Abstract
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.
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Notes
Here we might appeal either to the coinvestigators’ common knowledge or to their distributed knowledge. p is common knowledge in a group just in case every member of the group knows that p, knows that the others know that p, knows that the others know that they know that p, and so on. p is distributed knowledge in a group just in case a third party who knew everything known by the individual group members would be in a position to know that p (see Teller, 1972).
For a similar point about epistemic contextualism, see Feldman (2001, p. 29).
I use the generic terms “accept” and “reject” here to cover both speech acts (assertion and denial) and mental acts or states (belief and disbelief). I will assume that one way to reject a proposition is to accept a proposition incompatible with it—where two propositions are incompatible iff there is no circumstance of evaluation at which both are true. But I will not assume that that this the only way to reject a proposition.
For the useful distinction between what a claim is “about” and what it “concerns,” see Perry (1986).
In most applications, context will single out one circumstance as relevant—what Kaplan calls “the circumstance of the context” (Kaplan, 1989, p. 522), but this need not always be the case. For an application where the assumption of uniqueness fails, see MacFarlane (2003, forthcoming).
Here ‘@’ denotes the actual world.
An alternative would be to talk of the truth of propositions relative to contexts, as I do in MacFarlane (2005).
Of course, they may disagree about another matter—whether there are numbers that are neither even nor odd. But they need not disagree even about this. Tom may have simply failed to apply his general arithmetical knowledge to the question at hand, or he may have no opinion about the general question.
Indeed, one can be a relativist in this sense without relativizing propositional truth to anything besides worlds, as I show in MacFarlane (forthcoming).
For a related discussion, see MacFarlane (2005, pp. 331–332).
Note that given our definition of “accurate,” “is accurate” and “was accurate” are equivalent: the tense on the copula is determined grammatically by the subject, but has no semantic significance.
Of course, one can—for a time—experience the same phenomenon even in “fully objective” discourses, when the two parties have very different background assumptions. What seems to one party to be an utterly compelling proof seems to the other to be devoid of force. What is the difference, in practice, between these cases and the relativist cases? One is tempted to say: in the relativist cases, the phenomenon arises from a relativity about what it is for an assertion to be accurate, while in the objective cases, it arises from a relativity about what counts as an adequate proof. But we were hoping to get beyond characterizing relativism in terms of accuracy, by saying something about the practical significance of accuracy classifications. The difficulty is that what has practical significance is warranted judgments about accuracy, and it is hard to separate out what relativity is due to the “warranted” part and what is due to the “accurate” part.
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MacFarlane, J. Relativism and disagreement. Philos Stud 132, 17–31 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9049-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9049-9