Well, okay, I haven’t published any books yet. But I do have a manuscript in progress and a dissertation.
Here’s a draft of chapters 1–7. Comments are welcome.
Synopsis of chapters:
Chapter 1, Motivating Relativism, introduces the topic by making a prima facie case for a relativist treatment of “tasty.” We examine three approaches to understanding the meaning of “tasty”: objectivism, contextualism, and expressivism. Each approach, we argue, is motivated by a genuine insight. The objectivist’s insight is that there can be real disagreement about what is “tasty.” The contextualist’s insight is that “tasty” is context-sensitive in some way. And the expressivist’s insight is that we can best undertand “tasty” by looking at what one does in characterizing something as “tasty.” The problem for these standard views is that each of them achieves its insight in a one-sided way—a way that loses the insights of the others. A relativist account—on which “tasty” expresses a property whose extension is relative to judges or their tastes—promises to do better.
Chapter 2, The Standard Objections, sets out some standard objections to relativism about truth—objections whose currency among philosophers has largely kept relativism out of analytic semantics. It has been argued that the relativist has no coherent account of the bearers of relative truth values; that relativism about truth is self-refuting; that relativism about truth requires giving up the “Equivalence Schema” (according to which the proposition that p is true just in case p); and that the relativist has given no good account of the meaning of the relativized truth predicate. We extract from these standard objections some key problems for relativism that will be addressed in Chapters 3–6.
Chapter 3, Assessment Sensitivity, argues that relativism about truth should be understood as the view that truth is assessment-sensitive. (Though there are other things one might mean by “relativism about truth,” this is the one that is philosophically interesting and relevant to our motivating concerns.) Assessment sensitivity is understood by analogy with ordinary context sensitivity, or, as it is called here, use-sensitivity. Just as the truth of uses of ordinary context-sensitive sentences and depends on features of the context in which they are used, so the truth of uses of assessment-sensitive sentences depends on features of the context in which they are assessed. Building on ideas of Lewis and Kaplan, we develop a framework that makes room for assessment-sensitivity.
Chapter 4, Propositions, shows how propositions can fit into this framework, and extends the notion of assessment sensitivity from sentences to propositions. This allows us to draw an important distinction between relativism about truth (which involves a commitment to assessment sensitivity) and nonindexical contextualism (which does not), and shows that taking propositional truth to be relevant to parameters besides possible worlds (and possibly times) is neither necessary nor sufficient for relativism about truth, in the sense articulated here.
Chapter 5, Making Sense of Relative Truth, addresses the substantive philosophical question that remains: what does it mean to talk of truth relative to a context of assessment? It does this by explaining the theoretical role of assessment-relative truth in a truth-conditional semantic theory. The combined theory of chapters 3–5 allows us to formulate “relativist” semantic theories and derive from them substantive predictions about language use, so that they can be compared and evaluated against non-relativist alternatives. By doing this, I claim, we have “made sense of relative truth” and warded off apriori objections to its intelligibility.
Chapter 6, Disagreement, is devoted to the topic of disagreement, a central crux in the debate between relativists, indexical and nonindexical contextualists, classical expressivists, and objectivists. We distinguish several varieties or “levels” of disagreement and show how the issue between the different semantic approaches we have considered can be reduced to an issue about what kind of disagreement there is about matters of taste (or any other domain under discussion).
Once the framework of chapters 3–6 is in place, it becomes a broadly empirical question whether any of our thought and talk is best understood in terms of a relativist semantics. Chapters 7–12 make the case for an affirmative answer.
Chapter 7, Tasty, develops a simple relativist semantics for “tasty,” and considers what the relativist can and should say about the interaction of “tasty” with tense, modality, quantifiers, attitude verbs, and factive verbs and adjectives.
Chapter 8, Will, considers classical approaches to giving truth values to contingent statements about the future in an objectively indeterministic world. We argue that the two main approaches—the “thin red line” approach and the “no truth value” approach—are both motivated by genuine insights, which can be held together only in a relativist account.
Chapter 9, Knows, considers how a relativist account of knowledge attributions might steer a middle course between contextualist and invariantist accounts—breaking a deadlock in the contemporary debate.
Chapter 10, Might, makes a case for a relativist treatment of epistemic modal claims, like Joe might be in Boston, over the standard contextualist and expressivist alternatives.
Chapter 11, Ought (based on joint work with Niko Kolodny) takes on the view, widespread in the literature on ethics and practical reason, that “ought” is ambiguous between objective and subjective senses. We argue that a relativist treatment better accounts for our use of “ought,” and better fits the purposes for which we use “ought.”
Chapter 12, If (also based on joint work with Kolodny), shows how a relativist account of indicative conditionals emerges naturally out of existing views about indicatives and the relativist account of epistemic modals, and I show how this account solves a paradox involving conditional obligation.
Chapter 13, Varieties of Relativism, compares the approach recommended here to several alternative approaches that resemble it in various ways, including Cappelen’s and Lepore’s speech-act pluralism, the view (explored by Fine and Einheuser) that the facts themselves are relative, Gibbard’s sophisticated version of expressivism, and alternative versions of relativist semantics due to Lasersohn, Egan, Recanati, Kölbel, Weatherson, and Stephenson.
Chapter 14, Conclusion, sums up.
PhD Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2000. You can download a PDF.
Abstract:
Much philosophy of logic is shaped, explicitly or implicitly, by the thought that logic is distinctively formal and abstracts from material content. The distinction between formal and material does not appear to coincide with the more familiar distinctions between a priori and empirical, necessary and contingent, analytic and synthetic—indeed, it is often invoked to explain these. And although there are clear notions of formality that advert to schematic inference patterns, syntactic rules, and grammar, none of these is capable of demarcating logic. What does it mean, then, to say that logic is distinctively formal?
Three things: logic is said to be formal (or "topic-neutral’’)…
in the sense that it provides constitutive norms for thought as such,
in the sense that it is indifferent to the particular identities of objects, and
in the sense that it abstracts entirely from the semantic content of thought.
Though these three notions of formality are by no means equivalent, they are frequently run together. The reason, I argue, is that modern talk of the formality of logic has its source in Kant, and these three notions come together in the context of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Outside of this context (e.g., in Frege), they can come apart. Attending to this history can help us to see the sources of our disparate intuitions about logicality, and more importantly to sort these intuitions into central and adventitious ones. I argue that we have largely lost sight of the notion of formality (1) by which logic was demarcated in a central tradition from Leibniz through Frege—the intellectual home of most of the philosophical projects for which it matters how logic is demarcated.
This historical perspective is especially useful in evaluating contemporary debates about the demarcation of logic, which often seem to turn on opposing but equally brute intuitions about logicality. As an illustration, I examine the popular permutation-invariance account of logicality, which is commonly motivated by appeal to sense (2) of formality. I present the account in a way that reveals a hidden lacuna, and I show how this lacuna might be filled by appealing to formality in sense (1).