Comments on: Two Dogmas of Contextualism

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:49:22 +0000

Oops, that’s a terrible typo. I mean rejected (T) while held onto (U) as non-indexical contextualism. I really shouldn’t have messed that up.

By: Errol Lord

Errol Lord — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:20:47 +0000

“I called the position that held onto (T) while rejecting (U) “indexical relativism”.”

So (T)+~(U)= indexical relativism.

“I called something similar to the view that rejected (U) while accepting (T) “non-indexical contextualism”.”

And ~(U)+(T)=non-indexical contextualism.

Aren’t there two names for the same view on your taxonomy?

Perhaps the ‘something similar’ is doing the work here. I haven’t had the chance to read the paper. So, I don’t know the details of that yet.

By: Dan López de Sa

Dan López de Sa — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:36:21 +0000

As I was reading Andy’s, he was arguing for “audience-sensitivity,” not “assessor-sensitivity” (see section 7, specially fn. 29), but I take the point that in the limiting case, an absolutely unrestricted audience would include all possible assessors.

I also assume that there is such a thing as the context of use, so that either in that context Daniels is the addressee, or O’Leary is, but not both. But I was thinking two different contexts of use could “overlap,” as it were, and in particular could share the initial author-related stages of producing a given token of an expression (like with an e-mail of “I’ll see you later as planned” sent to both Daniels and O’Leary). (This seems compatible with the Kaplan/Lewis view of contexts as spatiotemporally centered worlds, if one allows the regions to be extended enough.) Does this make sense?

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:15:53 +0000

So I was thinking what was crucial to this example was that content is different relative to different assessors. If Daniels assesses the utterance, its content is Obama loves Daniels. If O’Leary assesses it, its content is Obama loves O’Leary. The content isn’t that Obama loves Daniels and O’Leary – relative to each context of assessment it expresses a proposition with just two people as constituents.

That’s to say, I’m assuming that there is such a thing as the context of utterance. Either in that context Daniels is the addressee, or O’Leary is, but not both. So if the utterance expresses different propositions relative to different people, then it must be that the content is fixed in part by something other than the context of utterance.

This possibly is just what MacFarlane calls “expressive relativism”. Perhaps that’s not a bad name too.

By: Dan López de Sa

Dan López de Sa — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:00:26 +0000

Hi Brian!

You say: “The second model lets assessors get into the content-fixing mechanism, but says the content that is fixed is a familiar proposition whose truth is not assessor relative. This is easiest to explain with an example involving second-person pronouns. For some utterances of “Obama loves you”, the content of that utterance, relative to x, is that Obama loves x.

But it seems to me that the example involves the audience of the (extended) context of use playing a content-determining role, rather than the assessor of the linguistic exchange, who need not be part of it.

As to the labels, just to be sure: your ‘indexical relativism’ is then what MacFarlane calls ‘expressive relativism’ (as opposed to ‘propositional relativism’) in ‘Making Sense of Relative Truth’ (p. 312), right?