Relative Truth

by Manuel García-Carpintero, Max Kolbel, Oxford Publishing Staff

Overview

The truth of an utterance depends on various factors. Usually these factors are assumed to be: the meaning of the sentence uttered, the context in which the utterance was made, and the way things are in the world. Recently, however, a number of cases have been discussed where there seems to be reason to think that the truth of an utterance is not yet fully determined by these three factors, and that truth must therefore depend on a further factor. The most prominent examples include utterances about values, utterances attributing knowledge, utterances that state that something is probable or epistemically possible, and utterances about the contingent future. In these cases, some have argued, the standard picture needs to be modified to admit extra truth-determining factors, and there is further controversy about the exact role of any such extra factors.

With contributions from some of the key figures in the contemporary debate on relativism this book is about a topic that is the focus of much traditional and current interest: whether truth is relative to standards of taste, values, or subjective informational states. It is an issue in the philosophy of language, but one with important connections to other areas of philosophy, such as meta-ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199234950
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	10/15/2008
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Max Kölbel received his PhD from King's College London in 1997. He has taught philosophy at UNAM in México City, at Swansea, Cambridge, and since 2001 at the University of Birmingham. From 2008, he will be ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona.

Manuel García-Carpintero received his PhD from the University of Barcelona in 1988 and has taught in the department of Lògica, Història i Filosofia there since 1984.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction: "Motivations for Relativism", Max Kölbel
I: RELATIVISM ELABORATED
2. Moderate Relativism, François Recanati
3. Semantic Relativism and the Logic of Indexicals, Stefano Predelli and Isidora Stojanovic
4. Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths, John MacFarlane
5. Margins for Error in Context, Denis Bonnay and Paul Egré
6. Relativism, Vagueness and What Is Said, Manuel García-Carpintero
II: THE METAPHYISCAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RELATIVISM
7. Relativism about Truth Itself: Haphazard Thoughts about the Very Idea, Crispin Wright
8. Three Forms of Truth-Relativism, Iris Einheuser
III: OBJECTIONS TO RELATIVISM
9. Assertion, Belief and Disagreement, Sebastiano Moruzzi
10. Frege, Relativism and Faultless Disagreement, Sven Rosenkranz
11. Epistemic Modals and Correct Disagreement, Richard Dietz
IV: ALTERNATIVES TO RELATIVISM
12. Content Relativism, Herman Cappelen
13. Faultless or Disagreement, Andrea Iacona
14. Presuppositions of Commonality: an Indexical Relativist Account of Disagreement, Dan Lopez de Sa