Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism

Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism

Relativism and Disagreement

It has often been proposed that claims about what is funny, delicious, or likely are “subjective,” in the sense that their truth depends not only on how things are with the objects they explicitly concern, but on how things are with some subject not explicitly mentioned. This thought is supported by the striking degree to which we differ in our judgements about these matters. If there are wholl...

On Losing Disagreements: Spencer’s Attitudinal Relativism

In ‘Reversibility or Disagreement’ (this journal), we posed a dilemma for invariantists about epistemic expressions—that is, for those who claim that expressions such as ‘might’ and ‘probably’ make a contextinvariant contribution to the truth conditions of the utterances to which they belong. The crux of our dilemma is simple: invariantists, we argued, cannot make sense of a phenomenon that we ...

Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement [version of June, 2007]

I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try ...

Paradox and Relativism

Since the time of Plato, relativism has been attacked as a self-refuting theory. Today, there are two basic kinds of argument that are used to show that global relativism is logically incoherent: first, a direct descendent of the argument Plato uses against Protagoras, called the peritrope; and, second, a more recent argument that relativism leads to an infinite regress. Although some relativis...