Effective Consciousness.Iñaki Xavier Larrauri Pertierra - 2022 - Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie (2):1-24.
    Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that consciousness not only historically constrains experience but also allows strangeness to intelligibly speak to it. This historically effected and effective consciousness features in Gadamer’s idea that a common language is unearthed for the interpretive horizons of those involved in dialogue with each other through a logic of question and answer. I argue, however, that this reveals a conceptual uncertainty about evaluating progress in interpretive understanding. Gadamer’s failure to escape from this uncertainty risks the possibility of a (...)
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  17. Jordan Peterson on Postmodernism, Truth, and Science.Panu Raatikainen - 2022 - In Jordan Peterson. Critical Responses. Chicago: Carus Books. pp. 187–197.
  18. A puzzle about accommodation and truth.Derek Ball & Torfinn Thomesen Huvenes - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):759-776.
    The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss a puzzle involving accommodation. The puzzle is based on three assumptions. The first assumption is that accommodation takes place after an utterance. The second assumption is that accommodation can make a difference to the truth-value of an utterance even if the utterance is not about the future. The third assumption is that something that takes place after an utterance cannot make a difference to the truth-value of the utterance unless the (...)
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  19. ¿Debemos preocuparnos por la verdad?Juan Diego Bogotá - 2021 - In Angel Rivera Novoa, Andres Buritica & Alfonso Cabanzo (eds.), Imágenes de la mente, el lenguaje y el conocimiento. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. pp. 233-250.
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  20. Relativist 'know': 'wh'-complements and intermediate exhaustivity.Ahmad Jabbar - 2021 - Proceedings of ESSLLI.
    We consider a puzzle in the question semantics literature. The puzzle concerns data when 'know' embeds interrogative complements. For the exhaustive strength in the literature known as intermediately exhaustive, first person ascriptions don't seem to exist, but third person do. By arguing against the only solution in the literature, we suggest that the puzzle is more interesting than previously thought. We provide a compositional semantics for 'know' where the interpretation of 'know' is relativized to an information state. The proposed semantics, (...)
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  21. Pluralism for Relativists: a new framework for context-dependence.Ahmad Jabbar - 2021 - In Proceedings of the 18th workshop of the Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS). pp. 3-16.
    We propose a framework that makes space for both non-indexical contextualism and assessment-sensitivity. Such pluralism is motivated by considering possible variance in judgments about retraction. We conclude that the proposed pluralism, instead of problematizing, vindicates defining truth of a proposition w.r.t. a context of utterance and a context of assessment. To implement this formally, we formalize initialization of parameters by contexts. Then, a given parameter, depending on a speaker's judgment, can get initialized by either the context of utterance or the (...)
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  22. Predicates of personal taste: Empirical data.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6455-6471..
    According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the tastes of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and if it is false, the speaker is required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test for the first time in three (...)
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  23. The Liar Without Relativism.Poppy Mankowitz - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):267-288.
    Some in the recent literature have claimed that a connection exists between the Liar paradox and _semantic relativism_: the view that the truth values of certain occurrences of sentences depend on the contexts at which they are assessed. Sagi (Erkenntnis 82(4):913–928, 2017) argues that contextualist accounts of the Liar paradox are committed to relativism, and Rudnicki and Łukowski (Synthese 1–20, 2019) propose a new account that they classify as relativist. I argue that a full understanding of how relativism is conceived (...)
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  24. New Foundations (Natural Language as a Complex System, or New Foundations for Philosophical Semantics, Epistemology and Metaphysics, Based on the Process-Socio-Environmental Conception of Linguistic Meaning and Knowledge).Gustavo Picazo - 2021 - Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science 9 (6):33–44.
    In this article, I explore the consequences of two commonsensical premises in semantics and epistemology: (1) natural language is a complex system rooted in the communal life of human beings within a given environment; and (2) linguistic knowledge is essentially dependent on natural language. These premises lead me to emphasize the process-socio-environmental character of linguistic meaning and knowledge, from which I proceed to analyse a number of long-standing philosophical problems, attempting to throw new light upon them on these grounds. In (...)
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  25. Centred Propositions, What is Asserted, and Communication.Jakub Rudnicki - 2021 - Theoria 87 (1):187-206.
    In recent years there has been a heated debate on how to accommodate John Perry's observations about the essentiality of indexicality into our models of linguistic communication. This article is an attempt at providing a new perspective on this issue. I argue that we should jettison two elements taken for granted by the views I present, and criticize, here: no centring, uncentring, recentring and multicentring. These elements are: (1) taking the asserted content to be a part of the communication process (...)
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  26. What is truth?Jeremy Wyatt - 2021 - Humanities, Arts and Society (HAS) Magazine 3 (1).
    In this paper, I consider three responses to the question "What is truth?," investigating their ramifications in philosophy and public life.
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  27. Relativism, metasemantics, and the future.Derek Ball - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):1036-1086.
    ABSTRACT Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this (...)
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  28. Relativism and Expressivism.Bob Beddor - 2020 - In Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism. Routledge.
    Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.
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  29. Relative Truth.Herman Cappelen & Torfinn Thomesen Huvenes - 2020 - In Michael Glanzberg (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Truth. Oxford University Press.
    An introduction to relativism about truth.
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  30. Meaning relativism and subjective idealism.Andrea Guardo - 2020 - Synthese 197 (9):4047-4064.
    The paper discusses an objection, put forward by - among others - John McDowell, to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s non-factualist and relativist view of semantic discourse. The objection goes roughly as follows: while it is usually possible to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse without being a relativist about anything else, relativism about semantic discourse entails global relativism, which in turn entails subjective idealism, which we can reasonably assume to be false. The paper’s first section sketches Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ideas (...)
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  31. Talking about appearances: the roles of evaluation and experience in disagreement.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (1):197-217.
    Faultless disagreement and faultless retraction have been taken to motivate relativism for predicates of personal taste, like ‘tasty’. Less attention has been devoted to the question of what aspect of their meaning underlies this relativist behavior. This paper illustrates these same phenomena with a new category of expressions: appearance predicates, like ‘tastes vegan’ and ‘looks blue’. Appearance predicates and predicates of personal taste both fall into the broader category of experiential predicates. Approaching predicates of personal taste from this angle suggests (...)
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  32. Review of 'Viewpoint Relativism' by Antti Hautamäki. [REVIEW]Markus Seidel - 2020 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:N.N..
  33. Sellars, Truth Pluralism, and Truth Relativism.Lionel Shapiro - 2020 - In Stefan Brandt & Anke Breunig (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 174–206.
    Two currently much discussed views about truth, truth pluralism and truth relativism, are found in Sellars’s writings. I show that his motivations for adoping these views are interestingly different from those shared by most of their recent advocates. First, I explain how Sellars comes to embrace a version of truth pluralism. I argue that his version overcomes a difficulty confronting pluralists, albeit at a serious cost. Then I argue that Sellars’s truth pluralism isn’t motivated by his interest in domains of (...)
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  34. Faultless Disagreement.Dan Zeman - 2020 - In Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism. Routledge. pp. 486-495.
    In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.
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  35. Essentially Practical Questions.Brendan Balcerak Jackson - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (1):1-26.
    Questions are known to play a crucial role in helping to structure linguistic communication. I argue that paying attention to questions is also necessary for understanding disagreement, and in particular for distinguishing between genuine and merely verbal disagreements. I argue, moreover, that some of the questions that play this role are essentially practical questions, questions about what to do. Such questions can remain open even after questions about what is the case have been settled. Essentially practical questions help structure discourse (...)
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  36. The Case against Semantic Relativism.Teresa Marques - 2019 - In Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism. Routledge.
    This paper presents reasons against semantic relativism. Semantic relativism is motivated by intuitions that are presumed to raise problems for traditional or contextualist semantics in contested domains of discourse. Intuition-based arguments are those based on competent speakers’ putative intuitions about seeming faultless disagreement, eavesdropper, and retraction cases. I will organize the discussion in three parts. First, I shall provide a brief introduction to the intuition-based arguments offered in favor of semantic relativism. Second, I shall indicate that there are ways for (...)
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  37. The Relativistic Legacy of Kuhn and Feyerabend.Howard Sankey - 2019 - In Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism. Routledge. pp. 379-387.
    Relativism in the philosophy of science is widely associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Kuhn and Feyerabend espoused views about conceptual change and variation of scientific method that have apparent relativistic implications. Both held that scientific theories or paradigms may be incommensurable due to semantic variation. Two ways that truth may be relative because of semantic incommensurability will be distinguished. Davidson’s criticism of the idea of an untranslatable language will be discussed, as well as a response (...)
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  38. Multiple Indexing Relativism about Predicates of Taste.Dan Zeman - 2019 - Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 51 (151):5-34.
    Focusing on predicates of taste, this paper puts forward a novel version of relativism, motivated by a recently discussed phenomenon: perspectival plurality. After showing that the phenomenon is problematic for at least some versions of relativism and discussing several possible answers on behalf of the relativist, I put forward my own version. The main feature of the proposal is the introduction in the index not of a single parameter for perspectives, but of a (possibly infinite) sequence of such parameters. In (...)
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  39. A Metaphysics for the Future (2nd edition).Robert Elliott Allinson - 2018 - London and New York: Routledge.
    Lewis Hahn, Editor of Library of Living Philosophers, including Quine, Gadamer, Davidson, Ricoeur, writes: "Professor Allinson’s work [A Metaphysics for the Future] is impressive. I do not remember when in recent years I have read a more exciting systematic study. With a new phenomenology, a distinctive method and unique modes of validation for philosophy, and an extraordinary command of both Eastern and Western philosophy, Professor Allinson develops his own bold, imaginative and challenging system of philosophy". This title was first published (...)
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  40. Might do Better: Flexible Relativism and the QUD.Bob Beddor & Andy Egan - 2018 - Semantics and Pragmatics 11.
    The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...)
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  41. Subjective Disagreement.Beddor Bob - 2018 - Noûs 53 (4):819-851.
  42. Retractions.Teresa Marques - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3335-3359.
    Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever (...)
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  43. Disagreement, Credences, and Outright Belief.Michele Palmira - 2018 - Ratio 31 (2):179-196.
    This paper addresses a largely neglected question in ongoing debates over disagreement: what is the relation, if any, between disagreements involving credences and disagreements involving outright beliefs? The first part of the paper offers some desiderata for an adequate account of credal and full disagreement. The second part of the paper argues that both phenomena can be subsumed under a schematic definition which goes as follows: A and B disagree if and only if the accuracy conditions of A's doxastic attitude (...)
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  44. Absolutely tasty: an examination of predicates of personal taste and faultless disagreement.Jeremy Wyatt - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):252-280.
    Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on (...)
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  45. Perspectival Plurality, Relativism, and Multiple Indexing.Dan Zeman - 2018 - In Rob Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern & Hannah Rohde (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. Semantics Archives. pp. 1353-1370.
    In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...)
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  46. The objectivity of truth, a core truism?Robert Barnard & Joseph Ulatowski - 2017 - Synthese 198 (2):717-733.
    A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in which it is uttered or the utterer making the claim. Part of our ongoing empirical studies surveying people’s responses to (...)
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  47. Using "not tasty" at the dinner table.Alex Davies - 2017 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 24 (3).
    John MacFarlane argues against objectivism about “tasty”/”not tasty” in the following way. If objectivism were true then, given that speakers use “tasty”/”not tasty” in accordance with a rule, TP, speakers would be using an evidently unreliable method to form judgements and make claims about what is tasty. Since this is implausible, objectivism must be false. In this paper, I describe a context in which speakers deviate from TP. I argue that MacFarlane's argument against objectivism fails when applied to uses of (...)
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  48. Elaboration and intuitions of disagreement.Alex Davies - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):861-875.
    Mark Richard argues for truth-relativism about claims made using gradable adjectives. He argues that truth-relativism is the best explanation of two kinds of linguistic data, which I call: true cross-contextual reports and infelicitous denials of conflict. Richard claims that such data are generated by an example that he discusses at length. However, the consensus is that these linguistic data are illusory because they vanish when elaborations are added to examples of the same kind as Richard’s original. In this paper I (...)
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  49. Truth-assessment Methodology and the Case against the Relativist Case 1 a gainst Contextualism about Deontic Modals.J. L. Dowell - 2017 - Res Philosophica 94 (3):325-357.
    Recent challenges to Kratzer’s canonical contextualist semantics for modal expressions are united by a shared methodological practice: Each requires the assessment of the truth or warrant of a sentence in a scenario. The default evidential status accorded these judgments is a constraining one: It is assumed that, to be plausible, a semantic hypothesis must vindicate the reported judgments. Fully assessing the extent to which these cases do generate data that puts pressure on the canonical semantics, then, requires an understanding of (...)
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  50. Talking with Vultures.Filippo Ferrari & Crispin Wright - 2017 - Mind 126 (503):911-936.
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