Introduction: Motivations for Relativism

The truth of an utterance depends on various factors. Usually these factors are assumed to be: the meaning of the sentence uttered, the context in which the utterance was made, and the way things are in the world. Recently, however, a number of cases have been discussed where there seems to be reason to think that the truth of an utterance is not yet fully determined by these three factors, and that truth must therefore depend on a further factor. The most prominent examples include utterances about values, utterances attributing knowledge, utterances that state that something is probable or epistemically possible and utterances about the contingent future. In these cases, some have argued, the standard picture needs to be modified to admit extra truth-determining factors, and there is further controversy about the exact role of any such extra factors. All the essays in this volume are about this issue. It is a narrowly defined issue in the philosophy of language, but one with important connections to other areas of philosophy, such as meta-ethics, metaphysics and epistemology.