Assessment sensitivity : relative truth and its applications / John MacFarlane.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacFarlane, John (John Gordon)

Series:

Context and content

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Relativity.

Knowledge, Theory of.

Physical Description:

xv, 344 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

John MacFarlane debates how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative, and how we might use this idea to give satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis. Although there is a substantial philosophical literature on relativism about truth, going back to Plato's Theaetetus, it has tended to focus on refutations of the doctrine, or refutations of these refutations, at the expense of saying clearly what the doctrine is. In contrast, Assessment Sensitivity begins with a clear account of what it is to be a relativist about truth, and uses this view to give satisfying accounts of what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do. The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris). Book jacket.

Contents:

1 A Taste of Relativism 1

1.1 Objectivism 2

1.2 Contextualism 7

1.2.1 Agreement and disagreement 8

1.2.2 Retraction 13

1.3 Expressivism 15

1.3.1 Disagreement and retraction 16

1.3.2 Force and content 17

1.4 A relativist approach 21

I Foundations

2 The Standard Objections 29

2.1 Self-refutation 30

2.1.1 Pragmatic inconsistency? 31

2.1.2 Regress of formulation? 32

2.1.3 Belief and the possibility of error 34

2.1.4 Is local relativism immune? 34

2.2 Disagreement 35

2.3 What are the bearers of relative truth? 36

2.4 The equivalence schema 37

2.5 What does it mean? 39

2.6 Conclusion 43

3 Assessment Sensitivity 44

3.1 Characterizing relativism 44

3.1.1 Sentences 44

3.1.2 Utterances 47

3.1.3 Propositions 49

3.2 Assessment Sensitivity 52

3.2.1 Truth at a context of use 52

3.2.2 Truth at an index and context 55

3.2.3 Contexts of assessment 60

3.3 Truth relativism as assessment sensitivity 64

3.4 Generalizing the logical notions 68

4 Propositions 71

4.1 What are propositions? 71

4.2 Content relativism 72

4.3 Context and circumstance 76

4.4 Two kinds of context sensitivity 78

4.5 Coordinates of circumstances 81

4.5.1 Operator arguments 82

4.5.2 Incompleteness 84

4.6 Nonindexical contextualism 88

4.7 Truth-value relativism 90

4.8 Monadic ''true" and the Equivalence Schema 93

4.9 Newton-Smith's .argument 94

5 Making Sense of Relative Truth 97

5.1 A strategy 97

5.2 The Truth Rule 101

5.3 Relativism and the Truth Rule 102

5.4 Retraction 108

5.5 Rejection 110

5.6 Relativism and the Knowledge Rule 111

5.7 Believing relative truths 114

5.8 Conclusion 117

6 Disagreement 118

6.1 Clarifying the target 119

6.2 Noncotenability 121

6.3 Preclusion of joint satisfaction 123

6.4 Preclusion of joint accuracy 125

6.5 Preclusion of joint reflexive accuracy 129

6.6 Disagreement in disputes of taste 130

6.7 On "faultless disagreement" 133

6.8 Conclusion 136

II Applications

7 Tasty 141

7.1 A relativist account 142

7.1.1 Tastes 143

7.1.2 A relativist account 144

7.1.3 Can an epicure be a relativist about taste? 147

7.2 Compositional semantics 148

7.2.1 Atomic formulas 148

7.2.2 Postsemantics 151

7.2.3 Contents and circumstances 151

7.2.4 Boolean connectives 152

7.2.5 Explicit relativizations 153

7.2.6 Implicit relativizations 155

7.2.7 Attitude verbs 156

7.2.8 Factive attitude verbs 158

7.2.9 Quantifiers and binding 160

7.2.10 Tense 162

7.2.11 Alethic modals and counterfactuals 165

7.3 Relativism and expressivism 167

7.3.1 Modem expressivism 167

7.3.2 Gibbard's two insights 170

7.3.3 How do the views differ? 172

7.3.4 Retraction and disagreement 175

8 Knows 176

8.1 Contextualism 178

8.2 Subject-sensitive invariantism 182

8.3 Relativism 187

8.4 Other alternatives 190

8.4.1 Nonindexical contextualism 190

8.4.2 Expressivism 192

8.5 Factivity 194

8.6 Speaker error 196

9 Tomorrow 201

9.1 Metaphysical background 202

9.1.1 Times 202

9.1.2 Worlds 202

9.1.3 Accessibility and branching structure 203

9.1.4 Determinism and indeterminism 204

9.2 Ockhamist semantics 204

9.3 Propositions 207

9.4 The postsemantic problem 207

9.4.1 The Thin Red Line 209

9.4.2 Against a Thin Red Line 209

9.4.3 Undermining Thin Red Line intuitions 211

9.5 Peircean semantics 213

9.6 Three-valued semantics 218

9.7 Supervaluationism 221

9.7.1 Supervaluational postsemantics 221

9.7.2 The retraction problem 224

9.8 Relativism 226

9.8.1 A relativist postsemantics 226

9.8.2 Explaining the pull of the Thin Red Line 227

9.8.3 Some logical subtleties 229

9.9 Asserting future contingents 230

9.10 Future-directed attitudes 233

9.11 Conclusion 236

10 Might 238

10.1 Against Solipsistic Contextualism 240

10.2 Flexible Contextualism 242

10.2.1 Widening the relevant community 243

10.2.2 Objective factors 246

10.2.3 The puzzle 248

10.3 Expressivism 248

10.3.1 Force modifiers 249

10.3.2 Embeddings 250

10.3.3 Hare's gambit 251

10.4 Relativism 254

10.4.1 Explaining Warrant, Rejection, and Retraction 255

10.4.2 Hacking's lottery 257

10.4.3 Resisting retraction 258

10.4.4 Ignorant assessors 260

10.5 Compositional Semantics 261

10.5.1 The framework 262

10.5.2 Epistemic modals 264

10.5.3 Boolean connectives 264

10.5.4 For all I know 265

10.5.5 Conditionals 267

10.5.6 Tense 271

10.5.7 Attitude verbs 275

10.6 Yalcin's nonfactualism 277

11 Ought 280

11.1 Objective and subjective oughts 281

11.1.1 Subjectivism 281

11.1.2 Objectivism 282

11.1.3 Ambiguity 283

11.2 Contextualism 284

11.3 A relativist account 285

11.4 Compositional Semantics 287

11.5 Ifs and oughts 291

11.5.1 The miner paradox 291

11.5.2 Gibbard on truth and correct belief 294

11.6 Evaluative uses of "ought" 297

11.7 Modal ignorance 299

12 The Rationality of Relativism 305

12.1 Rationality and reflection 306

12.2 Assessment sensitivity: an engineer's perspective 311

12.3 The evolution of assessment sensitivity 317

12.3.1 The upward path 317

12.3.2 The downward path 318.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-335) and index.

ISBN:

9780199682751

0199682755

OCLC:

864096035