Relativism about Truth and Predicates of Taste

Relativism, Assertion and Deflationary Truth∗

We provide a deflationarily acceptable account of assertion in truth-relativistic domains. First, we state what we take relativism and deflationism to be. Second, we clarify the problem of assertion in relativistic domains by singling out the features that make assertion within those domains problematic. Then, we tackle the problem directly by generalizing a standard deflationary account of the...

Relativism, the Open Future, and Propositional Truth

F. Correia and A. Iacona (eds.), Around the Tree: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues Concerning Branching and the Open Future, Synthese Library 361, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5167-5_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract In his paper “Future Contingents and Relative Truth,” John MacFarlane argues for truth relativism on the basis of the possibility of the open future. He defend...

Expressive Content and Predicates of Personal Taste

It is not straightforwardly clear how we might provide truth conditions for sentences containing predicates of personal taste (henceforth PoPTs), e.g. fun. According to Lasersohn (2005) a semantic theory of PoPTs must account for the intuition that each of the speakers in (1) is expressing a true statement, and yet B is directly contradicting A. This is known as the problem of faultless disagre...

Complexity and Hierarchy in Truth Predicates∗

Since seminal work of Tarski (e.g. Tarski, 1935), hierarchies have been much discussed in the literature on truth and paradox. Especially in recent years, this discussion has been decidedly negative. Tarski’s hierarchy of languages is sometimes described as the “orthodox” response to the Liar paradox (e.g. Kripke, 1975), but it is an orthodoxy many authors have gone to great lengths to avoid. F...

The Syntax of Taste 1: Introduction: Predicates of personal taste