Varieties of Relativism: Indexical, Propositional and Factual

Several authors have argued that a range of phenomena calls for a relativisation of propositional truth to contexts of assessment or, more generally, perspectives. I want to defend the more orthodox view that whether a proposition is true depends only on whether the represented states of affairs obtain. I offer an alternative account of the relativity suggested by the data, factual relativism, and argue that a plausible propositional relativism reduces to either indexical or factual relativism. We can distinguish between three broad varieties of relativism. 1. Indexical relativism, according to which certain (sentence-like) linguistic items express different truth-evaluable propositions relative to different contexts.1 2. Propositional relativism, according to which the same proposition may have different truth-values relative to different perspectives—say contexts of assessment, temporal perspectives, conceptual frameworks or states of information. 3. Factual relativism, according to which the facts relevant for settling the truth-value of a given proposition may differ across perspectives—that is, different facts obtain relative to different perspectives. These could be either contexts of utterance or contexts of evaluation.