Context, Content, and Relativism

There have been a number of recent attempts to argue for a relativism through the philosophy of language. These proposals argue that the semantic values of sentences must be construed as sets of pairs of worlds and something else. In the proposals I shall focus on, semantic values are sets of pairs of worlds and judges. The judge assess, for instance, what counts as fun. As proponents of such views are clearly aware, this is a form of relativism about truth. We can get no truth value from the content of an assertion until we fix the judge relative to whom it is true. But defenders of these views argue there are semantic phenomena we cannot make sense of without making room for relative truth. Furthermore, they will argue, this semantically motivated relativism is more modest, and more sensible, than other versions.

My main concern here will be with the philosophy of language side of this debate. I shall argue that in fact, thinking about the way language works does not give us any argument for relativism. I shall also draw some general morals about this sort of argument from relativism. I shall argue that it over-generalizes, and that if we accept it, we will have to be relativists about far more, and far more uncomfortable, things than who judges what is fun. I shall also suggest, in the end, that the argument which leads to this kind of rampant relativism hinges on a particularly stringent view about the way context fixes contextual parameters. I shall suggest this stringent view is not well-justified, and that language shows us many contextual effects which do not conform to it.