“Jon Kvanvig”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=153 attacks the appeal to norms of assertion “Andy Egan makes in his paper on relativism”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/might.doc. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, except I will note two things.

First, there’s no reason to think that moving to a justified belief standard for assertion would block, or even noticably slow down, Andy’s argument from these cases for a relativist conclusion. None of the plausible non-relativist semantics for epistemic modals licence the claim that the speakers in these eavesdropping cases are justified. Or at least none that I can see, and Jon doesn’t offer one of his own.

(Hopefully Andy will respond to Jon’s claim along these lines, though he might not read Certain Doubts so he possibly hasn’t got a chance to do so yet.)

Second, I don’t think Andy needs anything like as general as what Jon is attributing to him. For one thing, he only says that _part_ of the story about the appropriateness of the assertion is that it is true, not that this is anything like sufficient for assertion. More importantly, he can rely on direct judgments about what is truly said in what contexts, which don’t go via claims about appropriateness.

This is rather striking in the colour cases we discuss in EMiC. Harry the Human looks at two colour chips that are indistinguishable to humans (but distinguishable by pigeons, and by God) and says “Those are the same colour.” Pete the Pigeon looks at them and says “That’s not true.” Intuitively what Harry said is not just appropriate, but true. That intuition on its own can guide us towards relativism.