Category Archive

If my chosen project is to give a contextualist alternative to relativism it looks like I’m going to need to be clear that they’re different things. Here is one way I might try and explain the distinction. 

It’s clear that in order for it to be an interesting case the relevant tokenings of ‘The haggis is tasty’ and ‘The haggis is not tasty’, by John and Mary respectively, must be both in contexts that have one and the same salient haggis. Otherwise they’re simply not disagreeing. And they may well have to have the same contextually determined comparison class for tastiness. It seems that the contextualist holds that each tokening is able to come out as true in each one’s context. But they do not hold that there is some single context (of assessment) such that both come out as true. Whereas the relativist does allow for such a case.

I don’t know if that quite reports the positions taken in the literature by people like Michael Glanzberg but it seems to make a distinction clear. It also makes the relativist look rather like a dialethist, which I believe is a respectable but rather rare thing to be in the philosophy of logic. That might be a connection worth following up.

I think things went ok on Thursday. As always there were questions I couldn’t answer and objections I couldn’t meet. Here is a selection of them, and what I think might be a reasonable response.

Several people thought that it would be better to go with one of the other sorts of response to cases such as ‘Jones’ Note’. I think Keith and Ed were the main advocates of this line. The popular option seemed to be a kind of ambiguity for ‘I’ (and other indexicals). For example, perhaps ‘now’ can pick out either the time of utterance or the time at which the utterance is ‘consumed’. I have two connected worries about this. The first is that indexical expressions are now ambiguous, potentially between lots of senses. I think that this is more troubling than the thought that they can be used in lots of ways. Secondly, on this picture there is no obvious reason to think that the use of indexical expressions is governed by determinate rules at all. As was pointed out, I reject the most obvious rule for their use, but not the idea that there is a rule at all.

Various people asked for an example of a case where ‘I am here now’ turns out false. Here is one: Suppose I were to say ‘I am Aristotle. I am here now.’ The first sentence creates a content where the index for assessing the second will have Aristotle as its speaker parameter. If I said it in St Andrews on the 1st of March we would get those in the index as well. What would then be said by ‘I am here now’ would turn out to be the false claim that Aristotle is in St Andrews on the 1st of March. (Assume a tenseless ‘is’ if it helps.) That is false.

Ruth objected that I was assuming that the meaning of certain indexical containing expressions was equivalent to some expression not containing them. It’s certainly true that I would need to say a lot more about meaning to make my view work. Nonetheless I think that I’m actually quite happy to say that what the particular utterance of an indexical expression says is equivalent to an indexical-free expression.

Elia had two criticisms. Firstly he suggested that if I reject that ‘I am here now’ is an analytic truth then I must reject that other candidates such as ‘P iff P‘ are as well. I think I tried to say something complicated at the time. Looking back, I think it would have been better to point out that ‘P iff P‘ doesn’t have an indexical in, so for all I’ve said it is safe as an expression of an analytic truth. Admittedly it’s a schema, and if we put in a sentence with indexicals we may have a problem. The solution is to have a restriction such that if we have two occurrences of a sentence in such a schema they must get the same index. Then everything works out ok.

The second worry was about the use I wanted to put this in the contextualism vs. relativism debate. The thought was that if we had a language L for which there was no context-sensitive terms, but there was still pressure towards relativism, then the project would collapse. So far my only response would be to say that what I’m interested in is English and I don’t care about L. But I can see that that’s not going to be terribly satisfying.

I think that’s enough writing for a while. Thank-you for all the feedback so far and for any comments you’d like to leave now…