Relativism and Conversation

Frege famously held that each act of utterance expresses a complete thought, and that each thought is true or false absolutely. Until a few years ago, analytical philosophers have sided with their most venerable ancestor: traditionally, relativism about truth has been dismissed as an extravagant and confused piece of semantic nonsense. But in recent times several writers have proposed relativistic accounts of a wide array of expressions, including epistemic modals, predicates of personal taste, future contingents, gradable adjectives and indicative conditionals. This paper has two aims. First, I want to clarify some points of central importance in the debate about truth relativism. Relativism is often confused with superficially similar contextualist theses: here I will try to give a clear statement of the position, and to establish what sort of linguistic evidence can support or disconfirm relativism. Second, I will try to undermine the case for relativism. In the first place, I will argue that the relativist’s positive arguments rely on a simplistic analysis of the data, and hence are inconclusive. Then I will show that relativism is unable to explain how the disputed claims can be used to transmit information and gain knowledge. The first part of the paper (sections 2-5) is devoted to the clarificatory task. In section 2, I give a concise statement of the relativist position. In section 3, I sketch a sample of relativistic semantics, drawing mostly from the work of John MacFarlane. Section 4 aims at pulling apart relativism from non-standard brands of contextualism; from here I proceed, in section 5, to state a general claim about linguistic evidence for relativism. The second part (sections 6-8) contains my attack on relativism. After a survey of the discursive arguments (section 6), I proceed to show that they rely on an incorrect analysis of the linguistic evidence, and hence are incolclusive (section 7). At this point I develop my main objection (section 8).