Relativism and Monadic Truth

by Herman Cappelen, John Hawthorne

Overview

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191567995
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	360 KB

About the Author

Professor Herman Cappelen has written numerous papers in philosophy of language and two previous books, Insensitive Semantics (Blackwell 2004) and Language Turned on Itself (OUP 2007) (both with Ernie Lepore). He is currently a Professor at the Arch? Philosophical Research Centre and the University of St. Andrews and research director at CSMN at the University of Oslo. Previously he has held positions at Oxford University and Somerville College, the University of Oslo, and Vassar College. John Hawthorne is Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford, having previously been Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His books include Knowledge and Lotteries (OUP 2003) and Metaphysical Essays (OUP 2006).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Overview: Simplicity, Possible Worlds Semantics, and Relativism 1

Simplicity Introduced 1

From Possible Worlds Semantics to Analytic Relativism 7

The Three Core Ideas of Relativism 10

Assessor Sensitivity 17

Relativism: Taking Stock 18

Relativism and Contextualism 19

Relativism and Non-Indexical Contextualism 20

Relativism and Propositional Skeletons 24

More on the Motivation for Relativism: Opposition to Contextualism 25

Our Plan 31

2 Diagnostics for Shared Content: From 'Say' to 'Agree' 33

Part 1 Varieties of 'Say'-Based Content Diagnostics 34

Says-That and Easiness 34

From Easiness to Non-Propositional Semantic Contents 36

Three Ways Out 38

Against Easiness as Evidence for Semantic Insensitivity 39

Parasitic Context Sensitivity 40

Brief Digression: More on Easiness 42

Collective-Says-That (CST) as an Improved Diagnostic 43

Objection to CST: Lambda Abstraction in Collective Reports 45

Generalization: 'Believes That', 'Thinks That,' and 'Knows That' 47

Further Points about Lambda-Abstracted Content 48

Brief Digression: De Se Thought and Simplicity 50

Part 2 'Agree'-Based Content Diagnostics 54

Three Agreement-Based Tests for Context Sensitivity 54

Diagnosis: Why the Agreement Test Works 56

An Additional Argument in Favour of Agreement: Mixed Quotation 57

A Clarification: Agreement as State versus Agreement as Activity 60

Complications for 'Agree' 61

An Objection: MacFarlane on Agreement and Otherworldly Individuals 63

Concluding Remarks 66

3 Operators, the Anaphoric 'That', and Temporally Neutral Propositions 68

Lewis and Kaplan on Operators68

Taking Stock 68

The Anaphoric 'That' as an Objection to Simplicity 89

More on Simplicity: Contingency and Temporality 94

Against Thin Contents: Tense and Agreement 96

4 Predicates of Personal Taste 99

Motivating Relativism: Agreement, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste 100

Steps towards a Contextualist Semantics: 'Filling' 102

'Fun' 109

'Disgusting' 114

Relativist Approaches to Predicates of Personal Taste 121

Concluding Remarks 138

References 139

Index 145