No matter whowhat makes one a relativist?

  1. Eduardo Pérez-Navarro 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Granada
    info

    Universidad de Granada

    Granada, España

    ROR https://ror.org/04njjy449

Journal:
Theoria: an international journal for theory, history and foundations of science

ISSN: 0495-4548

Year of publication: 2021

Volume: 36

Issue: 2

Pages: 231-242

Type: Article

DOI: 10.1387/THEORIA.22067 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

More publications in: Theoria: an international journal for theory, history and foundations of science

Abstract

As part of her argument that relativism and contextualism are nothing but notational variants of each other, Stojanovic holds that contextualism is flexible enough to achieve whatever relativism might do if the matter is what truth-value is assigned to each pair of sentence and context. In this paper, I reply to this statement by arguing that contextualism cannot be made as flexible as relativism without in fact turning it into a version of relativism. The key to my response to Stojanovic is that, while relativism relativizes utterance truth, contextualism does not, so parameters that are not fixed at the context of utterance will be accessible for the relativist, but not for the contextualist. Although the relativity of utterance truth follows as soon as propositional truth is relativized to contexts of assessment, as the relativist does, it is easy to lose sight of this fact if we identify the context of assessment with the assessor’s context. Hence, the point of this paper is that the difference between relativism and contextualism is not one as to whose parameters play a role in determining the sentence’s truth-value. If it were, contextualism could indeed be made just as flexible as relativism.

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Funding information

This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the grant FPU14/00485, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the research projects “Contemporary Expressivisms and the Indispensability of Normative Vocabulary: Scope and Limits of the Expressivist Hypothesis” (FFI2016-80088-P) and “Disagreement in Attitudes: Normativity, Affective Polarization and Disagreement” (PID2019-109764RB-I00), by the Regional Government of Andalusia under the research projects “Public Disagreements, Affective Polarization and Immigration in Andalusia” (B-HUM-459-UGR18) and “The Inferential Identification of Propositions: A Reconsideration of Classical Dichotomies in Metaphysics, Semantics and Pragmatics” (P18-FR-2907), and by the University of Granada under a “Contrato Puente” fellowship and the excellence unit FiloLab-UGR (UCE.PPP2017.04). The author would also like to thank Manuel Almagro, María José Frápolli, Neftalí Villanueva, and two anonymous reviewers for Theoria for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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