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It’s a cliché that you always think of the right thing to say after the discussion is over. I think it’s got some truth to it though. Here is what I ought to have said recently when I was talking about differences between epistemic contextualism and contextualism in the semantics of personal taste predicates.
The semantic contextualist has a real problem with keeping content fixed. It seems reasonable to say that two speakers are disagreeing iff their utterances have the same content, plus or minus a negation operator. The details may get messy but the central idea seems to be sound. It may be that some versions of contextualism try and work with only suitably similar content, but most try and claim it is identical. This tends to lead to problems for them. Not least, how is their view then contextualist rather than relativist?
On the contrary the whole point of epistemic contextualism, at least as I see it, is to deny that ‘knows’ has the same content in different contexts. Again the details are difficult but the line of approach is clear.
From this it emerges that the links between semantic and epistemic contextualism are actually pretty tenuous, at least as far as a unified approach to both topics is concerned. What helps one project in a theory is likely to harm the other.
I’ve been re-reading John MacFarlane’s paper ‘Relativism and Disagreement’ this afternoon. It has a nice account of the key problem for contextualists when it comes to the semantics of predicates of personal taste: preserving what he calls the ‘phenomenology of disagreement’. I’m also a fan of the discussion at the end of how and why such terms could ever come to be part of our linguistic practices when they’re so strange. I think that this sort of issue is often ignored when people write about these things.
I did come across something that I found puzzling in his proposed solution to the problem. At one point he writes:
To be a relativist, then, is not to relativize propositional truth to “nonstandard parameters” like standards of taste, but to adopt a certain view about how the accuracy of certain acts or states is to be assessed.
It looks like there is a distinction between accuracy and truth playing a role here. Earlier in the paper such a distinction has indeed been introduced, but it is used to mark the distinction between utterances and propositions. The thought is that an utterance(-token) is an act and an act is not the kind of thing that can be true or false, merely accurate or inaccurate. I think that that’s a reasonable claim to make but I remember wondering when I first read it whether it was going to do any real work. It seems that it does, but, read like that, the work it’s doing looks rather dubious. If the distinction is in play only because utterances are acts then it seems obscure how that can be the bone of contention between relativists and contextualists.
I also wanted to to mention something that has been exercising me about the whole field recently. Looking at MacFarlane’s view I find it hard to discern much difference between it and the position of Peter Lasersohn. I have similar difficulty in finding any big picture differences between Lasersohn and the views of Jonathan Schaffer, at least as they were presented at his recent talk to Arché’s Contextualism and Relativism seminar. But MacFarlane is a relativist and Schaffer is a contextualist. If they disagree more about detail than they do about grand philosophy, then where is the importance of the distinction between these two terms? That’s assuming that I’m not lumping together views that should be kept apart due to a poor understanding of them. I hope I’m not.
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.
As noted on Ian Church’s ‘Reformed Philosophy’ blog, there is a prima facie problem for foundationalists: how to resolve disagreement. The problem would arise because both sides would accuse the other of begging the question by appealing to their foundational beliefs. Let us distinguish between base and superstructure, the base beliefs are held non-inferentially and the superstructure is inferred from base beliefs and rules of inference. In the cases that lead us to be having this discussion the base is some theological system and the superstructure is an epistemological one, but that’s not essential to the debate.
The problem is understanding how two people with different bases can have a meaningful debate about superstructures. It seems that each party believes what they believe for reasons that the other will not accept. Any arguments they offer will be met by a charge of begging the question. What to do?
Ian’s suggestion is to appeal to the following method of resolving conflicts. A conflict is resolved if one side can show that the other is internally inconsistent. I think it’s implicit in what Ian says that we imagine this process to be iterated and that one belief system will emerge from the process as undefeated. As he notes, this relies on the premise that there is at most one consistent base. I think that, if the base is assumed to contain or imply every atomic sentence or its negation (or something of the sort), this is right.
There are a couple of points to make about this, which I think make the view look pretty costly. The first is that it only works if we make the world views extremely comprehensive. This is required by the condition sketched at the end of the previous paragraph. If this is accepted then the other assumption of the optimistic view looks threatened. Why shouldn’t there be more than one internally consistent set of base beliefs plus inference rules? Presumably the world is consistent, but there could be more than one system of reasoning from what is given by it. This problem would be resolved if the inference rules were fixed. But trying to do so will bring back the charge of question-begging. Whoever has their favoured inference rules questioned will cry ‘foul!’
