Contextualism, Assessor Relativism, and Insensitive Assessments


Συγγραφέας: Alexander Almér


Alexander Almér: Contextualism, Assessor Relativism, and Insensitive Assessments (pdf, 10 pages)
Claims about what is tasty or about what might be the case are relative, somehow, to palates and bodies of information. One standard way to account for such relativity has been to say that the truth-conditions expressed by such claims vary with some feature of the context in which the utterance is made, a feature which picks out the relevant palate or body of information. For example: Might-C: An utterance of a sentence of the form P might be the case is true if and only if P is compatible with the body of information that is relevant in the context of utterance (cf. DeRose 1991, 1998; Bach 2008; Schaffer 2009). Tasty-C: An utterance of a sentence of the form X is tasty is true if and only if X accords with the standard of taste that is relevant in the context of utterance (cf. Glanzberg 2007; Schaffer 2009). Contextualist analyses promise to capture what we are interested in when we make epistemically modal judgments or judgments of taste. When the gambler considers whether the next card might be an ace, she seems to be asking whether she knows anything that rules out that it is an ace. When we search the fridge for something tasty, we are looking for something that accords with our palate. Recently, however, a number of authors (Mac- Farlane 2005, 2008; Egan 2007; Egan et al. 2005; Lasersohn 2005; e.g.) have suggested that contextualism fails to account for phenomena relating to linguistic expressions of agreement and disagreement — what we will call felicitous insensitive assessments — and have proposed much discussed alternative analyses according to which the truth of claims of the form P might be the case or X is tasty is relative to contexts of assessment, rather than contexts of utterance. In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption...