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.

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!’

This final chapter aims to build on the points made earlier to provide a defence of neo-traditionalism against a common kind of counterexample. The aim is to explain how an extremely simple system along these lines can account for belief reports. Predelli does not argue for the assumptions that underlie his particular system, simply against the charge that such a system cannot handle belief reports.

The alleged problem is with the substitution of co-referring terms in belief reports (and so it’s almost as old as this kind of philosophy). The problem is as follows:

(1) Tom believes that Bush is the President.

(2) Tom believes that Dubya is the President.

We seem to be able to represent one and the same belief by both (1) and (2), but not in all cases. But to count these as having different truth-conditions suggests that we should be able to detect a significant semantic difference, some ‘unarticulated constituent’ perhaps.

Predelli appeals to his account of the real workings of the neo-traditionalist paradigm and argues that (1) and (2) will indeed be associated with identical T-distributions, but not what are intuitively thought of as truth-conditions.

This and ch. 4 suggest lots of very interesting questions which I’m now thinking about how to answer. All in all it was a worthwhile read.