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Notes
Most of the time Richard uses the word “appropriate” instead of “apt” (and sometimes he even uses “fulfilled”), but I think “apt” is most apt for his purposes. He wants to say that a commitment to the truth of p is “apt” or “appropriate” if p turns out to be true, even if the person undertaking the commitment did not have good evidence for p, and committed herself recklessly. In such a case, we would not ordinarily say that the commitment was “appropriate,” but we might call it “apt”.
Though Richard doesn’t discuss the connection, the idea has some similarities to Simon Blackburn’s (2001) use of semantic tableaux to give a systematic accounts of the commitments undertaken by the use of complex sentences. Richard’s approach differs significantly from Blackburn’s, though, in ways that make it easier to defend.
In what follows, I present Richard’s idea in my own way, which I think makes it perspicuous, though some of the distinctions I make are only implicit in Richard’s book.
I put “Boolean” in scare quotes because we don’t have the structure of a Boolean algebra here; for example, Conj(A, Inv(A)) ≠ Conj(B, Inv(B)).
Elsewhere Richard says that “To say that S c-entails A is, roughly, to say that anyone who seriously utters all of the members of S, thereby incurring the commitments associated with those sentences, incurs also the commitment associated with A” (63). “Roughly” indeed; the notion expressed here is not at all the same as preservation of aptness of commitment. Take the inference “A ∨ B, \(\lnot\) A, therefore B.” Here we have preservation of aptness of commitment, in the sense that if the commitments undertaken in the premises are apt, so is the commitment undertaken in the conclusion. But we don’t have preservation of commitment, since the conclusion may introduce a commitment entirely disparate from the commitments undertaken in the premises.
Note that Richard takes propositions to be structured, so the proposition that \(\lnot\) (\(\lnot\) p ∧ \(\lnot\) q) is different from the proposition that p ∨ q.
When he first introduces force disjunction, Richard says (60) that for every set of second-order commitments, there is a unique second-order commitment that one fulfills just in case one fulfills some of its members. But no proof is offered.
I have argued elsewhere (e.g., MacFarlane 2005) that if this is the only thing the relativist says connecting relativized truth to normative proprieties, then the relativist’s position will be indistinguishable from a kind of “nonindexical contextualism,” on which two parties can accept and reject the same proposition without disagreeing in any robust sense. To distinguish relativism from nonindexical contextualism, it is also important to say something about when assertions must be retracted. But since Richard leaves this issue unexplored, we need not get into it here.
This is a lightly revised version of my contribution to the Pacific APA Author Meets Critics session on Richard (2008).
References
Blackburn, S. (2001). Ruling passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacFarlane, J. (2005). Making sense of relative truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105, 321–339.
Richard, M. (2008). When truth gives out. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Mark Richard for helpful correspondence.
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MacFarlane, J. Richard on truth and commitment. Philos Stud 160, 445–453 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9795-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9795-1