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No deep disagreement for new relativists

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Abstract

Recently a number of writers have argued that a new form of relativism involves a form of semantic context-dependence which helps it escape the perhaps most common objection to ordinary contextualism; that it cannot accommodate our intuitions about disagreement. I argue: (i) In order to evaluate this claim we have to pay closer attention to the nature of our intuitions about disagreement. (ii) We have different such intuitions concerning different questions: we have more stable disagreement intuitions about moral disputes than about, say, disputes about matters of taste. (iii) The new form of relativism does not vindicate the stable intuitions about disagreement. (iv) It does a better job explaining the unstable intuitions than contextualism. But, pace some relativists, it is not clear that assertion-truth rather than just proposition-truth has to be relativized to accomplish this.

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Notes

  1. Many of the conclusions in this paper are also presented in chapter 4 of my dissertation (2007).

  2. There is still no terminological consensus in this area. In MacFarlane’s terminology the view just described does not yet count as relativism (but as “non-indexical contextualism”), since formally it doesn’t differ from the standard Kaplanian view––there are just new parameters in the circumstance of evaluation. Brogaard follows MacFarlane in this, calling her view both “non-indexical contextualism” and “perspectivalism”. We will see later how MacFarlane thinks this idea needs to be complemented to get relativism. Other writers call the view described here “relativism”, however (Glanzberg 2007; Kölbel 2004, 2005, 2007, forthcoming; Westerståhl forthcoming).

  3. It could also be put as a norm of assertion: we should aim at asserting sentences that express propositions that are true relative to our own circumstance of evaluation. (See e.g. Egan, Hawthorne et al. 2005; Kölbel 2002, p. 125) MacFarlane has criticized this formulation of the truth norm (MacFarlane 2005). However, his objection does not seem to be that the norm is false or does not hold, but that it cannot explain the difference between expressions that are assessment relative and those that are merely use-relative.

  4. Similar objections against Brogaard’s view has been given by Lars Binderup (2008). He focuses on the fact that if proposition relativism were true, then for “semantically clearheaded users of moral language”, “all rational incentive to engage in further debate would evaporate, leaving a general tolerance of moral disagreement” (p. 412), since each party would understand that the proposition the other party accepts might be true in that party’s perspective, even if it is false in her own perspective.

  5. Lasersohn (2005, 2005) also defends a form of assertion relativism about predicates of taste. On his view, the judge-parameter to which the truth of an assertion about taste is relative, is not determined by the situation in which the sentence is uttered (so that the judge is the speaker), since that would make the assertion objectively true. Instead, the judge is the one who assesses the assertion, so that the same assertion can have different truth-values relative to different assessors. In contrast to MacFarlane, however, it seems that Lasersohn only uses the claim that the truth of propositions is relative (and not the claim that the truth of assertions is relative) to explain disagreement.

  6. At least if it is not reasonable that the other party would enjoy the pie under normal circumstances, i.e. if she hadn’t just brushed her teeth.

  7. It should be noticed that some relativists (e.g. Lasersohn 2005) are quite explicit that the point of relativism is to account for disagreements that are not (in my vocabulary) stable. Lasersohn concludes that his relativism about matters of taste implies that disagreements in that discourse are “substanceless” (p. 684), which seems to amount to the claim that there is nothing (no fact) that the disputants disagree about.

  8. There is a further discussion concerning the role of intuitions in metaethical debate and what conclusions to draw if people have very different such intuitions. Some writers have argued that given that we are after analyses of moral concepts that capture peoples intuitions (which seems to be what large parts of the meteathical literature are indeed after), it should make us question what might be called “the single analysis assumption”––the idea that one single coherent analysis fit for moral expressions as everyone uses them. Or, alternatively, we should change the goals of metaethical analyses. (Francén 2007; Gill 2008, forthcoming; Loeb 2008).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Gunnar Björnsson and an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for many helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Ragnar Francén

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Francén, R. No deep disagreement for new relativists. Philos Stud 151, 19–37 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9414-6

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