Trumping assessments and the aristotelian future

1 Truth-relativism For our purposes, truth-relativism can be characterised as the doctrine that in a single world the very same token utterance can take different truth-values when considered in different contexts of assessment. The root semantic idea is already present in Lewis’s 1980, where an utterance of a sentence like “It is raining” is conceived as receiving a truth-value only when the value of a parameter of place — an ‘index’ — is fixed to which there is no semantic reference (not even by an ‘unarticulated constituent’) in the utterance in question. Truthrelativism is what you get for a region of discourse when you construe its utterances as dealing in contents relevantly like that of “It is raining” on the Lewis treatment, —but then add in the idea that the truth-values of utterances of these contents is dependent upon a new kind of index whose value is not settled once and for all by a context of utterance, but varies with certain variable characteristics of (hypothetical) assessments. If truth relativism so defined holds for a certain utterance, the utterance is assessment-sensitive. The doctrine is widely regarded as providing one way to underwrite the (alleged)