Fodor (1983) claims that the modularity of mind (the relatively encapsulated, insulated, special-purpose nature of the psychological mechanisms of perception) helps undermine relativism in various forms. I shall show first, that the modular vision of mind provides insufficient support for the rejection of (most forms of) relativism, and second, that an alternative (‘neural constructivist’) mode...

Relativism and realism are often held to be in conflict. It is not obvious what the exact nature of the conflict is supposed to be, because it is not obvious what the two doctrines amount to. But that there is some kind of conflict between moral realism and moral relativism is evidenced by the fact that some take moral relativism to be the straightforward denial of moral realism. David Brink, f...

Most happiness researchers use semantic differential or Likert scales to assess happiness. Such conventionally used scales are susceptible to scale renorming (interpretation of scales differently in different contexts) and can produce a specious relativism effect (e.g., rating a low-income person happier than a high-income person in situations where the low-income person is not happier). Buildi...

In the last two decades, there have been numerous calls for a culturally sensitive bioethics. At the same time, bioethicists have become increasingly involved in empirical research, which is a sign of dissatisfaction with the analytic methods of traditional bioethics. In this article, I will argue that although these developments have broadened and enriched the field of bioethics, they can easi...

Here is a simple and inviting picture: the semantic values of sentences, relative to contexts, are sets of possible worlds. These are the truth conditions of assertions of those sentences in contexts. They are thus the contents of assertions, or the objects of attitudes we might take towards such contents. There have been many questions raised about the simple picture. For instance, sets of wor...

Many scholars and activists favor banning illicit businesses, especially given that such businesses constitute a large part of the global economy. But these businesses are commonly operated as if they are subject only to the ethical norms their management chooses to recognize, and as a result they sometimes harm innocent people. This can happen in part because there are no effective legal const...

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...