Assessment Sensitivity Relative Truth and its Applications 1st Edition by John Macfarlane ISBN 9780199682751 0199682755

1 A Taste of Relativism

1.1 Objectivism

1.2 Contextualism

1.2.1 Agreement and disagreement

1.2.2 Retraction

1.3 Expressivism

1.3.1 Disagreement and retraction

1.3.2 Force and content

1.4 A relativist approach

I FOUNDATIONS

2 The Standard Objections

2.1 Self-refutation

2.1.1 Pragmatic inconsistency?

2.1.2 Regress of formulation?

2.1.3 Belief and the possibility of error

2.1.4 Is local relativism immune?

2.2 Disagreement

2.3 What are the bearers of relative truth?

2.4 The equivalence schema

2.5 What does it mean?

2.6 Conclusion

3 Assessment Sensitivity

3.1 Characterizing relativism

3.1.1 Sentences

3.1.2 Utterances

3.1.3 Propositions

3.2 Assessment Sensitivity

3.2.1 Truth at a context of use

3.2.2 Truth at an index and context

3.2.3 Contexts of assessment

3.3 Truth relativism as assessment sensitivity

3.4 Generalizing the logical notions

4 Propositions

4.1 What are propositions?

4.2 Content relativism

4.3 Context and circumstance

4.4 Two kinds of context sensitivity

4.5 Coordinates of circumstances

4.5.1 Operator arguments

4.5.2 Incompleteness

4.6 Nonindexical contextualism

4.7 Truth-value relativism

4.8 Monadic “true” and the Equivalence Schema

4.9 Newton-Smith’s argument

5 Making Sense of Relative Truth

5.1 A strategy

5.2 The Truth Rule

5.3 Relativism and the Truth Rule

5.4 Retraction

5.5 Rejection

5.6 Relativism and the Knowledge Rule

5.7 Believing relative truths

5.8 Conclusion

6 Disagreement

6.1 Clarifying the target

6.2 Noncotenability

6.3 Preclusion of joint satisfaction

6.4 Preclusion of joint accuracy

6.5 Preclusion of joint reflexive accuracy

6.6 Disagreement in disputes of taste

6.7 On “faultless disagreement”

6.8 Conclusion

II APPLICATIONS

7 Tasty

7.1 A relativist account

7.1.1 Tastes

7.1.2 A relativist account

7.1.3 Can an epicure be a relativist about taste?

7.2 Compositional semantics

7.2.1 Atomic formulas

7.2.2 Postsemantics

7.2.3 Contents and circumstances

7.2.4 Boolean connectives

7.2.5 Explicit relativizations

7.2.6 Implicit relativizations

7.2.7 Attitude verbs

7.2.8 Factive attitude verbs

7.2.9 Quantifiers and binding

7.2.10 Tense

7.2.11 Alethic modals and counterfactuals

7.3 Relativism and expressivism

7.3.1 Modern expressivism

7.3.2 Gibbard’s two insights

7.3.3 How do the views differ?

7.3.4 Retraction and disagreement

8 Knows

8.1 Contextualism

8.2 Subject-sensitive invariantism

8.3 Relativism

8.4 Other alternatives

8.4.1 Nonindexical contextualism

8.4.2 Expressivism

8.5 Factivity

8.6 Speaker error

9 Tomorrow

9.1 Metaphysical background

9.1.1 Times

9.1.2 Worlds

9.1.3 Accessibility and branching structure

9.1.4 Determinism and indeterminism

9.2 Ockhamist semantics

9.3 Propositions

9.4 The postsemantic problem

9.4.1 The Thin Red Line

9.4.2 Against a Thin Red Line

9.4.3 Undermining Thin Red Line intuitions

9.5 Peircean semantics

9.6 Three-valued semantics

9.7 Supervaluationism

9.7.1 Supervaluational postsemantics

9.7.2 The retraction problem

9.8 Relativism

9.8.1 A relativist postsemantics

9.8.2 Explaining the pull of the Thin Red Line

9.8.3 Some logical subtleties

9.9 Asserting future contingents

9.10 Future-directed attitudes

9.11 Conclusion

10 Might

10.1 Against Solipsistic Contextualism

10.2 Flexible Contextualism

10.2.1 Widening the relevant community

10.2.2 Objective factors

10.2.3 The puzzle

10.3 Expressivism

10.3.1 Force modifiers

10.3.2 Embeddings

10.3.3 Hare’s gambit

10.4 Relativism

10.4.1 Explaining Warrant, Rejection, and Retraction

10.4.2 Hacking’s lottery

10.4.3 Resisting retraction

10.4.4 Ignorant assessors

10.5 Compositional Semantics

10.5.1 The framework

10.5.2 Epistemic modals

10.5.3 Boolean connectives

10.5.4 For all I know

10.5.5 Conditionals

10.5.6 Tense

10.5.7 Attitude verbs

10.6 Yalcin’s nonfactualism

11 Ought

11.1 Objective and subjective oughts

11.1.1 Subjectivism

11.1.2 Objectivism

11.1.3 Ambiguity

11.2 Contextualism

11.3 A relativist account

11.4 Compositional Semantics

11.5 Ifs and oughts

11.5.1 The miner paradox

11.5.2 Gibbard on truth and correct belief

11.6 Evaluative uses of “ought”

11.7 Modal ignorance

12 The Rationality of Relativism

12.1 Rationality and reflection

12.2 Assessment sensitivity: an engineer’s perspective

12.3 The evolution of assessment sensitivity

12.3.1 The upward path

12.3.2 The downward path

References

Index