When I was in Britain both The Observer and Q Magazine put out lists of the greatest British albums. At least at the top, the Observer got it right (Stone Roses) and Q got it spectacularly wrong (Definitely Maybe). Both lists were pretty weak on non-English acts, and on recent acts, but there’s interesting stuff on both lists.
Now while there are some facts about greatness in these parts (as I mentioned, Stone Roses is simply better than Definitely Maybe) it’s arguable that in some cases there’s simply no fact of the matter. So consider the following rather lame little dialogue.
Alice: Astral Weeks is a better album than Sgt. Peppers.
Suzy: No, Sgt. Peppers is a better album than Astral Weeks.
There’s an intuitive sense in which although Alice and Suzy are disagreeing, neither is making a mistake. But can this intuition really be endorsed? After all, it is inconsistent to suppose both that Astral Weeks is better than Sgt. Peppers and that Sgt. Peppers is better than Astral Weeks, and if not both of these claims are true, then one or both of the disputants is making a mistake – i.e. the one promoting a claim that isn’t true.
Crispin Wright’s paper at St Andrews was on just this question, but without the poppish sensibilities of my presentation. After some mucking about with attempts to resolve the dilemma here using intuitionist logic, Crispin chucked that and decided we should settle it using evaluator-sensitive semantics. For some claims, he held, whether they are true depends on what the relevant context of evaluation is.
And for these claims, whether one is making a mistake in asserting them depends on what is true in the asserter’s context of evaluation. So as long as in Alice’s context Astral Weeks really is better, and in Suzy’s Sgt. Peppers really is better, neither need be making a mistake. But it is still the case that they are making inconsistent claims. For in Alice’s context, what Suzy says is false, and vice versa.
Now for those of you following events on this blog and related areas, this might seem like rather old news. John MacFarlane has been promoting this kind of evaluator-relativism for what seems like months now, and is even writing a book on the subject. Mark Richard has a paper on it in Philosophical Studies from back in June. And Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and I have a long paper coming out shortly in a volume on contextualism. This is starting to look like a bandwagon.
Actually I suspect these discussions of evaluator-sensitivity, or what is now often called relativism, will become philosophically central over the rest of the decade. For one thing anything that all the people mentioned above are working on is bound to be the focus of some attention. For another, I can always keep babbling on about it here until it either is (a) widely discussed or (b) this blog loses all its readers. I note in passing that there are no papers written yet on why this is all a bad idea, so if any aspiring young philosopher wants a fresh shot at a field presumably full of first-pass errors waiting to be exposed, here’s your chance.
But you might think that disputes about the semantics for greatest album claims is unlikely to catch fire, philosophically speaking. If that was all there was to it, I suspect you’d be right. But what makes this kind of semantic relativism interesting is its wide range of possible applications. Andy, John and I go through a bunch of areas where we think it is at least prima facie plausible, the most philosophically interesting being colour claims, although the epistemic modals that are the focus of the paper I think should also be interesting. And there’s a possibility for application to ethics, though I’m a bit scared of treading there for fear of ending up in a morass.
The real philosophical interest, however, will come from applications in epistemology. As far as I can tell, relativism has all of the benefits of contextualism with none of the costs. John MacFarlane has written a paper just about applicability to knowledge claims and that will presumably be a major focus of his book. Mark Richard’s paper is also largely about knowledge claims, though the most detailed example concerns a special under-appreciated kind of comparative adjective. And Crispin Wright’s paper made an interesting point about knowledge as well. If the flurry of papers on contextualism about knowledge ascriptions is any indication, relativism about knowledge ascrpitions should be responsible for the deaths of several medium-sized forests.
One reason is that contextualism about knowledge isn’t that interesting from the perspective of formal semantics. We know that there are context sensitive expressions in language. Whether ‘know’ in English is one of them is an interesting empirical question, but not one whose answer causes deep theoretical ripples. If relativism about knowledge ascriptions, or about anything else, is right we have a lot of work to do at the foundations of semantics in order to accommodate this fact. (That’s not to say there aren’t other interesting questions for philosophers of language that contextualism raises. There are, particularly about philosophical methodology. But they don’t really cut to the core the way the relativist claims do.)
And as I said there are all the problems for contextualism that relativism solves. Below the fold I’ve included a summary of these, most of which are presented in more detail in the papers I’ve already mentioned.
TV Cases
I talked about these in an earlier post but it’s worth briefly mentioning them again. Let A and B be in different contexts so that the contextualist would say that A’s utterance S knows that p is true and B’s utterance S doesn’t know that p is also true. Now imagine A and B are both watching C, who is on television, talking about S. She says S knows that p, and A says That’s true while B says That’s false. Whatever intuitive force there is to the claim that both A and B spoke truly in the original case should, I think, carry over to the claim that both A and B speak truly when responding to C. But the contextualist cannot allow this. For the contextualist either A or B speaks falsely in these replies. (Which one it is will depend on what context C is in.) The relativist can allow that neither A nor B makes a mistake – that is each speaks truly relative to her context.
Reporting, Retracting and so on
MacFarlane focuses on this kind of case. When C says Smith knows that p, both A and B can report this by saying C said that S knows that p. This is difficult (to say the least) to account for under a contextualist framework. (If you are impressed by Lepore-style worries about the flexibility of speech reports, change the report to C believes that S knows that p. The worries don’t go away.)
Similarly, when we are moved by sceptical or otherwise standard-raising concerns, we are moved to retract previous knowledge ascriptions. This too is hard to account for under a contextualist picture.
The contextualist could in either case just say that we are making some kind of mistake in our reporting or retracting practices. But now it seems very hard to see what defence the contextualist has left against the invariantist who looks at the intuitive data the contextualist raises and says, well, we’re just making a mistake in our propositional attitude ascribing practices there too. The contextualist is left with the rather odd methodological claim that some propositional attitude ascriptions must be taken exactly at face value, while others are altogether discounted. Not a happy position, and not one the relativist finds herself in.
Conflict
Related to the previous point, Crispin Wright had a very nice example in the St Andrews paper that brought out why relativism looks more attractive than contextualism in the knowledge case. The point here is very similar to the point Richard is making in his paper in Philosophical Studies, but I thought Crispin’s version was nice enough to quote.
A doctor is performing surgery and notices something about the scalpel is handed.
—-This scalpel is dangerously blunt, he complains.
Later he is watching as an orderly comes by to collect the instruments for cleaning and sharpening.
—-Watch out, he says. That scalpel is dangeously sharp.
Although the doctor’s utterances have the surface form of being in conflict, they are really not. Indeed, he could hold both of the attitudes expressed at the same time. (Perhaps he gives the blunt scalpel directly to the orderly.) This is a contrast to the music case. No one could coherently hold both the view Alice expresses and the view Suzy expresses. That’s a nice way to distinguish contextually-sensitive terms from relativist terms. When dealing with relativist terms, we always have a conflict between expressions that look like they are in conflict, even if the semantics allows a kind of reconciliation. For contextually-sensitive terms, we don’t have that.
Now as Crispin pointed out, knowledge talk is more like music talk than scalpel talk in this respect. No one can hold, at the one time, that Moore both knows and does not know that he has hands, or both knows and does not know where his bicycle is parked. This contrasts with the doctor who can both hold the scalpel is dangerously blunt and dangerously sharp. So again we have a motivation for a relativist rather than contextualist treatment here.
So I think there’s lots of grounds for excitement here. Personally I’m an old-fashioned Moorean invariantist about knowledge. I think people are just making a philosophical mistake when they fall for sceptical arguments. (And I don’t think it should count too much against a theory that it says people are prone to philosophical mistakes. This strikes me as a truism. It’s here I part company with MacFarlane et al, though I do think they have the better of the dispute with the contextualists.) But there’s lots of philosophical work to be done developing and critiquing views on how the relativist project is to proceed.
Just for the sake of priority claims, it’s worth noting that in my case at least all of the ‘big picture’ philosophical ideas here are things I learned from John MacFarlane. Several of the details in the epistemic modals paper I guess are mine (and several others are Andy’s or John’s), and the TV cases is my way of putting one of MacFarlane’s ideas. But I don’t want my promotional efforts here to be confused with any claim to intellectual priority, because in this case (as in most cases!) I’m just the details guy. In terms of priority MacFarlane and Richard I think deserve the vast bulk of the credit. (Well, possibly Andy, John and I were the first to apply it to colour terms. That perhaps is more than a detail if you’re keeping score. But you get the idea.) The only qualification to that is that some of the ideas are, I’m told, anticipated by Jay Rosenberg’s book Thinking About Knowing. (MacFarlane credits this book. Thanks to David Jehle for bringing it to my attention.) I haven’t read the Rosenberg book so maybe I’ll revise a little my opinion on who was first here when I do.
Posted by Brian Weatherson in Uncategorized
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