Abstract
Some authors have recently claimed that relativism about knowledge sentences accommodates the context sensitivity of our use of such sentences as well as contextualism, while avoiding the counterintuitive consequences of contextualism regarding our inter-contextual judgments, that is, our judgments about knowledge claims made in other contexts. I argue that relativism, like contextualism, involves an error theory regarding a certain class of inter-contextual judgments.
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Notes
Unfortunately, for reasons of space, I will not be able to examine invariantist responses to contextualism. Nor will I argue that contextualism is preferable to relativism. My conclusion will be the weaker claim that relativism incurs a burden similar to that of contextualism with respect to ordinary speakers’ judgments about knowledge claims.
MacFarlane (2007, p. 23) writes that assertions are not properly characterized as true or false, and prefers instead to talk of assertions as accurate or inaccurate. I will not adopt MacFarlane’s terminology here, but nothing hinges on this.
As we will see in Sect. 6, the story is a little more complicated, for the relativist may hold that there are two concepts of truth, a binary one and a unary one, and that by ‘true’ we usually mean the unary concept of truth.
In what follows, I will speak of low and high epistemic standards, as if there were only two sets of standards, but it should be understood that there is a whole range of standards between the ones we invoke in everyday life and the standards invoked by the radical skeptic.
We need not suppose that the speaker in High and the speaker in Low are two different people: we could also imagine that the inter-contextual judgments made by a given speaker concern knowledge claims produced by a prior self located in a context involving different epistemic standards.
DeRose (2006) points out that when High and Low are constructed in the right way, it is far from clear that speakers will have the intuition that there is a disagreement and that the claims made by the participants in the other context are wrong. DeRose’s point has merit and is, in my view, an important component of a contextualist response to the problem with inter-contextual judgments; however, for the purpose of this paper, I will assume what seems to be the worst-case scenario for contextualism, according to which our inter-contextual judgments and intuition of disagreement are as described in the text.
The relativist’s account of disagreement is actually a little more complicated than this. I will come back to this issue in Sect. 9.
Here, I am supposing that Hannah’s epistemic position is high with respect to the proposition that John does not know that P.
As we will see in the next section, there is a way out of this problem for the relativist; however, it is useful to see why the current version of relativism is problematic.
Relativism holds that Bob’s assertion is true relative to any context of assessment.
Things are just as problematic with respect to the construction ‘is true relative to epistemic standards E,’ which many speakers would probably understand along the same lines. See Stanley (2005, pp. 151–152) for related remarks.
A more careful translation would be ‘seems true to informed and linguistically competent observers,’ but I will stick to the less cumbersome locution. Another possible translation that also seems to be adequate is ‘would be conversationally appropriate.’
Thanks to Stewart Cohen for a very helpful exchange about the topic of this section.
I make no claim about the possible conceptual priority of one notion of truth over the other. Nor do I claim that there is an exact synonymy relation between ‘P is trueB relative to W’ and the corresponding subjunctive conditional. My point is merely that the two statements have equivalent truth conditions.
See MacFarlane (2007, p. 25). For simplicity’s sake, I am omitting the time parameter. I take no stand on the question whether propositional truth is relative to time. I should also note that, as I pointed out in footnote 3, MacFarlane prefers to talk of the accuracy rather than the truth of assertions.
See MacFarlane (2007, p. 26).
This is how the relativist point of view has been understood here: throughout the paper, the relativist has been taken to hold that both a knowledge claim and the proposition expressed by this knowledge claim have assessment-sensitive truth values.
It is far from clear to me that ordinary speakers would behave in this way. Suppose that Hannah and John are in Low, and Hannah says, ‘I know the car is in the garage. I just parked it there.’ I doubt that if reminded by John of her claim ‘We don’t know anything about the external world,’ made in the epistemology seminar the day before, Hannah would then be inclined to withdraw her knowledge denial. At any rate, as I indicated in footnote 7, I am assuming, for the sake of the argument, that our inter-contextual judgments are as relativists say they are.
References
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Stewart Cohen for a very perceptive set of comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this article. I also want to thank Sherri Irvin for her feedback.
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Montminy, M. Contextualism, relativism and ordinary speakers’ judgments. Philos Stud 143, 341–356 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9203-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9203-7