Abstract
Contextualist theories of truth appeal to context to solve the liar paradox: different stages of reasoning occur in different contexts, and so the contradiction is dispelled. The word ‘true’ is relativized by the contextualists to contexts of use. This paper shows that contextualist approaches to the liar are committed to a form of semantic relativism: that the truth value of some sentences depends on the context of assessment, as well as the context of use. In particular, it is shown how Simmons’s and Glanzberg’s contextualist approaches entail relativism. In both cases, the liar sentence gets different semantic evaluations as uttered in a fixed context of use but assessed from different contexts. Shift in context of use alone cannot provide the full explanation of the liar. These contextualist approaches, as originally presented, were thus mischaracterised and they should be re-evaluated according to their full implications.
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Notes
The liar here is “strengthened”, since by contrast to the ordinary liar that ascribes falsity to itself, the ascription of un-truth resists simple gap-theoretic solutions.
This presentation of the strengthened liar discourse follows (Simmons 2015) in general lines. I will reformulate the discourse in accordance with the different details in Simmons’s and Glanzberg’s presentations when I discuss their views.
Conflicting values must be distinct. However, not all distinct values are conflicting. I will not define conflicting values, but will rather go case by case. Thus, if s receives ‘true’ and ‘false’ in two different contexts of use, s is use-sensitive, but if s receives ‘not true’ and ‘false’ in two different contexts of use, s is still not shown to be use-sensitive, since the evaluations are not in conflict. Less obviously, as we shall see, we will need to accept that ‘defective’ and ‘not true’ are conflicting values. This is based on the fact that we reached the conclusion that (L) is defective by denying its being not true.
If those are conceived to be radically different, then we still remain with sensitivity to context of use of an utterance expressing an assessment.
For our purposes, the relevant parameters are \(\beta \)’s given context of use \(c_\beta \), and some context of assessment. As a default, unless otherwise specified, we shall take the context of assessment of assessments to be equal to their context of use.
The requirement for a true assessment might raise the worry of an infinite regress: from a relativistic standpoint, the truth of an assessment depends on its context of use as well as its own context of assessment. However, there is no need to go further than that, since we do not require a true assessment on the second level, we merely rely on the context in which such an assessment could be made. If relativism required sensitivity to true assessments rather than sensitivity to context of assessment, we would be in danger of a regress. Nonetheless, when determining the truth of an assessment, we shall consider its context of use also as the context of assessment. The assessments we shall deal with, with the exception of the liar, will presumably not be assessment-sensitive.
Again, conflicting values must be distinct but not all distinct values are conflicting. See f.n. 5.
One may wonder whether for every assessment-sensitive utterance, the conflicting evaluations would find expression in the object language. Here we don’t need such a strong assumption for the argument presented to go through: we only need that parts of the liar discourse, which we have analysed as assessments, are expressible in the object language.
Note that it does not suffice that a sentence has conflicting evaluations in different contexts of assessment for it to be assessment-sensitive: the context of use must remain constant, hence, there is an utterance of the sentence that is assessment-sensitive.
For a criticism along these lines see Gauker (2006).
Scharp’s arguments rely on the idea that truth is an inconsistent concept, and there is no overlap with the arguments presented here.
The instance for (L) in the truth\(_L\)-schema is: (L) is true\(_L\) iff (L) is not true\(_L\).
The instance for (R) in the truth\(_{rL}\)-schema is: (R) is true\(_{rL}\) iff (L) is not true\(_L\).
In previous work (Simmons 1993), Simmons does not use the phenomenon of repetition as a primary motivation for his contextualist approach. However, the essence of the contextualist approach is the same, as is the implication to relativism.
The parameters leading to differing semantic values might not be the usual ones of worlds and times that are in play in “ordinary” indexical contextualism, but rather coordinates as tastes and aesthetic standards.
I use the term “proto-relativism” to flag that Glanzberg’s work appeared at an incipient stage of the current debate with its current terminology.
Note, however, that the type of relativism attributed to Glanzberg here is content relativism. That is, propositions here remain non-relative, but which proposition (or whether a proposition) is expressed by a sentence is relative to both context of use and context of assessment.
The relativist approach that emerges has a curious feature that should be taken into consideration. The liar discourse becomes essentially assessment-sensitive. Observe the following reformulation of the strengthened liar discourse, taking into account that truth is relative to context of assessment (we only need to be concerned with the first three steps):
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1.
(L\(_u^a\)): (L\(_u^a\)) is not true.
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2.
(L\(_u^a\)) is defective.
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3.
(L\(_u^a\)) is not true.
The sentence in the first line might be more easily read as: “The sentence L, as uttered in context u and assessed from context a is not true.” By similar reasoning to what we had before, we can move from (1) to (2) to (3). So we end up having two conflicting assessments of the very same item, which is already relativized to a context of assessment. And applying the contextualist reasoning, we solve the problem by reference to a context shift throughout the stages of the discourse. Context sensitivity will resurface no matter how many contextual parameters are fixed explicitly in the discourse—there is no way to reformulate the reasoning in the semantic theory in such a way that the sentences involved obtain an absolute truth value. One might object to the explicit reference to context of assessment in the discourse (which would mean a serious limitation of expression in the semantic theory!)—but then, a fortiori, the liar discourse remains assessment-sensitive.
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1.
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Acknowledgements
This paper originated from comments to Keith Simmons given at the Joint Workshop of The Hebrew University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. It was then presented at the Third Workshop on Philosophy of Logic of the Munich - Buenos Aires Logic Group and at the Philosophy Department at the University of Konstanz. I thank the audiences there for useful comments. I also wish to thank the following for very helpful comments and discussion on earlier drafts: Ole Hjortland, Dirk Kindermann, Hannes Leitgeb, Julien Murzi, Stewart Shapiro, Keith Simmons, Paula Teijeiro and two anonymous referees for this journal. This work has benefited from the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
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Sagi, G. Contextualism, Relativism and the Liar. Erkenn 82, 913–928 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9850-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9850-6