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Understanding  Question on "Good Explanation"

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Understanding  Question on "Good Explanation"

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- Make sure to distinguish the terms between "good" and "better." Good explanation is not compared by others. It is solely classified as "good" because it still seems fit on the context in community.
-Depending on which AOK you are focusing on, good explanation is defined in different ways.
For example, scientific explanation requires that the information should be based on prior information. (you should either reject or support the idea) The universal law should follow the support. SOMETIMES, easy explanation enhances the reliability because you are "hooking up" general audiences. Scientists are making sure that people in other area of knowledge could be convinced. (But, before you use this, DEFINE!!)

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Correspondence Theory
Criticizing
1. Problems with facts
2. Correspondence is never perfect
3. "Truth cannot be determined in isolation"

Coherence Theory
it fits in with our overall set of beliefs

Pragmatic Theory
it is useful or works in practice

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The theory of value begins with a subject matter. It is hard to specify in some general way exactly what counts, but it certainly includes what we are talking about when we say any of the following sorts of things (compare Ziff [1960]):

"pleasure is good/bad"; "it would be good/bad if you did that"; "it is good/bad for him to talk to her"; "too much cholesterol is good/bad for your health"; "that is a good/bad knife"; "Jack is a good/bad thief"; "he's a good/bad man"; "it's good/bad that you came"; "it would be better/worse if you didn't"; "lettuce is better/worse for you than Oreos"; "my new can opener is better/worse than my old one"; "Mack is a better/worse thief than Jack"; "it's better/worse for it to end now, than for us to get caught later"; "best/worst of all, would be if they won the World Series and kept all of their players for next year"; "celery is the best/worst thing for your health"; "Mack is the best/worst thief around"

The word "value" doesn't appear anywhere on this list; it is full, however, of "good", "better", and "best", and correspondingly of "bad", "worse", and "worst". And these words are used in a number of different kinds of constructions, of which we may take these four to be the main exemplars:

1. Pleasure is good.

2. It is good that you came.

3. It is good for him to talk to her.

4. That is a good knife.

Many of the basic issues in the theory of value begin with questions or assumptions about how these various kinds of claim are related to one another. Some of these are introduced in the next two sections, focusing in 1.1 on the relationship between our four kinds of sentences, and focusing in 1.2 on the relationship between "good" and "better", and between "good" and "bad".

Claims about good simpliciter are those which have garnered the most attention in moral philosophy. This is partly because as it is usually understood, these are the "good" claims that consequentialists hold to have a bearing on what we ought to do. Consequentialism, so understood, is the view that you ought to do whatever action is such that it would be best if you did it. This leaves, however, a wide variety of possible theories about how such claims are related to other kinds of "good" claim.

1.1.1 Good Simpliciter and Good For

For example, consider a simple point of view theory, according to which what is good simpliciter differs from what is good for Jack, in that being good for Jack is being good from a certain point of view - Jack's - whereas being good simpliciter is being good from a more general point of view - the point of view of the universe (compare Nagel [1985]). The point of view theory reduces both good for and good simpliciter to good from the point of view of, and understands good simpliciter claims as about the point of view of the universe. One problem for this view is to make sense of what sort of thing points of view could be, such that Jack and the universe are both the kinds of thing to have one.

Rather than accounting for either of goodness simpliciter or goodness- for in terms of the other, some philosophers have taken one of these seriously at the expense of the other. For example, Philippa Foot [1985] gives an important but compressed argument that apparent talk about what is good simpliciter can be made sense of as elliptical talk about what is good for some unmentioned person, and Foot's view can be strengthened (compare Shanklin [2011], Finlay [2014]) by allowing that apparent good simpliciter claims are often generically quantified statements about what is, in general, good for a person. Thomson [2008] famously defends a similar view.

G.E. Moore [1903], in contrast, struggled to make sense of good-for claims. In his refutation of egoism, Moore attributed to ethical egoists the theory that what is good for Jack (or "in Jack's good") is just what is good and in Jack's possession, or alternatively, what it is good that Jack possesses. Moore didn't argue against these theses directly, but he did show that they cannot be combined with universalizable egoism. It is now generally recognized that to avoid Moore's arguments, egoists need only to reject these analyses of good for, which are in any case unpromising (Smith [2003]).

1.1.2 Attributive Good

See the

Supplement on Four Complications about Attributive Good

for further complications that arise when we consider the attributive sense of "good".

Some philosophers have used the examples of attributive good and good for in order to advance arguments against noncognitivist metaethical theories (See the entry cognitivism and non-cognitivism). The basic outlines of such an argument go like this: noncognitivist theories are designed to deal with good simpliciter, but have some kind of difficulties accounting for attributive good or for good for. Hence, there is a general problem with noncognitivist theories, or at least a significant lacuna they leave. It has similarly been worried that noncognitivist theories will have problems accounting for so-called "agent-relative" value [see section 4], again, apparently, because of its relational nature. There is no place to consider this claim here, but note that it would be surprising if relational uses of "good" like these were in fact a deep or special problem for noncognitivism; Hare's account in The Language of Morals (Hare [1952]) was specifically about attributive uses of "good", and it is not clear why relational noncognitive attitudes should be harder to make sense of than relational beliefs.

1.1.3 Relational Strategies

In an extension of the strategies just discussed, some theorists have proposed views of "good" which aspire to treat all of good simpliciter, good for, and attributive good as special cases. A paradigm of this approach is the "end-relational" theory of Paul Ziff [1960] and Stephen Finlay [2004], [2014]. According to Ziff, all claims about goodness are relative to ends or purposes, and "good for" and attributive "good" sentences are simply different ways of making these purposes (more or less) explicit. Talk about what is good for Jack, for example, makes the purpose of Jack's being happy (say) explicit, while talk about what is a good knife makes our usual purposes for knives (cutting things, say) explicit. The claim about goodness is then relativized accordingly.

Views adopting this strategy need to develop in detail answers to just what, exactly, the further, relational, parameter on "good" is. Some hold that it is ends, while others say things like "aims". A filled-out version of this view must also be able to tell us the mechanics of how these ends can be made explicit in "good for" and attributive "good" claims, and needs to really make sense of both of those kinds of claim as of one very general kind. And, of course, this sort of view yields the prediction that non-explicitly relativized "good" sentences - including those used throughout moral philosophy - are really only true or false once the end parameter is specified, perhaps by context.

This means that this view is open to the objection that it fails to account for a central class of uses of "good" in ethics, which by all evidence are non-relative, and for which the linguistic data do not support the hypothesis that they are context-sensitive. J.L. Mackie held a view like this one and embraced this result - Mackie's [1977] error theory about "good" extended only to such putative non-relational senses of "good". Though he grants that there are such uses of "good", Mackie concludes that they are mistaken. Finlay [2014], in contrast, argues that he can use ordinary pragmatic effects in order to explain the appearances. The apparently non-relational senses of "good", Finlay argues, really are relational, and his theory aspires to explain why they seem otherwise.

1.1.4 What's Special About Value Claims

According to a more skeptical view, sentences like "pleasure is good" do not express a distinctive kind of claim at all, but are merely what you get when you take a sentence like "pleasure is good for Jill to experience", generically quantify out Jill, and ellipse "to experience". Following an idea also developed by Finlay [2014], Robert Shanklin [2011] argues that in general, good-for sentences pattern with experiencer adjectives like "fun", which admit of these very syntactic transformations: witness "Jack is fun for Jill to talk to", "Jack is fun to talk to", "Jack is fun". This view debunks the issue over which the views discussed in the last paragraph disagree, for it denies that there is any such distinct topic for value claims to be about. (It may also explain the failures of comparative forms, above, on the basis of differences in the elided material.)

On a natural view, the relationship between "good", "better", and "best" would seem to be the same as that between "tall", "taller", and "tallest". "Tall" is a gradable adjective, and "taller" is its comparative form. On standard views, gradable adjectives are analyzed in terms of their comparative form. At bottom is the relation of being taller than, and someone is the tallest woman just in case she is taller than every woman. Similarly, someone is tall, just in case she is taller than a contextually appropriate standard (Kennedy [2005]), or taller than sufficiently many (this many be vague) in some contextually appropriate comparison class.

Much moral philosophy appears to assume that things are very different for "good", "better", and "best". Instead of treating "better than" as basic, and something as being good just in case it is better than sufficiently many in some comparison class, philosophers very often assume, or write as if they assume, that "good" is basic. For example, many theorists have proposed analyses of what it is to be good which are incompatible with the claim that "good" is to be understood in terms of "better". In the absence of some reason to think that "good" is very different from "tall", however, this may be a very peculiar kind of claim to make, and it may distort some other issues in the theory of value.

1.2.2 Value

Moreover, it is difficult to see how one could do things the other way around, and understand "better" in terms of "good". Jon is a better sprinter than Jan not because it is more the case that Jon is a good sprinter than that Jan is a good sprinter - they are both excellent sprinters, so neither one of these is more the case than the other. It is, however, possible to see how to understand both "good" and "better" in terms of value. If good is to better as tall is to taller, then the analogue of value should intuitively be height. One person is taller than another just in case her height is greater; similarly, one state of affairs is better than another just in case its value is greater. If we postulate something called "value" to play this role, then it is natural (though not obligatory) to identify value with amounts of values - amounts of things like pleasure or knowledge, which "value" claims claim to be good.

But this move appears to be implausible or unnecessary when applied to attributive "good". It is not particularly plausible that there is such a thing as can-opener value, such that one can-opener is better than another just in case it has more can-opener value. In general, not all comparatives need be analyzable in terms of something like height, of which there can be literally more or less. Take, for example, the case of "scary". The analogy with height would yield the prediction that if one horror film is scarier than another, it is because it has more of something - scariness - than the other. This may be right, but it is not obviously so. If it is not, then the analogy need not hold for "good" and its cognates, either. In this case, it may be that being better than does not merely amount to having more value than.

These questions, moreover, are related to others. For example, "better" would appear to be the inverse relation of "worse". A is better than B just in case B is worse than A. So if "good" is just "better than sufficiently many" and "bad" is just "worse than sufficiently many", all of the interesting facts in the neighborhood would seem to be captured by an assessment of what stands in the better than relation to what. The same point goes if to be good is just to be better than a contextually set standard. But it has been held by many moral philosophers that an inventory of what is better than what would still leave something interesting and important out: what is good.

If this is right, then it is one important motivation for denying that "good" can be understood in terms of "better". But it is important to be careful about this kind of argument. Suppose, for example, that, as is commonly held about "tall", the relevant comparison class or standard for "good" is somehow supplied by the context of utterance. Then to know whether "that is good" is true, you do need to know more than all of the facts about what is better than what - you also need to know something about the comparison class or standard that is supplied by the context of utterance. The assumption that "good" is context-dependent in this way may therefore itself be just the kind of thing to explain the intuition which drives the preceding argument.

Traditional axiology seeks to investigate what things are good, how good they are, and how their goodness is related to one another. Whatever we take the "primary bearers" of value to be, one of the central questions of traditional axiology is that of what stuffs are good: what is of value.

2.1.1 What is Intrinsic Value?

Philosophers' adoption of the term "intrinsic" for this distinction reflects a common theory, according to which whatever is non-instrumentally good must be good in virtue of its intrinsic properties. This idea is supported by a natural argument: if something is good only because it is related to something else, the argument goes, then it must be its relation to the other thing that is non-instrumentally good, and the thing itself is good only because it is needed in order to obtain this relation. The premise in this argument is highly controversial (Schroeder [2005]), and in fact many philosophers believe that something can be non-instrumentally good in virtue of its relation to something else. Consequently, sometimes the term "intrinsic" is reserved for what is good in virtue of its intrinsic properties, or for the view that goodness itself is an intrinsic property, and non-instrumental value is instead called "telic" or "final" (Korsgaard [1983]). I'll stick to "intrinsic", but keep in mind that intrinsic goodness may not be an intrinsic property, and that what is intrinsically good may turn out not to be so in virtue of its intrinsic properties.

See the

Supplement on Atomism/Holism about Value

for further discussion of the implications of the assumption that intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties.

2.1.2 What is the Intrinsic/Instrumental Distinction Among?

I have assumed, here, that the intrinsic/instrumental distinction is among what I have been calling "value claims", such as "pleasure is good", rather than among one of the other kinds of uses of "good" from part 1. It does not make sense, for example, to say that something is a good can opener, but only instrumentally, or that Sue is a good dancer, but only instrumentally. Perhaps it does make sense to say that vitamins are good for Jack, but only instrumentally; if that is right, then the instrumental/intrinsic distinction will be more general, and it may tell us something about the structure of and relationship between the different senses of "good", to look at which uses of "good" allow an intrinsic/instrumental distinction.

It is sometimes said that consequentialists, since they appeal to claims about what is good simpliciter in their explanatory theories, are committed to holding that states of affairs are the "primary" bearers of value, and hence are the only things of intrinsic value. This is not right. First, consequentialists can appeal in their explanatory moral theory to facts about what state of affairs would be best, without holding that states of affairs are the "primary" bearers of value; instead of having a "good-first" theory, they may have a "value-first" theory (see section 1.1.4), according to which states of affairs are good or bad in virtue of there being more things of value in them. Moreover, even those who take a "good-first" theory are not really committed to holding that it is states of affairs that are intrinsically valuable; states of affairs are not, after all, something that you can collect more or less of. So they are not really in parallel to pleasure or knowledge.

For more discussion of intrinsic value, see the entry on intrinsic vs. extrinsic value.

One of the oldest questions in the theory of value is that of whether there is more than one fundamental (intrinsic) value. Monists say "no", and pluralists say "yes". This question only makes sense as a question about intrinsic values; clearly there is more than one instrumental value, and monists and pluralists will disagree, in many cases, not over whether something is of value, but over whether its value is intrinsic. For example, as important as he held the value of knowledge to be, Mill was committed to holding that its value is instrumental, not intrinsic. G.E. Moore disagreed, holding that knowledge is indeed a value, but an intrinsic one, and this expanded Moore's list of basic values. Mill's theory famously has a pluralistic element as well, in contrast with Bentham's, but whether Mill properly counts as a pluralist about value depends on whether his view was that there is only one value - happiness - but two different kinds of pleasure which contribute to it, one more effectively than the other, or whether his view was that each kind of pleasure is a distinctive value. This point will be important in what follows.

2.2.1 Ontology and Explanation

At least three quite different sorts of issues are at stake in this debate. First is an ontological/explanatory issue. Some monists have held that a plural list of values would be explanatorily unsatisfactory. If pleasure and knowledge are both values, they have held, there remains a further question to be asked: why? If this question has an answer, some have thought, it must be because there is a further, more basic, value under which the explanation subsumes both pleasure and knowledge. Hence, pluralist theories are either explanatorily inadequate, or have not really located the basic intrinsic values.

This argument relies on a highly controversial principle about how an explanation of why something is a value must work - a very similar principle to that which was appealed to in the argument that intrinsic value must be an intrinsic property [section 2.1.1]. If this principle is false, then an explanatory theory of why both pleasure and knowledge are values can be offered which does not work by subsuming them under a further, more fundamental value. Reductive theories of what it is to be a value satisfy this description, and other kinds of theory may do so, as well (Schroeder [2005]). If one of these kinds of theory is correct, then even pluralists can offer an explanation of why the basic values that they appeal to are values.

2.2.2 Revisionary Commitments?

Moreover, against the monist, the pluralist can argue that the basic posits to which her theory appeals are not different in kind from those to which the monist appeals; they are only different in number. This leads to the second major issue that is at stake in the debate between monists and pluralists. Monistic theories carry strong implications about what is of value. Given any monistic theory, everything that is of value must be either the one intrinsic value, or else must lead to the one intrinsic value. This means that if some things that are intuitively of value, such as knowledge, do not, in fact, always lead to what a theory holds to be the one intrinsic value (for example, pleasure), then the theory is committed to denying that these things are really always of value after all.

2.2.3 Incommensurability

The third important issue in the debate between monists and pluralists, and the most central over recent decades, is that over the relationship between pluralism and incommensurability. If one state of affairs is better than another just in case it contains more value than the other, and there are two or more basic intrinsic values, then it is not clear how two states of affairs can be compared, if one contains more of the first value, but the other contains more of the second. Which state of affairs is better, under such a circumstance? In contrast, if there is only one intrinsic value, then this can't happen: the state of affairs that is better is the one that has more of the basic intrinsic value, whatever that is.

See a more detailed discussion in the entry on value pluralism.

We have just seen that one of the issues at stake in the debate between monists and pluralists about value turns on the question (vaguely put) of whether values can be incomparable or incommensurable. This is consequently an area of active dispute in its own right. There are, in fact, many distinct issues in this debate, and sometimes several of them are run together.

2.3.1 Is there Weak Incomparability?

One of the most important questions at stake is whether it must always be true, for two states of affairs, that things would be better if the first obtained than if the second did, that things would be better if the second obtained than if the first did, or that things would be equally good if either obtained. The claim that it can sometimes happen that none of these is true is sometimes referred to as the claim of incomparability, in this case as applied to good simpliciter. Ruth Chang [2002] has argued that in addition to "better than", "worse than", and "equally good", there is a fourth "positive value relation", which she calls parity. Chang reserves the use of "incomparable" to apply more narrowly, to the possibility that in addition to none of the other three relations holding between them, it is possible that two states of affairs may fail even to be "on a par". However, we can distinguish between weak incomparability, defined as above, and strong incomparability, further requiring the lack of parity, whatever that turns out to be. Since the notion of parity is itself a theoretical idea about how to account for what happens when the other three relations fail to obtain, a question which I won't pursue here, it will be weak incomparability that will interest us here.

For example, one important argument against the incomparability of value was mentioned in the previous section. It is that incomparability would rule out the possibility of practical wisdom, because practical wisdom requires the ability to make correct choices even in complicated choice situations. Choices are presumably between actions, or between possible consequences of those actions. So it could be that attributive good is sometimes incomparable, because neither Mozart nor Rodin is a better artist than the other and they are not equally good, but that good simpliciter is always comparable, so that there is always an answer as to which of two actions would lead to an outcome that is better.

2.3.2 What Happens when there is Weak Incomparability?

Even once it is agreed that good simpliciter is incomparable in this sense, many theories have been offered as to what that incomparability involves and why it exists. One important constraint on such theories is that they not predict more incomparabilities than we really observe. For example, though Rodin may not be a better or worse artist than Mozart, nor equally good, he is certainly a better artist than Salieri - even though Salieri, like Mozart, is a better composer than Rodin. This is a problem for the idea that incomparability can be explained by value pluralism. The argument from value pluralism to incomparability suggested that it would be impossible to compare any two states of affairs where one contained more of one basic value and the other contained more of another. But cases like that of Rodin and Salieri show that the explanation of what is incomparable between Rodin and Mozart can't simply be that since Rodin is a better sculptor and Mozart is a better composer, there is no way of settling who is the better artist. If that were the correct explanation, then Rodin and Salieri would also be incomparable, but intuitively, they are not. Constraints like these can narrow down the viable theories about what is going on in cases of incomparability, and are evidence that incomparability is probably not going to be straightforwardly explained by value pluralism.

There are many other kinds of theses that go under the title of the incomparability or incommensurability of values. For example, some theories which posit lexical orderings are said to commit to "incomparabilities". Kant's thesis that rational agents have a dignity and not a price is often taken to be a thesis about a kind of incommensurability, as well. Some have interpreted Kant to be holding simply that respect for rational agents is of infinite value, or that it is to be lexically ordered over the value of anything else. Another thesis in the neighborhood, however, would be somewhat weaker. It might be that a human life is "above price" in the sense that killing one to save one is not an acceptable exchange, but that for some positive value of \(n\), killing one to save \(n\) would be an acceptable exchange. On this view, there is no single "exchange value" for a life, because the value of a human life depends on whether you are "buying" or "selling" - it is higher when you are going to take it away, but lower when you are going to preserve it. Such a view would intelligibly count as a kind of "incommensurability", because it sets no single value on human lives.

A more detailed discussion of the commensurability of values can be found in the entry on incommensurable values.

One of the biggest and most important questions about value is the matter of its relation to the deontic - to categories like right, reason, rational, just, and ought. According to teleological views, of which classical consequentialism and universalizable egoism are classic examples, deontic categories are posterior to and to be explained in terms of evaluative categories like good and good for. The contrasting view, according to which deontic categories are prior to, and explain, the evaluative categories, is one which, as Aristotle says, has no name. But its most important genus is that of "fitting attitude" accounts, and Scanlon's [1998] "buck-passing" theory is another closely related contemporary example.

Teleological theories are not, strictly speaking, theories about value. They are theories about right action, or about what one ought to do. But they are committed to claims about value, because they appeal to evaluative facts, in order to explain what is right and wrong, and what we ought to do - deontic facts. The most obvious consequence of these theories, is therefore that evaluative facts must not then be explained in terms of deontic facts. The evaluative, on such views, is prior to the deontic.

3.1.1 Classical Consequentialism

The most familiar sort of view falling under this umbrella is classical consequentialism, sometimes called (for reasons we'll see in section 3.3) "agent-neutral consequentialism". According to classical consequentialism, every agent ought always to do whatever action, out of all of the actions available to her at that time, is the one such that if she did it, things would be best. Not all defenders of consequentialism interpret it in such classical terms; other prominent forms of consequentialism focus on rules or motives, and evaluate actions only derivatively.

Classical consequentialism is sometimes supported by appeal to the intuition that one should always do the best action, and then the assumption that actions are only instrumentally good or bad - for the sake of what they lead to (compare especially Moore [1903]). The problem with this reasoning is that non-consequentialists can agree that agents ought always to do the best action. The important feature of this claim to recognize is that it is a claim not about intrinsic or instrumental value, but about attributive good. And as noted in section 2.1, "instrumental" and "intrinsic" don't really apply to attributive good. Just as how good of a can opener something is or how good of a torturer someone is does not depend on how good the world is, as a result of the fact that they exist, how good of an action something is need not depend on how good the world is, as a result that it happens. Indeed, if it did, then the evaluative standards governing actions would be quite different from those governing nearly everything else.

3.1.2 Problems in Principle vs. Problems of Implementation

Classical consequentialism, and its instantiation in the form of utilitarianism, has been well-explored, and its advantages and costs cannot be surveyed here. Many of the issues for classical consequentialism, however, are issues for details of its exact formulation or implementation, and not problems in principle with its appeal to the evaluative in order to explain the deontic. For example, the worry that consequentialism is too demanding has been addressed within the consequentialist framework, by replacing "best" with "good enough" - substituting a "satisficing" conception for a "maximizing" one (Slote [1989]). For another example, problems faced by certain consequentialist theories, like traditional utilitarianism, about accounting for things like justice can be solved by other consequentialist theories, simply by adopting a more generous picture about what sort of things contribute to how good things are (Sen [1982]).

In section 3.3 we'll address one of the most central issues about classical consequentialism: its inability to allow for agent-centered constraints. This issue does pose an in-principle general problem for the aspiration of consequentialism to explain deontic categories in terms of the evaluative. For more, see the entry on consequentialism and utilitarianism.

3.1.3 Other Teleological Theories

Universalizable egoism is another familiar teleological theory. According to universalizable egoism, each agent ought always to do whatever action has the feature that, of all available alternatives, it is the one such that, were she to do it, things would be best for her. Rather than asking agents to maximize the good, egoism asks agents to maximize what is good for them. Universalizable egoism shares many features with classical consequentialism, and Sidgwick found both deeply attractive. Many others have joined Sidgwick in holding that there is something deeply attractive about what consequentialism and egoism have in common - which involves, at minimum, the teleological idea that the deontic is to be explained in terms of the evaluative (Portmore [2005]).

Of course, not all teleological theories share the broad features of consequentialism and egoism. Classical Natural Law theories (Finnis [1980], Murphy [2001]) are teleological, in the sense that they seek to explain what we ought to do in terms of what is good, but they do so in a very different way from consequentialism and egoism. According to an example of such a Natural Law theory, there are a variety of natural values, each of which calls for a certain kind of distinctive response or respect, and agents ought always to act in ways that respond to the values with that kind of respect. For more on natural law theories, see the entry on the natural law tradition in ethics. And Barbara Hermann has prominently argued for interpreting Kant's ethical theory in teleological terms. For more on Herman's interpretation of Kant, see the entry on Kant's Moral Philosophy, especially section 13. Philip Pettit [1997] prominently distinguishes between values that we are called to "promote" and those which call for other responses. As Pettit notes, classical consequentialists hold that all values are to be promoted, and one way of thinking of some of these other kinds of teleological theories is that like consequentialism they explain what we ought to do in terms of what is good, but unlike consequentialism they hold that some kinds of good call for responses other than promotion.

3.2.1 Two Fitting Attitudes Accounts

Different Fitting Attitudes accounts, however, work by appealing to different deontic concepts. Some of the problems facing Fitting Attitudes views can be exhibited by considering a couple exemplars. According to a formula from Sidgwick, for example, the good is what ought to be desired. But this slogan is not by itself very helpful until we know more: desired by whom? By everyone? By at least someone? By someone in particular? And for which of our senses of "good" does this seek to provide an account? Is it an account of good simpliciter, saying that it would be good if \(p\) just in case ____ ought to desire that \(p\), where "____" is filled in by whoever it is, who is supposed to have the desire? Or is it an account of "value" claims, saying that pleasure is good just in case pleasure ought to be desired by ____?

The former of these two accounts would fit in with the "good-first" theory from section 1.1.4; the latter would fit in with the "value-first" theory. We observed in section 1.1.4 that "value" claims don't admit of comparatives in the same way that other uses of "good" do; this is important here because if "better" simpliciter is prior to "good" simpliciter, then strictly speaking a "good-first" theorist needs to offer a Fitting Attitudes account of "better", rather than of "good". Such a modification of the Sidgwickian slogan might say that it would be better if \(p\) than if \(q\) just in case ____ ought to desire that \(p\) more than that \(q\) (or alternatively, to prefer \(p\) to \(q\)).

A further complication with the Scanlonian formula, is that appealing in the analysis to the bare existential claim that there are reasons to respond to something in one of these "certain ways" faces large difficulties. Suppose, for example, that there is some reason to respond in one of the "certain ways", but there are competing, and weightier, reasons not to, so that all things considered, responding in any of the "certain ways" would be a mistake. Plausibly, the thing under consideration should not turn out to be good in such a case. So even a view like Scanlon's, which appeals to reasons, may need, once it is more fully developed, to appeal to specific claims about the weight of those reasons.

3.2.2 The Wrong Kind of Reason

This issue has recently been the topic of much fruitful investigation, and investigators have drawn parallels between the kinds of reason to desire that are provided by these kinds of "external" incentives and familiar issues about pragmatic reasons for belief and the kind of reason to intend that exists in Gregory Kavka's Toxin Puzzle (Hieronymi [2005]). Focusing on the cases of desire, belief, and intention, which are all kinds of mental state, some have claimed that the distinction between the "right kind" and "wrong kind" of reason can be drawn on the basis of the distinction between "object-given" reasons, which refer to the object of the attitude, and "state-given" reasons, which refer to the mental state itself, rather than to its object (Parfit [2001], Piller [2006]). But questions have also been raised about whether the "object-given"/"state-given" distinction is general enough to really explain the distinction between reasons of the right kind and reasons of the wrong kind, and it has even been disputed whether the distinction tracks anything at all.

One reason to think that the distinction may not be general enough, is that situations very much like Wrong Kind of Reasons situations can arise even where no mental states are in play. For example, games are subject to norms of correctness. External incentives to cheat - for example, a credible threat from an evil demon that she will kill your family unless you do so - can plausibly not only provide you with reasons to cheat, but make it the case that you ought to. But just as such external incentives don't make it appropriate or correct to desire something bad, they don't make it a correct move of the game to cheat (Schroeder [2010]). If this is right, and the right kind/wrong kind distinction among reasons really does arise in a broad spectrum of cases, including ones like this one, it is not likely that a distinction that only applies to reasons for mental states is going to lie at the bottom of it.

Further discussion of fitting attitudes accounts of value and the wrong kind of reasons problem can be found in the entry on fitting attitude theories of value.

3.2.4 Application to the Varieties of Goodness

One significant attraction to Fitting Attitudes-style accounts, is that they offer prospects of being successfully applied to attributive good and good for, as well as to good simpliciter (Darwall [2002], Rönnow-Rasmussen [2009], Suikkanen [2009]). Just as reasons to prefer one state of affairs to another can underwrite one state of affairs being better than another, reasons to choose one can-opener over another can underwrite its being a better can opener than the other, and reasons to prefer some state of affairs for someone's sake can underwrite its being better for that person than another. For example, here is a quick sketch of what an account might look like, which accepts the good-first theory from section 1.1.4, holds as in section 1.1.2 that good simpliciter is a special case of attributive good, and understands attributive "good" in terms of attributive "better" and "good for" in terms of "better for":

Attributive better: For all kinds K, and things A and B, for A to be a better K than B is for the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose A over B when selecting a K to be weightier than the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose B over A when selecting a K.

Better for: For all things A, B, and C, A is better for C than B is just in case the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose A over B on C's behalf is weightier than the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose B over A on C 's behalf.

If being a good K is just being a better K than most (in some comparison class), and "it would be good if \(p\)" just means that \(p\)'s obtaining is a good state of affairs, and value claims like "pleasure is good" just mean that other things being equal, it is better for there to be more pleasure, then this pair of accounts has the right structure to account for the full range of "good" claims that we have encountered. But it also shows how the various senses of "good" are related, and allows that even attributive good and good for have, at bottom, a common shared structure. So the prospect of being able to offer such a unified story about what the various senses of "good" have in common, though not the exclusive property of the Fitting Attitudes approach, is nevertheless one of its attractions.

3.3.1 Agent-Centered Constraints

The most central, in-principle problem for classical consequentialism is the possibility of what are called agent-centered constraints (Scheffler [1983]). It has long been a traditional objection to utilitarian theories that because they place no intrinsic disvalue on wrong actions like murder, they yield the prediction that if you have a choice between murdering and allowing two people to die, it is clear that you should murder. After all, other things being equal, the situation is stacked 2-to-1 - there are two deaths on one side, but only one death on the other, and each death is equally bad.

Consequentialists who hold that killings of innocents are intrinsically bad can avoid this prediction. As long as a murder is at least twice as bad as an ordinary death not by murder, consequentialists can explain why you ought not to murder, even in order to prevent two deaths. So there is no in-principle problem for consequentialism posed by this sort of example; whether it is an issue for a given consequentialist depends on her axiology: on what she thinks is intrinsically bad, and how bad she thinks it is.

But the problem is very closely related to a genuine problem for consequentialism. What if you could prevent two murders by murdering? Postulating an intrinsic disvalue to murders does nothing to account for the intuition that you still ought not to murder, even in this case. But most people find it pre-theoretically natural to assume that even if you should murder in order to prevent thousands of murders, you shouldn't do it in order to prevent just two. The constraint against murdering, on this natural intuition, goes beyond the idea that murders are bad. It requires that the badness of your own murders affects what you should do more than it affects what others should do in order to prevent you from murdering. That is why it is called "agent-centered".

3.3.2 Agent-Relative Value

The problem with agent-centered constraints is that there seems to be no single natural way of evaluating outcomes that yields all of the right predictions. For each agent, there is some way of evaluating outcomes that yields the right predictions about what she ought to do, but these rankings treat that agent's murders as contributing more to the badness of outcomes than other agents' murders. So as a result, an incompatible ranking of outcomes appears to be required in order to yield the right predictions about what some other agent ought to do - namely, one which rates his murders as contributing more to the badness of outcomes than the first agent's murders. (The situation is slightly more complicated - Oddie and Milne [1991] prove that under pretty minimal assumptions there is always some agent-neutral ranking that yields the right consequentialist predictions, but their proof does not show that this ranking has any independent plausibility, and Nair [2014] argues that it cannot be an independently plausible account of what is a better outcome.)

As a result of this observation, philosophers have postulated a thing called agent-relative value. The idea of agent-relative value is that if the better than relation is relativized to agents, then outcomes in which Franz murders can be worse- relative-to Franz than outcomes in which Jens murders, even though outcomes in which Jens murders are worse-relative-to Jens than outcomes in which Franz murders. These contrasting rankings of these two kinds of outcomes are not incompatible, because each is relativized to a different agent - the former to Franz, and the latter to Jens.

The idea of agent-relative value is attractive to teleologists, because it allows a view that is very similar in structure to classical consequentialism to account for constraints. According to this view, sometimes called Agent-Relative Teleology or Agent-Centered Consequentialism, each agent ought always to do what will bring about the results that are best-relative-to her. Such a view can easily accommodate an agent-centered constraint not to murder, on the assumption that each agent's murders are sufficiently worse-relative-to her than other agent's murders are (Sen [1983], Portmore [2007]).

Some philosophers have claimed that Agent-Relative Teleology is not even a distinct theory from classical consequentialism, holding that the word "good" in English picks out agent-relative value in a context-dependent way, so that when consequentialists say, "everyone ought to do what will have the best results", what they are really saying is that "everyone ought to do what will have the best-relative-to-her results" (Smith [2003]). And other philosophers have suggested that Agent-Relative Teleology is such an attractive theory that everyone is really committed to it (Dreier [1996]). These theses are bold claims in the theory of value, because they tell us strong and surprising things about the nature of what we are talking about, when we use the word, "good".

3.3.3 Problems and Prospects

In fact, it is highly controversial whether there is even such a thing as agent-relative value in the first place. Agent-Relative Teleologists typically appeal to a distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral value, but others have contested that no one has ever successfully made such a distinction in a theory-neutral way (Schroeder [2007]). Moreover, even if there is such a distinction, relativizing "good" to agents is not sufficient to deal with all intuitive cases of constraints, because common sense allows that you ought not to murder, even in order to prevent yourself from murdering twice in the future. In order to deal with such cases, "good" will need to be relativized not just to agents, but to times (Brook [1991]). Yet a further source of difficulties arises for views according to which "good" in English is used to make claims about agent-relative value in a context-dependent way; such views fail ordinary tests for context-dependence, and don't always generate the readings of sentences which their proponents require.

One of the motivations for thinking that there must be such a thing as agent-relative value comes from proponents of Fitting Attitudes accounts of value, and goes like this: if the good is what ought to be desired, then there will be two kinds of good. What ought to be desired by everyone will be the "agent-neutral" good, and what ought to be desired by some particular person will be the good relative-to that person. Ancestors of this idea can be found in Sidgwick and Ewing, and it has found a number of contemporary proponents. Whether it is right will turn not only on whether Fitting Attitudes accounts turn out to be correct, but on what role the answer to the questions, "who ought?" or "whose reasons?" plays in the shape of an adequate Fitting Attitudes account. All of these issues remain unresolved.

The questions of whether there is such a thing as agent-relative value, and if so, what role it might play in an agent-centered variant on classical consequentialism, are at the heart of the debate between consequentialists and deontologists, and over the fundamental question of the relative priority of the evaluative versus the deontic. These are large and open questions, but as I hope I've illustrated here, they are intimately interconnected with a very wide range of both traditional and non-traditional questions in the theory of value, broadly construed.

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The theory of value begins with a subject matter.

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The label "relativism" has been attached to a wide range of ideas and positions which may explain the lack of consensus on how the term should be defined. The profusion of the use of the term "relativism" in contemporary philosophy means that there is no ready consensus on any one definition. Here are three prominent, but not necessarily incompatible, approaches:

A standard way of defining and distinguishing between different types of relativism is to begin with the claim that a phenomenon x (e.g., values, epistemic, aesthetic and ethical norms, experiences, judgments, and even the world) is somehow dependent on and co-varies with some underlying, independent variable y (e.g., paradigms, cultures, conceptual schemes, belief systems, language). The type of dependency relativists propose has a bearing on the question of definitions. Let us take some examples.

(a)

Justice is relative to local norms.

(b)

Truth is relative to a language-game.

(c)

The measurement of temperature is relative to the scale we use.

Each of (a)-(c) exhibits a relation of dependence where a change in the independent variable y will result in variations in the dependent variable x. However, of the three examples cited above, normally only (a) and (b) are deemed relevant to philosophical discussions of relativism, for one main attraction of relativism is that it offers a way of settling (or explaining away) what appear to be profound disagreements on questions of value, knowledge and ontology and the relativizing parameter often involves people, their beliefs, cultures or languages.

The co-variance definition proceeds by asking the dual questions: (i) what is relativized? and (ii) what is it relativized to? The first question enables us to distinguish forms of relativism in terms of their objects, for example, relativism about truth, goodness, beauty, and their subject matters, e.g., science, law, religion. The answer to the second question individuates forms of relativism in terms of their domains or frames of reference-e.g., conceptual frameworks, cultures, historical periods, etc. Such classifications have been proposed by Haack (1996), O'Grady (2002), Baghramian (2004), Swoyer (2010), and Baghramian & Coliva (2019). The following table classifies different relativistic positions according to what is being relativized, or its objects, and what is being relativized to, or its domains.

Table 1: Domains of Relativization ( y)

Table 1 reflects the availability of fine-grained distinctions between different forms of relativism as functions of both objects ( x) and domains ( y) of relativization. In practice, however, much contemporary discussions of relativism focus on subjectivism, historicism, cultural relativism and conceptual relativism, along the axis of y, and cognitive/epistemic relativism, ethical or moral relativism and aesthetic relativism, along the axis of x. As we shall see in §5, New Relativism, where the objects of relativization (in the left column) are utterance tokens expressing claims about cognitive norms, moral values, etc. and the domain of relativization is the standards of an assessor, has also been the focus of much recent discussion.

A second approach to defining relativism casts its net more widely by focusing primarily on what relativists deny. Defined negatively, relativism amounts to the rejection of a number of interconnected philosophical positions. Traditionally, relativism is contrasted with:

Absolutism, the view that at least some truths or values in the relevant domain apply to all times, places or social and cultural frameworks. They are universal and not bound by historical or social conditions. Absolutism is often used as the key contrast idea to relativism.

Objectivism or the position that cognitive, ethical and aesthetic norms and values in general, but truth in particular, are independent of judgments and beliefs at particular times and places, or in other words they are (non-trivially) mind-independent. The anti-objectivist on the other hand, denies that there is such thing as simply being 'true', 'good', 'tasty' or 'beautiful' but argues that we can coherently discuss such values only in relation to parameters that have something to do with our mental lives.

Monism or the view that, in any given area or topic subject to disagreement, there can be no more than one correct opinion, judgment, or norm. The relativist often wishes to allow for a plurality of equally valid values or even truths.

Realism, when defined in such a way that it entails both the objectivity and singularity of truth, also stands in opposition to relativism.

Relativism in this negative sense is a prominent feature of the work of the relativists malgré eux such as Richard Rorty (1979) and Jacques Derrida (1974). What justifies the appellation 'relativist', rather than 'skeptic', is not only these philosophers' suspicion of the possibility of objectivity but their insistence on the role of socio-historical, psychological and textual contexts in accounts of 'truth' and 'knowledge' claims.

What also binds various forms of relativism is an underlying idea that claims to truth, knowledge or justification have an implicit, maybe even unnoticed, relationship to a parameter or domain. Gilbert Harman (1975), Robert Nozick (2001), and Crispin Wright (2008b) are among the philosophers to propose versions of this thesis. Paul Boghossian summarizes the position this way:

the relativist about a given domain, D, purports to have discovered that the truths of D involve an unexpected relation to a parameter. (Boghossian 2006b: 13)

To take an example, moral relativism, according to this approach, is the claim that the truth or justification of beliefs with moral content is relative to specific moral codes. So the sentence "It is wrong to sell people as slaves" is elliptical for "It is wrong to sell people as slaves relative to the moral code of ...". Or alternatively, as Kusch (2010) formulates the idea on behalf of the relativist: "It is wrong-relative-to-the-moral-code-of-..." to sell people as slaves. The resulting sentence(s) turns out to be true, according to the relativist, depending on how we fill in the "...". So, "It is wrong to sell people as slaves" comes out true relative to the moral code of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights and false relative to the moral code of ancient Greece. The justifying thought is that judgments about the morality of slavery, or any other ethical issue, are based on differing conventions, and there is no universal or objective criterion for choosing among differing competing socio-historically constituted conventions. Moreover, as a corollary of this approach, there is no truth of the matter of whether it is wrong to sell people as slaves, independently of the specification of some standard. Thus on the hidden parameter account, a consequence is that the relevant claims will be true, if at all, only relative to some parameter.

This particular approach to relativism is often expressed in explicitly linguistic terms and is favored by philosophers interested in the semantic dimensions of relativism. The claim is that predicates such as "is true", "is rational", "is right", "is good" etc. in a natural language have the apparent logical form of one-place predicates, but their surface grammatical form is misleading, because upon further investigation they prove to be elliptical for two-place predicates such as "is true relative to...", "is right according to", etc., (of course, where such predicates are available). Relativism, according to this approach, is the claim that a statement of the form " A is P" within a given domain (e.g., science, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) is elliptical for the statement " A is P in relation to C", where A stands for an assertion, belief, judgment or action, P stands for a predicate such as "true", "beautiful", "right", "rational", "logical", "known" etc., and C stands for a specific culture, epistemic framework, language, belief-system, etc.

The three approaches outlined here are compatible and sometimes complementary. A relativistic thesis as captured by the approach outlined in §1.1 for instance, will also be relativistic in at least one of the negative senses outlined in §1.2. Moreover, as we shall see, since various subdivisions of relativism appearing in table 1 could, with appropriate modification, be expressed as claims about the truth of sentences falling in a particular domain, then the hidden predicate approach is applicable to them as well. (See §5 for a more detailed way to give expression to the hidden parameter insight within recent work in the philosophy of language.)

A further consideration relevant to defining relativism is its scope.

The basic idea of global relativism is captured by the oft-repeated slogan "all is relative". The claim is that all beliefs, regardless of their subject matter, are true only relative to a framework or parameter. Local relativists, by contrast, limit their claim of relativization to self-contained areas of discourse, e.g., ethics, aesthetics and taste but argue that, for instance, scientific truths are not suitable candidates for a relativistic understanding (but also see §4.4.3). It is worth noting that local relativisms, typically, are endorsed on the basis of philosophical considerations connected to the kinds of features that are claimed to be relative (e.g., aesthetic standards, epistemic principles), or relatedly, semantic considerations to do with discourse where such features are attributed. Global relativism, by contrast, seems to be motivated not so much by considerations about particular features, but by more general considerations about truth itself.

As we will see, global relativism is open to the charge of inconsistency and self-refutation, for if all is relative, then so is relativism. Local relativism is immune from this type of criticism, as it need not include its own statement in the scope of what is to be relativized. Unsurprisingly, local rather than global relativism is much more common within contemporary debates. There is also a question mark on whether we could apply relativism to all truths in a completely unrestricted way; for instance, Kölbel (2011) has argued that claims such as "an object is beautiful and not beautiful" and "an object is identical to itself" have to be excluded.

A further distinction is made between weak and strong forms of relativism. Strong relativism is the claim that one and the same belief or judgment may be true in one context (e.g., culture or framework or assessment) and false in another. Weak relativism is the claim that there may be beliefs or judgments that are true in one framework but not true in a second simply because they are not available or expressible in the second. Bernard Williams' "relativism of distance" (Williams 1985) and Ian Hacking's (1982) defense of variability in styles of reasoning are instances of weak relativism. Williams argues that certain concepts are only available to people who live a particular form of life. These are concepts that are not a part of what Williams calls the "absolute conception of the world" and do not express truths that any rational creature, regardless of her culture, would in principle acknowledge. Truths that require these concepts for their formulation are expressible only in languages whose speakers take part in that particular form of life. Such truths need not be true in a relativized sense-true relative to some parameters, false relative to others; rather, such truths are perspectival: real but visible only from a certain angle, i.e., for people who adopt a certain way of life. This weaker form of relativism, in so far as it denies the universality of certain truth claims, is captured more readily by the negative definition ( §1.2) of relativism.

Interest in relativism as a philosophical doctrine goes back to ancient Greece. In more recent decades, however, relativism has also proven popular not only as a philosophical position but also as an idea underwriting a normative-ethical and political-outlook. (see Bloom 1987, in particular the Introduction, and Kusch (ed.) 2019). A number of philosophical considerations as well as socio-historical developments explain the enduring interest in and the more recent popularity of relativism.

Data regarding diversity of belief systems, conceptual frameworks and ways of life have frequently been used by philosophers and anthropologists alike to give credibility to philosophical arguments for relativism (For example see Hollis & Lukes 1982 and Wilson 1970). The mere fact of empirical diversity does not lead to relativism, but, relativism as a philosophical doctrine, has often been taken as a natural position to adopt in light of empirical diversity, in part, because relativism helps to make sense of such diversity without the burden of explaining who is in error.

Descriptive relativism, an empirical and methodological position adopted by social anthropologists, relies on ethnographic data to highlight the paucity of universally agreed upon norms, values and explanatory frameworks. From polygamy to cannibalism, from witchcraft to science we find major differences between the worldviews and outlooks of individuals and groups. Descriptive relativism is often used as the starting point for philosophical debates on relativism in general and cultural relativism in particular. The observed radical differences among cultures, it is argued, show the need for a relativistic assessment of value systems and conceptual commitments. Some anti-relativist universalists, on the other hand, argue that underlying the apparent individual and cultural differences, there are some core commonalities to all belief systems and socio-cultural outlooks (e.g., Nussbaum 1997). But the relativistically inclined respond by first pointing to the seeming incommensurability of various ethical and conceptual frameworks and the variability of cognitive norms and practices in difference cultures, and then, on this basis, maintain that the so-called "commonalities" belie significant differences. The anti-relativist may concede the point and insist that where such disagreements exist, at most one view is correct and the rest mistaken. But in so far as we are reluctant to impute widespread and systematic error to other cultures, or to our own, relativism remains an attractive option. Descriptive relativism is also central to the brand of relativism advocated by the sociologists of scientific knowledge and other social constructionists who argue that, even in the so-called "hard sciences", we cannot escape the specter of irresolvable differences and even incommensurability (see §4.4.3).

There is not only a marked diversity of views on questions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, etc., but more significantly, many disputes arising from such differences seem intractable. There are instances of long-standing disagreement, such that the disputants are very plausibly talking about the same subject matter (thus avoiding incommensurability) and genuinely disagreeing with each other; and yet, no amount of information and debate enables them or us to resolve the disagreement. And moreover, in such cases, it can seem that neither side seems to have made any obvious mistake (see, e.g., Hales 2014 and Beddor 2019).

If well-informed, honest and intelligent people are unable to resolve conflicts of opinion, we should, some relativists argue, accept that all parties to such disputes could be right and their conflicting positions have equal claims to truth, each according to their own perspective or point of view. Their disagreement is faultless (Kölbel 2004; Brogaard 2007; Hales 2014). Many relativistically inclined philosophers, (e.g., Max Kölbel (2004), Wright (2006) and John MacFarlane with terminological qualification (2014: 133-136)) see the presence of faultless disagreements as central to motivating and justifying relativism. The anti-relativists counter that the very notion of a "faultless" disagreement is incompatible with our common understanding of what it means to disagree. It is a hallmark of disagreement, as commonly understood, that the parties involved find fault with the other sides' views. When people disagree at least one of them is making a mistake or is failing to believe what he or she ought to believe given his or her cognitive aims. Relativism accordingly offers a revisionary account of what it means to disagree (e.g., MacFarlane 2007, 2014; see §5 where the point has been discussed in some detail); but it is not clear if the account can explain what is left of a disagreement to preserve once we allow that both parties to a disagreement could be right (Carter 2013; Dreier 2009).

A sophisticated semantic version of relativism about truth, known as truth-relativism, and alternatively as "new relativism", has been proposed in recent years and which attempts to deal with some of these issues (e.g., MacFarlane 2014 and Ferrari 2019 for an overview). We will return to this variety of relativism in §5.

A different perspective on the move from disagreement to relativism is offered in recent work by Carol Rovane (2012 and 2013), who rejects the prevailing consensus on what she calls the "disagreement intuition of relativism" in favor of an "alternatives intuition". According to Rovane, relativism is motivated by the existence of truths that cannot be embraced together, not because they contradict and hence disagree with each other but because they are not universal truths. The example Rovane gives is conflict between a belief that deference to parents is morally obligatory in Indian traditionalist sense and the belief that it is not morally obligatory in the American individualist sense. Each belief is true within its particular ethical framework but the two beliefs cannot be conjoined or embraced together. Or more generally, it is not possible both to exercise full autonomy and simultaneously be dedicated to one's community and its norms. The underlying thought, for Rovane, is that not all truth-value-bearers are in logical relations to one another, that there are many noncomprehensive bodies of truths that cannot be conjoined.

What the two approaches have in common is the claim that truth and justification are plural, that there could be more than one correct account of how things stand in at least some domains and their correctness has to be decided relative to a framework of context of assessment.

Additionally, the relativistically inclined find further support for their position in the contention that there is no meta-justification of our evaluative or normative systems, that all justifications have to start and end somewhere (see Sankey 2010 and 2011) and that there are no higher-order or meta-level standards available for adjudicating clashes between systems in a non-question begging way. Steven Hales, for instance, argues that faced with disagreement and given non-neutrality, relativism is the most viable non-skeptical conclusion to draw (Hales 2006: 98; 2014). Similar considerations apply to attempts to anchor beliefs on secure foundations. Various intellectual developments, leading to loss of old certainties in the scientific and social arena have strengthened the appeal of this point. The scientific revolution of the early 20 th century, brought about by, for instance, the advent of Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics and the loss of faith in lasting religious or political truths (Marxism in particular), as well as the failure of foundationalist philosophical programs have been used in arguments to vindicate relativistic views (for relativism about science see §4.4.3). The relativists often argue that justifications are not only perspectival but also interest-relative and there is no neutral or objective starting ground for any of our beliefs (see Seidel 2014; Carter 2015: ch. 4 and Siegel in Hales 2011: 205 for criticisms of this type of justification of relativism).

Pierre Duhem's (1861-1916) thesis of underdetermination of theory by data, the claim that empirical evidence alone is not adequate for providing justification for any given scientific theory, has played an important role in building up a case both for conceptual relativism ( §4.2) and for constructionism and relativism about science ( §4.4.2 and §4.4.3). According to the underdetermination thesis, incompatible theories can be consistent with available evidence. Relativism threatens whenever conflicting theories or views appear to have equal claim to truth or justification. The relativistically inclined use underdetermination to claim that evidence could be brought to justify opposing explanations and justification. The underdetermination thesis is also used to highlight the absence of neutral starting points for our beliefs. Choices between incompatible but equally well-supported rival theories, it is argued, are often made based on interests and local preferences rather than neutral universal grounds.

Relativists argue that beliefs and values get their justification or truth only relative to specific epistemic systems or practices (see Kusch forthcoming). Strong support for this view has come from social scientists and cultural theorist who focus on the socio-cultural determinants of human beliefs and actions. The social sciences, from their very inception, were hospitable to relativism. Indeed, August Comte, the father of sociology, claimed that a strength of "positive sociology" was its "tendency to render relative the ideas which were at first absolute" (Comte 1976 [1830-42]: 89). Comte also was responsible for the battle cry "all is relative", but immediately and no doubt self-consciously contradicted himself by adding "and that's the only absolute". Other social scientists, under the influence of Karl Marx (1818-1883), Max Weber (1864-1920), and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), have given credence to the idea that human beliefs and actions could be understood and evaluated only relative to their social and economic background and context (cf., Kinzel 2019). Beliefs, desires and actions, the argument goes, are never independent of a background of cultural presuppositions, interests and values. We cannot step out of our language, culture and socio-historical conditions to survey reality from an Archimedean vantage point. Even perceptions are "theory-laden" and could vary between linguistic and cultural groupings. The sociological view that beliefs are context-dependent, in the sense that their context helps explain why people have the beliefs they do, has also been used to support what is sometimes called "social" or "sociological relativism" or the view that truth or correctness is relative to social contexts because we can both understand and judge beliefs and values only relative to the context out of which they arise. Context-dependence is also used to explain empirical observations of diversity in beliefs and values; different social contexts, the argument goes, give rise to differing, possibly incompatible norms and values.

Advocates of relativism, particularly outside philosophical circles, often cite tolerance as a key normative reason for becoming a relativist. On this rationale, all ways of life and cultures are worthy of respect in their own terms, and it is a sign of unacceptable ethnocentrism to presume that we could single out one outlook or point of view as objectively superior to others. The Principle of Tolerance acquires an overtly socio-political form in the hand of Paul Feyerabend who maintains that "A free society is a society in which all traditions are given equal rights" (Feyerabend 1978: 30). Anti-relativists find this normative advocacy of relativism unconvincing for two key kinds of reasons. Some anti-relativists (e.g., Rachels 2009) often appeal to cases at the limits (e.g., toleration of heinous crimes) to show the thesis to be implausibly overpermissive (see §4.5). Others argue that if all values are relative then tolerance and maximizing freedom are valuable only to those who have already embraced them. Relativists counter that they are not defending a global version of relativism regarding all truths and justification but local versions concerning the ethics and politics of belief and the usefulness of relativism in our attempt to become better, or at least more flexible and less dogmatic, thinkers and more tolerant citizens (e.g., Feyerabend 1978: 82-84). The anti-relativists counter-argue that even if we grant that political tolerance is an important value, and that accepting relativism would promote it, we should never adopt philosophical views about the nature of truth or justification simply because of their assumed good moral or political consequences. Second, and more importantly: political toleration does not require the strong doctrine of philosophical relativism. Increased awareness of diversity together with an awareness of the historical contingency of one's own convictions will promote political toleration just as effectively. As Knobe and Nichols point out, simply being made aware of radically different view points can lead to a:

...crisis akin to that of the [Christian] child confronted with religious diversity... For the discovery of religious diversity can prompt the thought that it's in some sense accidental that one happens to be raised in a Christian household rather than a Hindu household. This kind of arbitrariness can make the child wonder whether there's any reason to think that his religious beliefs are more likely to be right than those of the Hindu child (Knobe & Nichols 2007: 11)

A separate strand of argument connecting tolerance and relativism has appealed to the claimed virtues of relativism as a kind of philosophical stance (e.g., Bloor 2011; Baghramian 2019), one that is characterised by anti-absolutist intellectual virtues such as curiosity and anti-dogmatism. The idea that a relativistic stance involves the manifesting of intellectually beneficial attitudes has been championed by, along with Bloor, Feyerabend (1975) and Code (1995), the latter of whom have emphasised the value of emancipatory thinking, e.g., thinking that is not artificially constrained by attempts to "enforce a universalist truth".

However, critics of relativism as a stance have countered such arguments from 'relativist virtues' with arguments from vice. Baghramian (2019), for instance, has suggested that even if we grant that a relativist stance aligns with a cluster of intellectually virtuous dispositions in thinking, the stance also has the consequence of encouraging several corresponding vices, including intellectual insouciance (e.g., Cassam 2019), and lack of conviction (Baghramian 2019: 265; cf., Kusch 2019 for replies).

The English term "relativism" came into usage only in the 19 th Century. John Grote was probably the first to employ it when in Exploratio Philosophica (1865) he wrote:

The notion of the mask over the face of nature is.... what I have called "relativism". If "the face of nature" is reality, then the mask over it, which is what theory gives us, is so much deception, and that is what relativism really comes to. (Grote 1865: I.xi, 229).

Its German counterpart, " Relativismus ", has a longer history. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who succeeded Kant in the University of Königsberg in his philosophical lexicon, defines it as

the assumption that everything which we experience and think (the self, the idea of reason, truth, morality, religion etc.) is only something relative, and therefore has no essential endurance and no universal validity. (Krug 2010 [1838]: 224)

Although the term "relativism" is of recent coinage, doctrines and positions, with some of the hallmarks of contemporary relativism, date back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 BC) is often considered the first overt champion of relativism, and his dictum

Man ( anthrôpos) is the measure ( metron) of all things ( chrêmatôn), of the things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not ( tôn men ontôn hôs esti, tôn de mê ontôn hôs ouk estin) (from Plato's Theaetetus 152a 2-4)

its first battle-cry. According to Plato, Protagoras thought:

Each thing appears ( phainesthai) to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you-you and I each being a man. ( Theaetetus 152a 6-8)

For instance, the same wind could be cold to one person and hot to another. The extent to which Protagoras's view, or at least what comes down to us from Plato, amounts to genuine relativism remains somewhat controversial. As Burnyeat (1976b: 172) notes, Sextus Empiricus thought-though Burnyeat thinks mistakenly-that the Protagorean measure doctrine was to be understood as the subjectivist thesis that every appearance is true ( simpliciter). This kind of radical subjectivism, though, quickly can be shown to turn on itself: it can appear that the thesis that "every appearance is true" is false. And so this radical subjectivist interpretation, regardless of whether it is accurate, is as Sextus had thought, untenable. However, Plato also ascribes a social or ethical dimension to Protagorean relativism which seem to go beyond individualistic subjectivism. In Theaetetus 172a 2-6 he says

what may or may not fittingly be done, of just and unjust, of what is sanctioned by religion and what is not; and here the theory may be prepared to maintain that whatever view a city takes on these matters and establishes as its law or convention, is truth and fact for that city. In such matters, neither any individual nor any city can claim superior wisdom. [emphasis added]

Plato's attempted refutation of Protagoras, known as peritrope or "turning around", is the first of the many attempts to show that relativism is self-refuting.

Protagorean relativism directly influenced the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, who saw the "man is the measure" doctrine as a precursor to their brand of skepticism. Sextus Empiricus, for instance, in his "Relativity Mode" states that judgments and observations are relative to the person who makes them, to their context as well as the object being observed and goes on to say,

since we have established in this way that everything is relative ( pros ti), it is clear then that we shall not be able to say what an existing object is like in its own nature and purely, but only what it appears to be like relative to something. (Sextus Empiricus PH I 140)

But the conclusion he draws favors skepticism rather than relativism as understood in modern philosophy, for he concludes, "It follows that we must suspend judgment about the nature of objects" (ibid.).

Glimpses of relativistic thinking were in evidence in Boethius (480-524) (see Marenbon 2003) as well as in the double truth doctrine, or the view that religion and philosophy are separate and at times conflicting sources of truth, originally found in Averroes (1126-1198) and the 13 th century Latin Averroists. However, the dominant belief in a singular and absolute revealed truth within a Christian framework, on the whole, made the medieval period inhospitable to relativism. There was a renewed interest in both relativism and skepticism at the inception of modern philosophy inspired, in part, by Latin translations of Sextus Empiricus in the 16 th century. Michel de Montaigne's work (1533-1592), in common with others sympathetic towards relativism, ancient or contemporary, relies on accounts of faraway cultures to argue that "we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinion and customs of our own country" (Montaigne 1580 [1991: 152]) (but also see Fricker 2013 for a dissenting view). His advocacy of toleration, even for the cannibal, paved the way for not only the acceptance but the valorization of idealized versions of alien creeds and distant cultures by Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau (1712-1778), Voltaire (1694-1778), Diderot (1713-1784), Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Condorcet (1743-1794), who in turn, were instrumental in establishing an intellectual climate hospitable to cultural relativism. These authors were also the first to explore the idea of viewing one's culture from an outsider's point of view and using this external perspective as a vehicle to criticize local customs and norms. To take just one example, Diderot, in his "Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville", tells us that the Tahitian is mild, innocent, and happy while civilized people are corrupt, vile, and wretched; the natives live according to customs and rules that vary greatly from the Western ones. They do not possess private property or operate their affairs based on egalitarian principles, and they exercise sexual freedom not accepted in "civilized societies". Diderot accordingly opposes the European mission of civilizing the natives, and despite his belief in a common human nature, he advocates the relativistic sounding maxim to

be monks in France and savages in Tahiti. Put on the costume of the country you visit, but keep the suit of clothes you will need to go home in. (Diderot 1956 [1772]: 228 in Baghramian 2010: 37)

Discussions of relativism in the 19 th century had two sources (see Gardiner 1981). On the one hand, figures from the so-called Counter-Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which arose in the late 18 th century and the early 19 th century in opposition to the Enlightenment, Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) emphasized the diversity of languages and customs and their role in shaping human thought. Hamann's views on language, for instance, foreshadow contemporary conceptual and epistemic relativism. He maintained that language is the "instrument and criterion of reason" as well as the source of all the confusions and fallacies of reason. Furthermore, the rules of rationality are embedded within language, which in turn, is governed by local norms of custom and use (Hamann 1967 [1759]). Relativism ensues because languages and their rules of rationality vary a great deal. Herder, on the other hand, not only railed against the rational, universalizing and science-oriented ethos of the Enlightenment but, much like later relativists, also argued that different nations and epochs have their distinct preferences in ethical and aesthetics matters as well as their varied conceptions of truth and we are not in a position to adjudicate between them (Herder 1774 [2002: 272-358]).

The Counter Enlightenment had a significant influence on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, who in turn have shaped relativistic thinking in certain strands of continental philosophy, postmodernism and cultural studies. Hamann's rejection of objectivism was central to Nietzsche's even more profound recoil from objectivity. And indeed, Nietzsche is possibly the single most influential voice in shaping relativistic sensibilities in 20 th century continental philosophy. His declaration that all human conceptions and descriptions, including those advanced by scientists, are

only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to our own requirements, if I may say so!)-and not an explanation of the world. (Nietzsche 1886a [1996]: §14)

and that "there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing" (Nietzsche 1886b [1968]: §540), irrespective of how Nietzsche himself intended them, have been taken to express a core contention of relativism that no single account of truth or reality can occupy a privileged position, for such accounts are only one of many perspectives that prevail at a given time in history. We cannot appeal to any facts or standards of evaluation independently of their relation to the perspectives available to us; we can do little more than to insist on the legitimacy of our own perspective and try to impose it on other people through our "will to power".

A second source was the German post-Kantian and British Idealist discussions of the "relativity of knowledge" taking place in the context of the distinction between being-for-other ( für anderes sein) and being-for-itself ( fürsichsein)-a distinction influenced by the Kantian idea that all knowledge is ultimately relational because knowledge of the Real or "the thing in itself" is impossible. John Stuart Mill, for instance ascribes to the Kantian William Hamilton the "doctrine of relativity of our human knowledge" because Hamilton, according to Mill, believed that there could be no unconditional or absolute knowledge for all knowledge is dependent on the knowing mind (Mill 1884: 8).

The end of the 19 th century witnessed the emergence of yet another strand of relativism motivated by empirical-psychological and physiological interpretations of Kantian categories. The view, known as species relativism, and defended by neo-Kantian psychologists such as Theodore Lipps (1851-1914), holds that the rules of logic are products of the human mind and psychology and therefore may be unique to the human species; different species could have and use different logical principles. The view was vehemently, but quite effectively, attacked by Frege and Husserl as part of their arguments against what they called "psychologism" and "speciesism" (Kusch 1995: 47). Logic in this approach is identified with the actual thinking processes of individuals or communities and its authority is seen to be local, or relative to the practices of particular epistemic groupings. But Frege and Husserl argued that with such relativization we would lose the ability to distinguish between reasoning correctly and merely seeming to do so.

Finally, the popularity of the very idea of relativism in the 20 th century owes something to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905) which was to be used both as model and as well as a vindication for various relativistic claims. Gilbert Harman is among the philosophers to use Einsteinian relativity as a model for philosophical versions of relativism. He says:

According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity even an object's mass is relative to a choice of spatio-temporal framework. An object can have one mass in relation to one such framework and a different mass in relation to another. .... I am going to argue for a similar claim about moral right and wrong. ... I am going to argue that moral right and wrong .... are always relative to a choice of moral framework. (Harman 1996: 3)

The Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity (see §4.1) is also thought to have been inspired by the Relativity Theory. It is however worth noting that Einstein did not think that the Theory of Relativity supported relativism in ethics or epistemology because, although in his model simultaneity and sameness of place are relative to reference frames, the physical laws expressing such relativity are constant and universal and hence in no sense relative.

The different strands of the intellectual genealogy of relativism have shaped a variety of relativistic doctrines.

Relativism is discussed under a variety of headings some of which have been more prominent in recent philosophical and cultural debates.

Public debates about relativism often revolve around the frequently cited but unclear notion of cultural relativism. The idea that norms and values are born out of conventions can be traced back to the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC), but it is only in the 20 th century, and particularly with the advent of social anthropology, that cultural relativism has gained wide currency. Franz Boas, responsible for the founding of social anthropology in the U.S., claimed that

The data of ethnology prove that not only our knowledge but also our emotions are the result of the form of our social life and of the history of the people to whom we belong. (Boas 1940: 636)

Boas's views became the orthodoxy of anthropology through M. J. Herskovits' "principle of cultural relativism" stating: "Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation" (Herskovits 1955:15).

Since those early days, social anthropologists have come to develop more nuanced approaches to cultural relativism (see for instance Geertz 1993); however, its core tenet, a claim to the equal standing of all cultural perspectives and values which co-vary with their cultural and social background, has remained constant.

Cultural relativists justify their position by recourse to a combination of empirical, conceptual and normative considerations:

(a)

The empirical observation that there is a significant degree of diversity in norms, values and beliefs across cultures and historic periods, known as descriptive relativism (see §2.1).

(b)

An inductive argument to the effect that failures in previous attempts to resolve disagreements arising from (a) show that there are no universal criteria for adjudicating between differing world-views.

(c)

The methodological assumption that human behavior and thought carry the imprint of their cultural and social context such that biology by itself is not sufficient for explaining many of their most important features, especially those with respect to which cultures differ.

(d)

The normative principle of a need for tolerance and acceptance towards other points of view (see §2.6), which leads to so-called "normative or prescriptive cultural relativism", or the positions that cultural relativism is a moral requirement (see also normative moral relativism in §4.5).

Claims (a)-(d) are open to a variety of objections. Some anthropologists and biologists have argued against the empirical assumption of the variability of cultures and have disputed its extent. Kinship, death and its attendant rituals of mourning, birth, the experience of empathy, expressions of sympathy and fear, and the biological needs that give rise to these, are some of the constant elements of human experience that belie the seeming diversity reported by ethnographers (Brown 2004). (c) has also been challenged by naturalistically inclined social scientists who believe that an evolutionary or a biologically informed approach can provide a context-independent, universally applicable theoretical framework for explaining what is common to all cultures, despite their superficial differences. Moreover, Moody-Adams (1997), among others, has argued that cultures are not integrated wholes that could determine uni-directionally the beliefs and experiences of their members; they are porous, riddled with inconsistencies and amenable to change. Finally, (d) is under pressure from the very relativism it advocates. Other critics, Pope Benedict XVI for instance, in his very first homily delivered upon election (18 April 2005), reject and condemn prescriptive cultural relativism as a harbinger of nihilism and an "anything goes" extreme permissiveness.

An influential form of descriptive cultural relativism owes its genesis to linguistics. Benjamin Whorf, inspired by his teacher Edward Sapir, who in turn was supervised by the social anthropologist Franz Boas, used ethnographic evidence from American Indian languages, such as Hopi, to argue that languages mold our views of the world and different languages do so differently, because "we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages" (Whorf 1956: 213). In the case of the Hopi, the claim was that their language imposes a conception of time very different from that of the speakers of the Indo-European languages. The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the position known as "linguistic relativity", became popular in both psychology and social anthropology in the mid 20 th century. However, the empirical work by the psychologists Berlin and Key (1969) and later by Eleanor Rosch (1974) pointed to the universality of color terms. The linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky regarding the universality of grammar were also widely taken to have discredited linguistic relativity. Moreover, Malotki (1983) had argued that, contrary to Whorf's claim, the Hopi language does indeed have tense, as well as units of time, such as days, weeks, months and seasons, and terminology for yesterday and tomorrow. Things have changed recently and there has been a slight swing of the pendulum back in favor of linguistic relativity on the part of so called "neo-Whorfians". Stephen Levinson, for instance, drawing on experimental evidence, has argued that the frame of reference that underlies any given language shapes our spatial experiences and perceptual modalities (see Gumperz & Levinson 1996). Similar claims have been made about emotions, object representation, and memory. But the claims of linguistic relativity in all these cases are much more modest than Whorf's original thesis.

Historical relativism, or historicism, is the diachronic version of cultural relativism. As Clifford Geertz points out, cultural and historical relativism are in effect the same doctrine with a core claim that "we cannot apprehend another people's or another period's imagination neatly, as though it were our own" (1993: 44). Historicism originated in reaction to the universalist tendencies of the Enlightenment but proved most influential in the social sciences, particularly in the hands of 19 th century theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber. Oswald Spengler, the then-influential turn-of-the-century German historian and philosopher, also declared that: "There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is an expression of its time" (Spengler 1918: 58). Karl Mannheim, to whom we owe the sub-discipline of sociology of knowledge, pronounced that historicism is a significant intellectual force that epitomizes our worldview ( Weltanschauung).

The historicist principle not only organizes, like an invisible hand, the work of the cultural sciences ( Geisteswissenschaften), but also permeates everyday thinking. (Mannheim 1952 [1924]:84)

As we will see ( §4.4.3), in more recent times historicist interpretations of science, chiefly those espoused by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, have played a major role in popularizing relativistic interpretations of scientific knowledge.

Conceptual relativism is a narrowly delineated form of relativism where ontology, or what exists, rather than ethical and epistemic norms, is relativized to conceptual schemes, scientific paradigms, or categorical frameworks. In this sense, conceptual relativism is often characterized as a metaphysical doctrine rather than as variant of epistemic or cultural relativism. The underlying rationale for this form of relativism is the anti-realist thesis that the world does not present itself to us ready-made or ready-carved; rather we supply different, and at times incompatible, ways of categorizing and conceptualizing it. Reflection on the connections between mind and the world, rather than empirical observations of historic and cultural diversity, is the primary engine driving various forms of conceptual relativism, but data from anthropology and linguistics are also used in its support. The thought, at least since Kant, is that the human mind is not a passive faculty merely representing an independent reality; rather, it has an active role in shaping, if not constructing, the "real". The conceptual relativist adds, as Kant did not, that human beings may construct the real in different ways thanks to differences in language or culture.

In the 20 th century, a variety of positions sympathetic to conceptual relativism were developed. Quine's ontological relativity, Nelson Goodman's "irrealism" with its claim of the plurality of "world-versions" and Hilary Putnam's conceptual relativity are prominent examples. What these authors have in common is an insistence that there could be more than one "right" way of describing what there is, that incompatible "manuals of translation" and "world-versions" can be equally correct or acceptable.

Quine's thesis of ontological relativity, probably the most influential of 20 th century approaches to conceptual relativity, is expressed both in an epistemic as well as in a stronger metaphysical form. Quine supports an epistemic thesis when he claims that incompatible scientific theories can account equally adequately for the data available to us (his underdetermination thesis) and that "there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world", (Quine 1992: 102). But his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation makes the stronger claim that different incompatible manuals of translation, or conceptual schemes, can account for one and the same verbal behavior and the indeterminacy resides at the level of facts rather than our knowledge, a position that leads to unavoidable ontological relativity.

Nelson Goodman's irrealism is an even more radical claim to the effect that the existence of many adequate, and indeed correct, but irreconcilable descriptions and representations of the world shows that there is no such thing as one unique actual world; rather there are many worlds, one for each correct description (e.g., Goodman 1975; cf. Sider 2009). Hilary Putnam disagrees with Goodman's formulation of relativity with its radical talk of "world-making" but relies on arguments from conceptual plurality to reject metaphysical realism, the view that there is one single correct account of what the world is like (cf., Arageorgis 2017). According to Putnam, our most basic metaphysical categories, e.g., objecthood and existence, could be defined variously depending on what conceptual scheme we use. What counts as an object itself, he argues, is determined by and hence is relative to the ontological framework we opt for.

Thomas Kuhn's highly influential discussion of the governing role of paradigms in science (see §4.4.3) has also been interpreted as a form of conceptual relativism by friends (Kusch 2002) and critics (Davidson 1974) of relativism alike.

The suggestion ... is that what is (by commonsense standards) the same situation can be described in many different ways, depending on how we use the words. The situation does not itself legislate how words like "object", "entity", and "exist" must be used. What is wrong with the notion of objects existing "independently" of conceptual schemes is that there are no standards for the use of even the logical notions apart from conceptual choices. (Putnam 1988: 114)

The puzzle is to explain how both the Carnapian and mereological answers to the one and same question could be correct and yet mutually incompatible, for unless we abandon the most fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, we cannot deem one and the same proposition true and not true. Relativists respond that both answers are correct, each relative to the conceptual scheme it invokes. So, once we accept the insight that there is no Archimedean vantage point for choosing among conflicting frameworks, we no longer face a genuine contradiction. The response invokes, often implicitly, a relativized conception of truth, which as we shall see below, faces its own difficulties.

Relativism about truth, or alethic relativism, at its simplest, is the claim that what is true for one individual or social group may not be true for another, and there is no context-independent vantage point to adjudicate the matter. What is true or false is always relative to a conceptual, cultural, or linguistic framework.

Alethic relativism is the most central of all relativistic positions since other subdivisions of the philosophical theses of relativism-with the possible exception of some narrowly defined versions of conceptual relativism such as Nelson Goodman's irrealism (see §4.2)-are in principle, reducible to it (Baghramian 2004: 92). For instance, relativism about logic may be restated as a view according to which the standing of logical truths (including truths about consequence relations) is relative to cultures or cognitive schemes. Ethical relativism can be seen as the claim that the truth of ethical judgments, if such truths exist, is relative to context or culture. If truth is to be seen as equally applicable to all areas of discourse and also unitary, rather than domain specific or plural, then alethic relativism is not only a strong form of global relativism but it also entails the denial of the possibility of more local forms of relativism because all localized relativistic claims are also attempts at relativizing truth (seemingly in a particular domain of discourse).

The central claim of alethic relativism is that "is true", despite appearances to the contrary, is (at least, in some relevant domains of discourse) not a one-place but a two-place predicate such that " P is true" should correctly be understood as ( modulo differences in particular ways of developing this idea) shorthand for " P is true for X", where X is a culture, conceptual scheme, belief framework, etc. And within the broad camp of alethic relativists, the matter of how it is that which we should opt for " P-is-true-for- X", rather than " P is true", simpliciter, is developed in different ways (e.g., see Meiland 1977; MacFarlane 2014: ch. 5; Egan 2007; Ferrari & Moruzzi 2018). One shared commitment of relativizing the truth predicate is that claims such as "misfortune is caused by witchcraft" could be true according to the Azande cultural framework and false in the Western scientific framework. One major difficulty facing alethic relativists is to explain what "true for" actually means, and how "true for" should be understood as related to the more familiar absolutist truth predicate. For instance, should relative truth be understood as a modification on an already familiar strategy for thinking about truth (e.g., the correspondence, pragmatic or epistemic model) or in some different way, entirely? (MacFarlane 2014: ch. 2). Much of the work of New Relativists such as John MacFarlane (see §5) can be see as an attempt to clarify this thorny issue.

The strongest and most persistent charge leveled against all types of relativism, but (global) alethic relativism in particular, is the accusation of self-refutation. Here is for instance Harvey Siegel:

This incoherence charge is by far the most difficult problem facing the relativist. It is worth noting that attempts to overcome the problem by appealing to the notion of relative truth appear not to succeed. Many versions of relativism rely on such a notion, but it is very difficult to make sense of it. An assertion that a proposition is "true for me" (or "true for members of my culture") is more readily understood as a claim concerning what I (or members of my culture, scheme, etc.) believe than it is as a claim ascribing to that proposition some special sort of truth. Constructing a conception of relative truth such that " p is relatively true" (or " p is true for S", or " p is true for members of culture C") amounts to something stronger than " S believes that p" (or "members of culture C believe that p"), but weaker than " p is true ( simpliciter)", has proved to be quite difficult, and is arguably beyond the conceptual resources available to the relativist. (Siegel 2011: 203)

The original argument goes back to Plato's criticism of Protagoras in the Theaetetus where he argues:

Most people believe that Protagoras's doctrine is false.

Protagoras, on the other hand, believes his doctrine to be true.

By his own doctrine, Protagoras must believe that his opponents' view is true.

Therefore, Protagoras must believe that his own doctrine is false (see Theaetetus: 171a-c)

Plato's argument, as it stands, appears to be damaging only if we assume that Protagoras, at least implicitly, is committed to the universal or objective truth of relativism. On this view, Plato begs the question on behalf of an absolutist conception of truth (Burnyeat 1976a: 44). Protagoras, the relativists counter, could indeed accept that his own doctrine is false for those who accept absolutism but continue believing that his doctrine is true for him. He could also try to persuade others to become the sort of thinker for whom relativism is true without being entangled in self-contradiction. Such an effort at persuasions, however, could involve Protagoras in a performative contradiction as the relativist cannot assume that her arguments are good for persuading others. Ordinarily, the very act of defending a philosophical position commits us to the dialectical move of attempting to convince our interlocutors of the superior value of what we are arguing for. The relativist cannot make such a commitment and therefore his attempts to persuade others to accept his position may be pragmatically self-refuting. The relativist can avoid the standard charge of self-refutation by accepting that relativism cannot be proven true in any non-relative sense- viz., that relativism itself as a philosophical position is at best true only relative to a cultural or historical context and therefore could be false in other frameworks or cultures. But such an admission will undermine the relativist's attempt to convince others of her position, for the very act of argumentation, as it is commonly understood, is an attempt to convince those who disagree with us of the falsehood of their position. In other words, if Protagoras really believes in relativism why would he bother to argue for it?

It may be argued that Protagoras could have opted for a more sensible form of alethic relativism where a person's beliefs are not automatically true relative to the framework she accepts. Rather a belief p is true according to X's framework iff (roughly) X would believe that p if she were to reason cogently by her own standards on the basis of full relevant information. This form of alethic relativism allows for argument and persuasion among people who initially disagree, for despite their disagreement they may share or come to share a framework. Protagoras may, on this reinterpretation, be trying to persuade his interlocutor that if she were to reason cogently by her own standards from their shared framework, she would accept relativism. However, it is not clear how the relativist could share a framework with the absolutist on the nature of truth or what argumentative strategies he can use to convert the absolutist without presupposing a shared (relativist or absolutist) conceptions of truth. In particular, a consistent relativist will have only a relativized criteria of what counts as "true" information, which presumably will not be shared by the absolutist.

A second strand of the self-refutation argument focuses on the nature and role of truth. J.L. Mackie, for instance, has argued that alethic absolutism is a requisite of a coherent notion of truth and that a claim to the effect that "There are no absolute truths" is absolutely self-refuting (Mackie 1964: 200). But the relativists reject the quick move that presupposes the very conception of truth they are at pains to undermine and have offered sophisticated approaches of defense. A good example of such a defense is Hales' (1997)-who uses a "u" operator to represent "It is true in some perspectives that" and a "n" operator to represent "It is true in all perspectives that"-in order to establish that there could indeed be a consistent relativist logic which avoids the charge of self-refutation. Key to this approach, according to Hales, is that we abandon a conception of global relativism on which the lose thesis "everything is relative" is embraced-a thesis Hales concedes to be inconsistent-for the thesis "everything that is true is relatively true", which he maintains is not ( cf. Shogenji 1997 for a criticism of Hales on this point).

It has also been claimed that alethic relativism gives rise to what J.L. Mackie calls "operational" (Mackie 1964: 202) and Max Kölbel "conversational" self-refutation (Kölbel 2011) by flouting one or more crucial norms of discourse and thereby undermines the very possibility of coherent discourse. One version of the argument, advanced most notably by Gareth Evans (1985: 346-63), begins with the premise that a publicly shared distinction between correct and incorrect, and hence true and false, assertion is a necessary condition for coherent assertoric discourse. As Evans puts it, a theory that

permits a subject to deduce merely that a particular utterance is now correct but later will be incorrect ... cannot assist the subject in deciding what to say, nor in interpreting the remarks of others. What should we aim at, or take others to be aiming at?. (1985: 349)

And if truth is relative, then there is no single shared definite aim for any given assertion (see MacFarlane 2014: ch. 12 for a discussion). The relativists however, could respond that truth is relative to a group (conceptual scheme, framework) and they take speakers to be aiming a truth relative to the scheme that they and their interlocutors are presumed to share. The difficulty with this approach is that it seems to make communication across frameworks impossible.

Such a response, however, will be answerable to the charge of incoherence raised by Donald Davidson against both alethic and conceptual relativism. According to Davidson, the principle of charity-the assumption that other speakers by and large speak truly (by our lights)-is a pre-requisite of all interpretation. He takes this to imply that there could not be languages or conceptual schemes that we cannot in principle understand and interpret, in other words, if a system of signs L is not recognizable as a language by us then L is not a language. Languages are either inter-translatable and hence not radically different from ours, or incommensurable and beyond our ability to recognize them as languages (Davidson 1974). The relativist, in effect, places other speakers and their languages beyond our recognitional reach and thereby undermines the initial claim that they could be radically different or incommensurable.

New Relativism, as we shall see, offers a novel take on the old question of alethic relativism and gives weight to Alasdair MacIntyre's observation that relativism may have been refuted a number of times too often, whereas genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once (MacIntyre 1985: 5).

Claims to knowledge and justification have proven receptive to relativistic interpretations. Epistemic relativism is the thesis that cognitive norms that determine what counts as knowledge, or whether a belief is rational, justifiable, etc. could vary with and are dependent on local conceptual or cultural frameworks and lack the universality they aspire or pretend to. The three key assumptions underlying epistemic relativism are:

(a)

Epistemic justification is framework relative. It makes no sense to ask whether a belief is justified simpliciter; we can only ask questions about justification relative to an epistemic system, which casts doubts on the very possibility of objectivity.

(b)

There are many genuinely alternative, even incompatible, epistemic systems.

(c)

We cannot demonstrate in a non-circular way that our epistemic system is superior to any other. (see Williams 2007: 94 for one version of this approach to epistemic relativism; cf. Carter 2015)

The epistemic relativist, as Paul Boghossian in developing his trenchant criticisms of relativism points out, is committed to a "doctrine of equal validity", the view that "there are many radically different, incompatible, yet, 'equally valid' ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them" (Boghossian 2006a: 2). The relativist's key claim is that either we can chauvinistically maintain that our epistemic system is superior to all or accept the equal legitimacy of varying epistemic systems.

One crucial question facing epistemic relativism is how to identify and individuate alternative epistemic systems. The intuitive idea is that varying and possibly incompatible cognitive principles, ground-level beliefs and presuppositions, or what Wittgenstein calls "hinge" and "bedrock" propositions (Wittgenstein 1969: §§341-343) separate non-convergent epistemic schemes. A simple and quite commonly used example is the contrast between scientific and religious belief systems. Boghossian, for instance, uses the debate between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine as a case study of an encounter between antagonists operating within putatively different epistemic frameworks, who use different frameworks, or as Rorty (1979) put it "grids", for determining what would count as appropriate evidence on planetary movements. The relativist claims that there is no fact of the matter about whether the Copernican theory or the geocentric view is justified by the evidence, "for there are no absolute facts about what justifies what" (Boghossian 2006a: 62) while the anti-relativist attempts to show the unintelligibility or the implausibility of such a claim.

Boghossian has been criticized however for his characterization of epistemic relativism. One notable such criticism has been advanced by Crispin Wright (2008), who takes issue with Boghossian's attributing to the epistemic relativist a version of (a) above, what Boghossian calls epistemic relationism, or the thesis that any claim of the form "Evidence E justifies belief B", if it is to have any prospect of being true, must be construed as expressing the claim According to the epistemic system C, that I, S accept, information E justifies belief B (Boghossian 2006a:73). Having characterized the relativist's position in this fashion, Boghossian suggests-after considering various ways of articulating what the relativist might say about the untruth of claims of the form "Evidence E justifies belief B "-that the relativist is left, ultimately, with no coherent way to account for how she should count as accepting or adhering to a given epistemic system. And on this basis, Boghossian concludes that there is no coherent way to formulate the position because the relativist in formulating his position and setting up the opposition between two or more alternative non-convergent epistemic systems cannot but assume the universality of at least some epistemic principles, including deduction, induction, warrant through empirical evidence, etc. (see Boghossian 2006a).

As Wright sees it, however, Boghossian's attributing the relationist clause to the epistemic relativist is to simply

fail to take seriously the thesis that claims such as [Evidence E justifies belief B] can indeed by true or false, albeit only relatively so. (Wright 2008: 383, our italics)

Moreover, Wright argues, the epistemic relationist clause Boghossian includes in the kind of epistemic relativism he challenges betrays a failure to distinguish between (i) making a judgment in the light of certain standards and (ii) judging that those standards mandate that judgment. (See also MacFarlane (2008b and Carter & McKenna forthcoming for different critiques of Boghossian's argument against the epistemic relativist.)

Conceptions of rationality, and its key components of logic and justification, are some of the principles that are often used to differentiate between epistemic systems. Below we look at attempts at relativizing each.

Earlier defenses of epistemic relativism centered on the idea of alternative rationalities and were often developed as a reaction to the charge of irrationality leveled at non-Western tribal people. Rationality traditionally is seen as a cognitive virtue as well as a hallmark of the scientific method. The complex notion of rationality is intimately tied to requirements of consistency, justification, warrant and evidence for beliefs. Relativists about rationality cast doubt on the universal applicability of one or more of these features of rational thought, and deem them merely local epistemic values. Peter Winch's treatment of E.E. Evans-Pritchard's account of the Azande tribe's beliefs in witchcraft and magic is now a classic of the "rationality wars" of the 1960s and 70s. Winch had argued that since standards of rationality in different societies do not always coincide, we should use only contextually and internally given criteria of rationality in our assessment of the systems of belief of other cultures and societies. Under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, he maintained that it does not make sense to speak of a universal standard of rationality because what is rational is decided by a backdrop of norms governing a given language and form of life. As outside observers, we are not in a position to impute irrationality or illogicality to the Azande or any other group whose practices and language-games may differ from ours. Critics of Winch, Steven Lukes, for instance, using considerations reminiscent of Davidson's principle of charity, have argued that we will not be in a position to understand a language or culture with standards of rationality radically different from ours, and that we must have at least some core principles, or what Martin Hollis had called a "bridgehead" with elements such as consistency and the goal of truth, in common with the Azande in order to understand them (Hollis 1968; Lukes 1970). They, thereby, conclude that an all-out or strong relativism about rationality is not tenable. The weaker claim is that some elements of rationality, for instance what counts as good evidence or a better style of reasoning, could vary with historic conditions and traditions of enquiry and therefore a degree of relativization of such norms, without succumbing to irrationalism, is acceptable (see Hacking 1982 and MacIntyre 1988).

Being rational also means having warrant, in the form of good reasons and justification for one's beliefs. Epistemic relativists maintain that the legitimacy of a justificatory system and the presumed strength of epistemic warrants are decided locally. Richard Rorty has made the influential claim that

there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society- ours -uses in one or another area of inquiry. (Rorty 1991: 23)

For Rorty, warrant is a "sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of [a speaker's] statement by her peers" (1993: 449). Rorty also claims that knowledge and truth are compliments "paid to beliefs which we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not needed" (Rorty 1991: 24) where the "we" is a historically conditioned community of enquirers. Rorty rejects the label "relativist" because he insists that, unlike the relativists, he does not subscribe to the view that all beliefs are equally true or good. He calls his position "ethnocentrism", because the only form of warrant available to any of us is the one provided through solidarity with our peers. His rejection of the label "relativist" has had little effect on critics such as Hilary Putnam (1999) or Paul Boghossian (2006a) who do not see the distinction Rorty wishes to draw between his brand of ethnocentrism and relativism

Debates about the scope and authority of logic are also focal to discussions of rationality. The argument for relativism about logic is usually traced to the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) who claimed that tribal or "primitive" cultures did not subscribe to universal laws of logic such as the principles of non-contradiction and identity and were in a pre-logical stage of thinking (Lévy-Bruhl 1922/1923). In a posthumous publication, Lévy-Bruhl renounced his earlier views, finding them "simplistic and rather crude" (Lévy-Bruhl 1949/1975: 48) but he remains the standard bearer for relativism about logic.

Peter Winch's interpretation of the Azande material became the impetus for a new wave of arguments for relativism about logic. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, for instance, have argued that different societies may have incompatible but internally coherent systems of logic because validity and rules of inference are defined by, and hence are relative to, the practices of a given community, rather than a priori universal restrictions on all thought. According to Bloor,

The Azande have the same psychology as us but radically different institutions. If we relate logic to the psychology of reasoning we shall be inclined to say that they have the same logic; if we relate logic more closely to the institutional framework of thought then we shall incline to the view that the two cultures have different logics. (Bloor 1976: 129-130)

Even the status of "contradictions" is at times seen as culturally relative and the Azande's application of witchcraft in determining guilt is cited as an example. The Azande, according to Evans-Prichard, believe that it is possible to identify a witch by examining the contents of his intestine (through the use of a poison oracle). They also believe that Witchhood is inherited patrilineally. Since the Azande clan members are related to each other through the male line, it follows that if one person is shown to be a witch, then all the members of his clan must also be witches. Evans-Pritchard tells us that although the Azande see the sense of this argument they do not accept the conclusion; they seem to side-step the contradiction in their belief-system. Relativistically inclined commentators have argued that the Azande both do and do not contradict themselves depending on, or relative to, the culture that is being taken as the vantage point (Bloor 1976: 124 and Jennings 1989: 281). See Seidel (2014) for a sustained critique.

More recently, Peng and Nisbett, using experimental data, have argued that Chinese and American students have different attitudes towards the Law of Non-Contradiction. The Chinese, they claim, are more willing to accept that conflicting views may be compatible and therefore are less disposed to recognize or condemn contradictions (Peng & Nisbett 1999). In his The Geography of Thought (2003), Nisbett has generalized his results to claim that Asian and European structures of thinking, including perception and conceptualization, differ significantly.

Nisbitt's data, as well as the claims by Barnes and Bloor, are contributions to a long-standing debate about the status of logic. Their approach attempts to naturalize logic by tying it to actual practices of the human subjects. The relativistically inclined, however, argue that to think of logic as singular, a priori, and universal speaks of a philosophical prejudice and does not sit well with a naturalistic and scientific attitude. As to the claim by Quine and Davidson, that an allegedly illogical culture is in fact a misinterpreted or badly interpreted culture-that if the speakers of a language seem to accept sentence of the form " P and not- P ", this is conclusive evidence that "and" and "not" in their language do not mean what these words mean in English (Quine 1960)-the relativists and their sympathisers point out that reasoning in deviant ways is quite common and is not an impediment to understanding or translating others (e.g., Stich 2012). They further argue that such diversity is better explained by the relativist's claim that the correctness of the principles of reasoning is relative to their cultural background rather than by the absolutist approach that attributes wholesale error to alternative epistemic systems or to the members of other cultures.

A different line of support for relativism about logic starts with pluralism about logic, the view that there can be a multitude of correct but not fully compatible conceptions of logic where differing accounts of logical consequence, logical connectives or even validity are on offer. Relativism ensues if we also assume that there is no neutral framework for adjudicating between the differing accounts. What counts as a correct account of logical consequence and validity or even the choice of logical vocabulary are relative to the system of logic that embed and justify these accounts and choices. (See Steinberger 2019 for a useful survey.)

Stewart Shapiro (2014) is probably the most vocal defender of this approach. His argument for relativism about logic is similar to defences of relativism in other areas where intractable differences in a particular domain and an inability to reconcile them are used as the motivators for relativism. Shapiro advocates what, following Crispin Wright, he calls "folk-relativism" and its slogan that "There is no such thing as simply being Φ" (Shapiro, 2014: 7; Wright 2008a: 158) and applies it to validity and logical consequence. The claim is that there are different conceptions of logical consequence. in classical and non-classical logic, which although not compatible can still capture correct accounts of the idea of logical consequence. Therefore, it does not make sense to think that there is a uniquely correct conception of validity and logical consequence. Different conceptions can be legitimate in so far as each is (internally) consistent and also non-trivial in the sense that it is the basis a workable mathematical systems, i.e., the means of making sense of "the practice of pursuing and applying mathematics" (Shapiro 2014: 81). Intuitionism and fuzzy logic are notable examples. Choices between different logical vocabularies also can lead to a relativized conception of logic in so far a these vocabularies play a decisive role in generating different relations of logical consequence.

For further discussion, see the entry on logical pluralism.

Discussions of relativism about science gained currency with the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and the emergence of a historicist approach to question of change and progress in science. Pronouncements such as

In so far as their only recourse to [the] world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world (Kuhn 1970 [1962]: 111)

and

The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world (Kuhn 1970 [1962]: 117)

were taken to suggest that not only standards of epistemic appraisal but even the data gathered by scientists were, to a significant extent, determined by governing paradigms and hence relative to them. Although Kuhn stepped back from such radical relativism, his views gave currency to relativistic interpretations of science (though see Sankey 2018).

Relativism about science is motivated by considerations arising from the methodology and history of science (Baghramian 2007). As we saw in §4.2, Quine has argued that

Physical theories can be at odds with each other and yet compatible with all possible data even in the broadest possible sense. In a word, they can be logically incompatible and empirically equivalent. (1970: 179)

Relativists about science have argued that only with the addition of auxiliary hypotheses could the scientist choose between various theories and that such auxiliary hypotheses are colored by socially and historically grounded norms as well as by personal and group interests. Paul Feyerabend's "democratic relativism"-the view that different societies may look at the world in different ways and regard different things as acceptable (1987: 59) and that we need to give equal voice to these differing perspectives-is one instance of the use of the underdetermination thesis in support of relativism. According to Feyerabend, underdetermination ultimately demonstrates that

for every statement, theory, point of view believed (to be true) with good reason there exist arguments showing a conflicting alternative to be at least as good, or even better. (1987: 76)

Larry Laudan usefully lists the ways underdetermination is used to motivate relativism or its proximate doctrines. He says:

Lakatos and Feyerabend have taken the underdetermination of theories to justify the claim that the only difference between empirically successful and empirically unsuccessful theories lies in the talents and resources of their respective advocates (i.e., with sufficient ingenuity, more or less any theory can be made to look methodologically respectable). Hesse and Bloor have claimed that underdetermination shows the necessity for bringing noncognitive, social factors into play in explaining the theory choices of scientists (on the grounds that methodological and evidential considerations alone are demonstrably insufficient to account for such choices). H. M. Collins, and several of his fellow sociologists of knowledge, have asserted that underdetermination lends credence to the view that the world does little if anything to shape or constrain our beliefs about it. (Laudan 1990: 321)

Laudan even connects Derrida's deconstructionism and the view that texts do not lend themselves to determinate readings with underdetermination (ibid.). He also believes that an appropriately modest understanding of what underdetermination entails will distance it from relativism, but most relativistically inclined advocates of underdetermination are not willing to follow Laudan's advice to circumscribe its scope. The key issue is that both the relativists and the anti-relativists could agree that the totality of evidence available does not prove the truth of any given theory. But the anti-relativists responds to this fact of underdetermination by pointing out that the we have good reasons for embracing the best theory available and moreover that there are indeed objective facts about the world, even if we are not in possession of them. The relativist, in contrast, argues that there are many, equally acceptable principles for accepting theories, all on the basis of evidence available, but such theories could result in very different verdicts. They also argue that in the absence of any strong epistemic grounds for accepting the existence of absolute facts in any given domain, we have no grounds, other than some kind of metaphysical faith, for thinking that there are such facts.

Relativism about science is also influenced by the related doctrine that all observations are theory-laden. Even anti-relativists such as Karl Popper admit that the idea that observations are not in some way tinted by theoretical assumptions is naïve. But some relativists about science offer a particularly extreme form of the doctrine of the widely accepted thesis of theory-ladenness. Feyerabend, for instance, goes so far as to argue that different systems of classification can result in perceptual objects that are not easily comparable.

Relativists about science also point to the prevalence of both synchronic and diachronic disagreement among scientists as a justification of their view. Looking at the history of science, Kuhn and his followers argued that Aristotelian physics presupposes a totally different conception of the universe compared to Newtonian physics; the same is true of Einsteinian physics compared to its predecessors. Moreover, these differing conceptions may be incommensurable in the sense that they are not readily amenable to comparison or inter-theoretical translation. There are also strong and unresolved disagreements between scientists working contemporaneously. The many different interpretations of quantum mechanics are a case in point.

Anti-relativist philosophers of science are often willing to concede all three points above, but insist that they do not, singly or jointly, justify the claim that scientific knowledge, in any philosophically interesting sense, is relative to its context of production. The success of science, both theoretical and applied, indicates that progress does take place. Fallibilism, the view that all scientific claims are provisional and liable to fail, they argue, is sufficient for dealing with difficulties arising from considerations of underdetermination and theory-ladenness of observations. Relativism, with its attendant denial that there could be objective and universal scientific truths or knowledge exacts too high a price for dealing with these allegedly troublesome features of the methodology and history of science.

Social constructionism is a particularly radical form of conceptual relativism with implications for our understanding of the methodology and subject matter of the sciences. According to social constructionism, nature as studied by scientists does not come carved at its joints (to use Plato's metaphor from Phaedrus: 265d-266a). Reality-with its objects, entities, properties and categories-is not simply "out there" to be discovered only by empirical investigation or observation; rather, it is constructed through a variety of norm-governed socially sanctioned cognitive activities such as interpretation, description, manipulation of data, etc. Social constructionism has relativistic consequences insofar as it claims that different social forces lead to the construction of different "worlds" and that there is no neutral ground for adjudicating between them. The "Science Studies" approach of Bruno Latour is a prime example of constructionism with relativistic consequences. Latour and Woolgar (1986) have argued that so-called "scientific facts" and the "truths" of science emerge out of social and conceptual practices and inevitably bear their imprints. This is because the very idea of a mind-independent reality open to scientific study, or as they call it "out-there-ness", itself is the consequence of scientific work rather than the cause. A crucial difference between scientific realists and constructionists is that whereas the realists see nature and society as the causes that explain the outcomes of scientific enquiry, for the constructionists the activity of

scientists and engineers and of all their human and non-human allies is the cause, of which various states of nature and societies are the consequence. (Callon & Latour 1992: 350-1)

Scientific theories are also products of socially constituted practices. They are

contextually specific constructions which bear the mark of the situated contingency and interest structure of the process by which they are generated. (Knorr-Cetina 1981: 226)

So called "scientific facts" and "natural kinds", the primary subjects of scientific investigation are, at least in part, the products of the contingent social and epistemic norms that define the very subject matter of science. It may be argued that the view, if taken literally, entails a counter-intuitive form of backward causation to the effect that, for instance, the scientific facts about dinosaur anatomy 50 million years ago were caused in the 20 th century when a scientific consensus about dinosaur anatomy was formed (see Boghossian 2006a). But constructionism, at least in its most extreme form, accepts this consequence, insisting that there are indeed no facts except for socially constructed ones, created and modified at particular times and places courtesy of prevailing theoretical and conceptual frameworks.

Moral or ethical relativism is simultaneously the most influential and the most reviled of all relativistic positions. Supporters see it as a harbinger of tolerance (see §2.6), open-mindedness and anti-authoritarianism. Detractors think it undermines the very possibility of ethics and signals either confused thinking or moral turpitude.

Briefly stated, moral relativism is the view that moral judgments, beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, not only vary greatly across time and contexts, but that their correctness is dependent on or relative to individual or cultural perspectives and frameworks. Moral subjectivism is the view that moral judgments are judgments about contingent and variable features of our moral sensibilities. For the subjectivist, to say that abortion is wrong is to say something like, "I disapprove of abortion", or "Around here, we disapprove of abortion". Once the content of the subjectivist's claim is made explicit, the truth or acceptability of a subjectivist moral judgment is no longer a relative matter. Moral relativism proper, on the other hand, is the claim that facts about right and wrong vary with and are dependent on social and cultural background. Understood in this way, moral relativism could be seen as a sub-division of cultural relativism. Values may also be relativized to frameworks of assessment, independent of specific cultures or social settings.

Moral relativism, like most relativistic positions, comes in various forms and strengths. It is customary to distinguish between descriptive or empirical, prescriptive or normative, and meta-ethical versions of moral relativism. These views in turn are motivated by a number of empirical and philosophical considerations similar to those introduced in defense of cultural relativism. The purported fact of ethical diversity, the claim that there are no universally agreed moral norms or values, conjoined with the intractability of the arguments about them, are the core components of descriptive moral relativism. The anti-relativists counter-argue that the observed diversity and lack of convergence in local norms can in fact be explained by some very general universal norms, which combine with the different circumstances (or false empirical beliefs) of the different groups to entail different particular norms. The objectivist thereby can accommodate diversity and lack of agreement at this higher level of generalization (see Philippa Foot (1982) for this type of argument).

As in the case of cultural relativism, the imperative of tolerance is often seen as a normative reason for adopting moral relativism. Moral relativism, it is argued, leads to tolerance by making us not only more open-minded but also alerting us to the limitations of our own views. Edward Westermarck, for instance, in his early classic defense of relativism writes:

Could it be brought home to people that there is no absolute standard in morality, they would perhaps be on the one hand more tolerant and on the other more critical in their judgments. (Westermarck 1932: 59)

Critics however point out that for the consistent relativist tolerance can be only a framework-dependent virtue, while Westermarck, and others, seem to recommend it as a universal desideratum. A second problem with arguing for normative moral relativism on the grounds of tolerance is known as the Argumentum ad Nazium. Relativists, as this argument goes, are not in a position to condemn even the most abhorrent of worldviews as they are forced to admit that every point of view is right (relative to the perspective of its beholder). W.T. Stace, arguing against Westermarck's relativism gives an early example of this type of criticism:

Certainly, if we believe that any one moral standard is as good as any other, we are likely to be more tolerant. We shall tolerate widow-burning, human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, the infliction of physical torture, or any other of the thousand and one abominations which are, or have been, from time approved by moral code or another. But this is not the kind of toleration that we want, and I do not think its cultivation will prove "an advantage to morality". (Stace 1937: 58-59)

More moderate forms of normative moral relativism, positions that sometimes are characterized as moral pluralism, have been defended by David Wong (2006) and David Velleman (2013). Moderate moral relativists endorse the idea of diversity and plurality of ethical values and accept that such values are justified according to differing local normative frameworks, but they avoid a full blown "anything goes" relativism by maintaining that all such frameworks are ultimately answerable to conditions for human flourishing and other overarching universal constraints such as the value of accommodation (Wong 2006). (It should however be noted that while theses under the description of pluralism needn't entail a commitment to relativism, some formulations of relativism (such as Boghossian's 2006b), include, as an essential ingredient, a "pluralist" clause. Whether particular instances of moral pluralism entail moral relativism depends entirely on the details of relevant claim to pluralism).

Metaethical versions of moral relativism are often motivated by the thought that ethical positions, unlike scientific beliefs, are not apt for objective truth-evaluation. Strong realists about science such as Gilbert Harman have argued that the intractability of moral disagreements, the absence of convergence in ethics as opposed to the natural sciences and mathematics, point to fundamental differences between natural facts and ethical values (Harman & Thompson 1996). This is a metaethical, rather than a descriptive or normative position, because it is a theory about the nature of ethics or morality. The ethical domain, Harman argue, is such that all relevant evaluations could be undertaken only in the context of social norms or personal preferences and commitments. Values are not objective-they are not part of the fabric of the universe. Rather they always arise from some form of convention and agreement among people. Therefore, there can be no objective or externally justified ethical knowledge or judgment (Harman 1975). In this sense, metaethical relativism shares common concerns with non-cognitivist approaches to ethics. What distinguishes it, however, is the insistence on the part of metaethical relativists that moral judgments contain an implicit relativization to the speaker's moral outlook (Dreier 2006: 261). It is possible to talk about the truth or falsity of a moral judgment but only in the context of pre-existing standards or value systems. For instance, we can ask questions about just actions or judgments in the context of standards of justice prevalent in a society at a given time; but questions about the objective standing of these standards do not make sense (cf., Boghossian 2017). (For further discussion of moral relativism see the separate entry on this topic. What has become known as New Moral Relativism will be discussed below).

There is a recent version of relativism according to which some of the views considered so far-for instance, Harman's (1975) variety of moral relativism-will be regarded varieties of contextualism as opposed to bona fide relativism. This recent version-sufficiently distinct from the relativisms so far considered that it is deserving of attention in its own right-we are calling "New Relativism", a variety of relativism that has arisen out of work in the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition, and for which the leading proponents have included Max Kölbel (2003, 2004), Peter Lasersohn (2005), Crispin Wright (2006) and, in particular, John MacFarlane (2005b, 2007, 2014); cf., Marques (2019). In this section we aim to (i) outline several features that individuate New Relativism; (ii) consider in turn motivations for (and objections to) several prominent strands of it; and, finally, (iii) conclude with some philosophical problems that face New Relativism more generally.

It is a commonplace that the truth-value of an utterance can depend on the context in which it is uttered. If you say "I'm happy" and I say the same sentence, your utterance may be true and mine false. In such cases, the context of utterance plays a role in determining which proposition the sentence expresses. This can happen even when the sentence does not contain an overtly indexical expression. Thus Harman and Dreier hold that a statement of the form " A is wrong" is roughly equivalent to " A is wrong according to the moral system I accept". So two utterances of (say) "Torture is wrong" can differ in truth-value if they are uttered by speakers who accept very different moral systems. Contextualists about (for instance) moral, aesthetic and epistemic discourse will view moral, aesthetic and epistemic expressions likewise as indexical expressions but (as we'll see) with some difficulty explaining apparent genuine disagreement in these areas of discourse. On this point, New Relativists claim an important advantage over contextualists. New relativism, by contrast with contextualism, aims to achieve this advantage via a much less familiar form of context dependence.

To see how this view is claimed to offer a satisfying take on disagreement in types of discourse (see Beddor 2019), consider a simple example, concerning predicates of personal taste. A utters, "Pretzels are tasty", and B utters, "Pretzels are not tasty". While the semantic invariantist (for whom the truth-value of taste predications is in no way context sensitive) will insist that the above exchange constitutes a genuine disagreement about whether pretzels are tasty and that at least one party is wrong, contextualists and truth-relativists have the prima facie advantageous resources to avoid the result that at least one party to the apparent disagreement has made a mistake.

The contextualist claims that the truth-evaluable content expressed by A's utterance encodes A's standards ( cf. non-indexical contextualism). Thus, in this apparent disagreement, the proposition expressed by A is "Pretzels are tasty relative to my [ A's] standards" while B expresses the proposition "Pretzels are not tasty relative to my [ B's] standards". This maneuver avoids the result that at least one of the two parties has uttered something false, but (as the new relativist points out) this result comes at the price of being unable to offer a clear explanation of our intuition that there is some uniform content about which A and B disagree.

(i)

true relative to the context of assessment where A's standards of taste are operative and

(ii)

false relative to the context of assessment where B's standards of taste are operative.

New Relativist views, which endorse truth-relativism locally for some domain of discourse, stand in opposition to the more traditional view of propositional content (what Cappelen & Hawthorne call "The Simple View") according to which propositions bear truth and falsity as monadic properties (cf. however, MacFarlane 2011a for some resistance to Cappelen & Hawthorne's claim that this simple characterization should be regarded as the "received" view.)

A key source of philosophical motivation for relativizing truth in the fashion of New Relativism traces to Lewis's (1980) and Kaplan's (1989) foundational work in semantics, according to which sentence truth is to be understood as relative to a circumstance of evaluation that includes world, time and location. New Relativists inherit the formal apparatus of Lewis and Kaplan and add another parameter, but their reasons for doing so are quite different from the reasons that motivated the framework in the first place. While Lewis's and Kaplan's reasons for "proliferating" parameters were primarily based on considerations to do with intensional operators (though see Yli-Vakkuri et al. 2019), the more contemporary reasons for adding a judge or standard parameter are often to do with respecting (for instance) disagreement data. (For further discussion here, see Kölbel (2015)). (Note that "old-style contextualism" can also be stated in Kaplan's framework; it involves variation in content with respect to the context of utterance rather than in truth value with respect to the circumstance of evaluation).

Kaplan's view specifically was that the need for particular parameters in the circumstance of evaluation was a function of the non-specificity of certain propositional contents with respect to world, time and location (see Kaplan's (1989) analysis of indexicals). On Kaplan's view:

A circumstance will usually include a possible state or history of the world, a time, and perhaps other features as well. The amount of information we require from a circumstance is linked to the degree of specificity of contents and thus to the kinds of operators in the language.... (1989: 502)

John MacFarlane, a leading contemporary relativist, writes:

Taking this line of thought a little farther, the relativist might envision contents that are "sense-of-humor neutral" or "standard-of-taste neutral" or "epistemic-state neutral", and circumstances of evaluation that include parameters for a sense of humor, a standard of taste or an epistemic state. This move would open up room for the truth value of a proposition to vary with these "subjective" factors in much the same way that it varies with the world of evaluation. (MacFarlane 2007: 6-7)

Similarly, Cappelen and Hawthorne write:

Contemporary analytic relativists reason as follows: 'Lewis and Kaplan have shown that we need to relativize truth to triples of <world, time, location>[']. ... But, having already started down this road, why not exploit these strategies further? In particular, by adding new and exotic parameters into the circumstances of evaluation, we can allow the contents of thought and talk to be non-specific (in Kaplan's sense) along dimensions other than world, time and location. (2009: 10; edited)

A question on which New Relativists are divided, however, is: what contents are non-specific along dimensions other than world, time and location? It is with respect to this general question that different families of New Relativism are generated.

The taxonomy we offer is that a view falls within the category of New Relativism if, and only if, the view endorses a truth-relativist semantics (as previously outlined) for utterance tokens in some domain of discourse, such as: discourse about predicates of personal taste (Lasersohn 2005; Kölbel 2003), epistemic modals (Egan 2007; Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson 2005; MacFarlane 2011b; Stephenson 2007), future contingents (MacFarlane 2003), indicative conditionals (Weatherson 2009; Kolodny & MacFarlane 2010) gradable adjectives (Richard 2004), deontic modals (Kolodny & MacFarlane 2010 and MacFarlane 2014: ch. 11) and knowledge attributions (Richard 2004); MacFarlane 2005b, 2011c, 2014). The motivations for truth-relativism in each of these domains include various considerations unique to those domains. We consider some of the arguments for New Relativism in four of these domains in the following sections.

One area of discourse that has been particularly fertile ground for New Relativism is discourse that concerns predicates of personal taste (e.g., "tasty" and "fun".)

Take a case where Mary says: "The chili is tasty" and John says, "The chili is not tasty". Lasersohn argues (much as Kölbel does) that only the truth-relativist can make sense of the nature of John and Mary's disagreement: It is a genuine disagreement. One affirms what the other denies. And yet neither is wrong. Lasersohn argues that there is an elegant way to make sense of the idea that John and Mary are both (in some sense) right, even though John asserts the negation of what is expressed by Mary. What Lasersohn) suggests, more formally, is the introduction of a judge parameter.

Instead of treating the content of a sentence as a set of time-world pairs, we should treat it as a set of time-world-individual triples. We assume that the content will provide an individual to be used in evaluating the sentences for truth and falsity, just as it provides a time and world. (Lasersohn: 2005: 17)

Lasersohn adds (2005: 23) that in order to maintain an authentically subjective assignment of truth-values to sentences containing predicates of personal taste, we must allow that the objective facts of the situation of utterance do not uniquely determine a judge. But who is the judge? Typically, it is us, and when it is, the evaluation is from what Lasersohn calls an autocentric perspective. Importantly, Lasersohn allows that in certain circumstances we take an exocentric perspective when assessing predicates of personal taste: assessing these sentences for truth relative to contexts in which someone other than ourselves is specified as the judge ( cf. "Come on, it'll be fun!" "Is this fun?" (2005: 26); cf. Stanley (2005: 10) for a response to Lasersohn's program).

Kölbel's (2003) faultless disagreement argument for relativism about predicates of personal taste features a "proof" that there is no faultless disagreement followed by a demonstration that the proof is indefensible. The proof proceeds from two premises: an equivalence schema

and an apparent truism about mistakes:

(T)

It is a mistake to believe a proposition that is not true.

(ES) and (T) generate the conclusion that there is no faultless disagreement through the following proof (see also Wright 2001:52)

But because Kölbel takes (9) to be implausible in what Kölbel takes to be "discretionary" (non-objective, as Kölbel sees it) areas of discourse he contends that we should introduce a relativized version of (T) to avoid the conclusion that at least one party has made a mistake.

(T***)

It is a mistake to believe a discretionary proposition that is not true as evaluated from one's own perspective. (2003: 70)

Kölbel claims further that, for reasons of uniformity, we should "relativize truth of all propositions across the board..." and he accordingly endorses the following version of truth relativism:

(TR)

It is a mistake to believe a proposition that is not true in one's own perspective. (2003: 70).

Kölbel (2003: 71) thinks that this position allows the possibility of maintaining that faultless disagreement is impossible in some non-discretionary (objective) areas, and this will depend on the relation of perspective possession (but see also Boghossian 2011 for the contrary view). An implication of the position is that Kölbel's view will allow assertions of the form: "Pretzels are not tasty, though John believes they are. And yet John is not mistaken". For other discussions of faultless disagreement, see Richard (2008), MacFarlane (2012, 2014: ch. 6), and Zeman (2019). For an attempt to countenance faultless disagreement within an absolutist framework, see Baker & Robson (2017).

There is a version of moral relativism (e.g., Kölbel 2004) that falls squarely within the New Relativist tradition. We can think of this relativism simply as a generalization of the position just discussed that treats moral terms (e.g., "right", "good") as assessment-sensitive along with predicates of personal taste.

Such an extension faces problems analogous to those faced by truth-relativists about predicates of personal taste (cf. Beebe (2010) for a helpful discussion of truth-relativist semantics versus varieties of contextualist competitors).

A broader kind of problem for this semantic thesis (as well as to moral relativists more generally), raised by Coliva and Moruzzi (2012) is that it succumbs to the progress argument, an argument that famously challenges, in particular, cultural relativists (as well as indexical contextualists) about moral judgments by insisting that moral progress is both evident and not something the relativist can countenance (e.g., Rachels 2009). A third and particularly important kind of worry, addressed by Capps, Lynch and Massey (2009), involves explaining the source and nature of moral relativity, on a truth-relativist framework. Specifically, they claim that

we ought to have some account of why it is that truth in the moral domain is such that it varies with a parameter set by the context of assessment. (Capps, Lynch & Massey 2009: 416)

An additional problem concerns the plausibility of simply extending disagreement based arguments for relativism about predicates of personal taste over to moral predicates like 'right' and 'good'. As Wedgwood (2019) has suggested, moral disagreements, in a way that is disanalogous to disagreements about what's tasty, implicate a kind of 'inexcusable irrationality' (2019: 97)-at least, if the moral truths that constitute moral principles are a priori knowable. To the extent that there is a difference in inexcusability across the two cases of disagreement, it would be contentious to think that an argument from 'faultless disagreement' to relativism in the arena of predicates of personal taste would extend, mutatis mutandis, to an analogous argument in the moral arena.

...statements of epistemic possibility in plain English do not make any explicit reference to such a person, group, evidence set, or information state. One of the key issues confronting a semanticist attempting to theorize about epistemic modals is what to do about this lack of reference.

Eavesdropper-style cases highlight the difficulty of determining exactly which individual's or group's body of information is relevant to the truth of claims of epistemic possibility and are taken by defenders of truth-relativism about epistemic modals to motivate their position. A variety of different eavesdropper cases have been given by different proponents (and attempted refuters) of truth-relativism about epistemic modals in the literature. For ease of exposition, we will use an especially simple version of the case, from Hawthorne's (2007), slightly amended:

EAVESDROPPER: [Sandra] is on the way to the grocery store. I hear her say: "Susan might be at the store. I could run into her". No party to the conversation that I am listening in on knows that Susan is on vacation. But I know that she is. Despite the fact that it is compatible with what the conversants know that Susan is in the store and that the speaker will run into her, I am inclined to judge the speaker's [Sandra's] modal judgments to be incorrect. (Hawthorne 2007: 92)

Egan (2007), Egan, Hawthorne and Weatherson (2005) and MacFarlane (2011b) share a similar set of diagnoses here: (i) it seems that while Sandra and I disagree about the truth value of Sandra's statement, neither she nor I have made a mistake; (ii) the contextualist can't explain this; (iii) the truth-relativist can.

Why can't the contextualist explain this? As noted, the truth of claims expressing epistemic modals must depend on what some individual or group knows. But in these cases the context of use does not pick out a single such individual or group. After all, if it did, then either Sandra or I would be wrong, but it seems that neither of us is. That the context of use does not uniquely pick out one relevant body of knowledge for determining the truth of epistemic modal statements is not, as MacFarlane notes, something that can be accommodated by "the framework of contextualism, which requires that the relevant body of knowledge be determined by features of the context of use". (MacFarlane 2011c)

Additionally, as Egan and Weatherson (2011) suggest, any contextualist account of the semantics of epistemic modals that could handle eavesdropper-style cases in a principled way would be hideously complicated. This motivates a metasemantic argument against contextualism (and a corresponding argument for relativism): if contextualism about epistemic modals is correct, then the semantics for epistemic modals will be hideously complicated; the semantics is not hideously complicated on the truth-relativist's proposal, therefore, ceteris paribus, truth-relativism for epistemic modals is more plausible than contextualism. However, Glanzberg (2007) notably denies that metasemantic complexity in this case must be problematic.

How can the relativist accommodate eavesdropper cases? MacFarlane (2011b) articulates the relativist solution: Sandra and I disagree about the truth-value of a single proposition, the proposition that Susan might be at the store. This proposition, even when fully articulated, makes no reference to any particular body of knowledge. But such propositions cannot be true or false simpliciter. They are true only relative to a context of assessment that includes a body of knowledge. In this case, the proposition is true relative to a context of assessment where what Sandra knows is operative-a context in which Sandra is the evaluator-and false relative to a context of assessment where what I know is operative because I am the evaluator. Thus: both disagreement and faultlessness are preserved ( cf. Ross & Schroeder 2013 for criticism and Kindermann & Egan (2019) for an alternative proposal).

Along with MacFarlane, Egan (2007) and Stephenson (2007) have also offered positive defenses of truth-relativism about epistemic modals; their defenses share MacFarlane's view that propositions expressing epistemic modals are non-specific along dimensions that include the body of information possessed by a judge or assessor.

More recently, experimental philosophy has contributed to this debate. Empirical studies reported by Knobe & Yalcin (2014) and Khoo (2015) indicate that folk judgments about the truth of claims featuring epistemic modals aligns more closely with what contextualism rather than relativism would predict. However, see Beddor and Egan (2019) for experimental results that are argued to better support (a version of) relativism than contextualism.

Propositions termed "future contingents" are about the future and their truth-values are not settled by the state of the world in the past or present (see entry on Future Contingents, and MacFarlane 2014: ch. 9). In a deterministic world there are no future contingent statements in this sense. But in an indeterministic world, statements partly about the future will often satisfy these conditions. Consider Aristotle's oft-cited example: the proposition There will be a sea battle tomorrow, uttered at t. Contrast now two intuitions: the determinacy intuition that utterances that "turned out true" were true at the time of utterance; and the indeterminacy intuition that, at the time of the utterance, multiple histories are possible, including one where there was a sea battle and the proposition is true, and one where there was not, and the proposition is false. The indeterminacy intuition leads us to think the truth-value of future contingents is indeterminate at the time of utterance, and either true or false at a later time ( cf. MacFarlane 2003; Carter 2011).

John MacFarlane (2003) thinks that both the indeterminacy intuition and the determinacy intuition should be taken at face value and that the only way to account for the semantics of future contingents is to allow the truth of future contingent statements to be, as he puts it, doubly relativized: to both the context of utterance and the context of assessment. When we evaluate a single token utterance of "There will be a sea battle tomorrow" produced on (say) Monday, this counts as neither true nor false when the context of assessment is the context in which the utterance is being made (as multiple possible histories are open at this point). However the very same statement will have a determinate truth-value relative to the context of assessment of the following day. So we can have faultless transtemporal disagreement about the truth-value of a single utterance (MacFarlane 2003: 36; cf. Carter 2011).

MacFarlane (2005b) argues that "know" is sensitive to the epistemic standards at play in the context of assessment; that is, the extension of "know" varies with the context of assessment. Much as the relativist about future contingents aimed to accommodate both the determinacy and indeterminacy intuitions, the relativist about knowledge attributions can be viewed as offering an attempted synthesis between the contextualist and both sensitive and insensitive varieties of invariantist (see entry on Epistemic Contextualism). As MacFarlane (2014: 190) puts it:

Invariantism is right that there is a single knowledge relation, and that the accuracy of knowledge ascriptions does not depend on which epistemic standard is relevant at the context of use. But contextualism is right that the accuracy of such ascriptions depends somehow on contextually relevant standards. Relativism seeks to synthesize these insights into a more satisfactory picture.

To apply this view, suppose George says, "Bill knows that his car is in the driveway", while Barry says, "Bill doesn't know that his car is in the driveway". According to the relativist, the assessment of the truth-values of Bill's and Barry's statements depends also on the specification of some epistemic standard. For the truth-relativist, the standard will be the operative standard in the context of assessment. George's utterance may be true (and Barry's false) relative to a context of assessment in which ordinary "low" standards are in place, whereas Barry's may be true (and George's false) relative to a context of assessment in which high "Cartesian" standards are in place. See Stanley (2005: ch. 7) for a detailed criticism of this position, though see also MacFarlane (2014: §8.5 for a reply). See also Richard (2004), for another version of truth-relativism for knowledge attributions. In MacFarlane's more recent (2014) defense of a truth-relativist semantics for "knows", the context of assessment is taken to fix which alternatives count as relevant. See, however, Carter 2015 for an argument that MacFarlane's more recent view generates counterintuitive results in cases of environmental epistemic luck (e.g., barn façade-style cases) and normative defeaters.

We turn now to two general arguments against New Relativism in all its forms. The first is an argument from assertion, the second an argument from simplicity.

Two assertion-related objections to New Relativism arise from work by Gareth Evans (1985) and Robert Stalnaker (1978), respectively. Greenough (2010: 2) concisely captures Evans's challenge to truth-relativism on assertoric grounds as follows:

(1)

The question "What should [an assertor] aim at?" is a legitimate question.

(2)

Any legitimate answer to this question will generate a once-and-for-all answer.

(3)

Any once-and-for-all answer is incompatible with Truth-Relativism

(4)

Therefore, Truth Relativism is ruled out.

The relativist must plausibly take issue with (2) or (3), (or both). For an attempt to meet Evans' challenge, MacFarlane has defended a way to effectively reject (2) via what Marques has called a "meet-the-challenge" norm of assertion ( cf. MacFarlane 2003; though see also his 2014: ch. 5; cf., Stanley 2016: 181-2)-according to which ( à la Brandom 1983), in asserting p one undertakes a commitment to either defending p or giving up p if the challenge cannot be met satisfactorily (see Kölbel (2004: 308) for some other discussions of this objection).

A related assertion-based challenge to truth-relativism emerges by appeal to Stalnaker's (1978) belief transfer model of assertion ( cf. 2011). The idea here is to appeal to a plausible view of the purpose of assertion-to "transfer beliefs from assertor to members of her audience" (Egan 2007: 15) and then to object that what is asserted, according to the truth-relativist, cannot play this characteristic role; specifically, this will be because, for the truth-relativist, the asserted contents are liable to be true relative to the speaker but false relative to the audience. For instance, Sam hardly (on the truth-relativist's program) seems to "transfer" to Dean his belief Apples are tasty (which is true) by asserting this to Dean, when what Dean comes to believe Apples are tasty is something (on the assumption that Dean doesn't like apples) that will be false. Thus, and more generally, it's not clear what, exactly, could be said to be transferred and a fortiori asserted. See Egan (2007) and Dinges (2017) for attempts to reconcile truth-relativism (about epistemic modals) with Stalnaker's belief-transfer model of assertion.

Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) assess the merits of New Relativism as it stands to challenge what they take to be the received view of the objects of thought and talk, "Simplicity", the core tenets of which are:

(T1)

There are propositions and they instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter.

(T2)

The semantic values of declarative sentences relative to contexts of utterance are propositions.

(T3)

Propositions are, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes, such as belief, hope, wish, doubt.

(T4)

Propositions are the objects of illocutionary acts; they are, e.g., what we assert and deny.

(T5)

Propositions are the objects of agreement and disagreement. (Cappelen & Hawthorne 2009: 1)

Cappelen and Hawthorne understand New Relativism (what they call analytic relativism) as a direct challenge to (T1) and that, if this challenge were successful, it would consequently bring down the more general picture they call "simplicity" (cf., Ferrari & Wright 2017). Accordingly, Cappelen and Hawthorne's central objective is to show that truth-relativist's arguments aimed at undermining (T1) are ultimately unsuccessful; more specifically, their broad strategy is to insist that the arguments adduced in favor of truth-relativism-when thoroughly understood-constitute a presumptive case for contextualism (in the domains where relativism was defended, and in particular, in the domain of predicates of personal taste).

Relativism comes in a plethora of forms that are themselves grounded in disparate philosophical motivations. There is no such thing as Relativism simpliciter, and no single argument that would establish or refute every relativistic position that has been proposed. Despite this diversity, however, there are commonalities and family resemblances that justify the use of the label "relativism" for the various views we have discussed. Relativism remains a hotly disputed topic still surviving various attempts to eliminate it from philosophical discourse. What is most surprising, however, is the recent popularity of some versions of the doctrine in at least some circles of analytic philosophy.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The label "relativism" has been attached to a wide range of ideas and positions which may explain the lack of consensus on how the term should be defined. The profusion of the use of the term "relativism" in contemporary philosophy means that there is no ready consensus on any one definition.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientific Explanation and Moral Explanation

# data[].attributes.body
Pursuit of TOK?
: What does it mean by knowing something?
: How do we know?
"we can say that truth is a condition of knowledge; that is, if a belief is not true, it cannot constitute knowledge. Accordingly, if there is no such thing as truth, then there can be no knowledge. Even if there is such a thing as truth, if there is a domain in which there are no truths, then there can be no knowledge within that domain. (For example, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then a belief that something is beautiful cannot be true or false, and thus cannot constitute knowledge.)"

# data[].attributes.body
Good Explanation
Truth

Good: Something that fulfills the condition in all AOK (Ethical consideration, other AOK if intersects)
- "Must exist"???

# data[].attributes.body
Hempel's Theory of Explanation

# data[].attributes.body
* Correspondence Theory
(G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell)
: What we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are – to the facts

* Neo-classical correspondence theory
: A belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity – a fact – to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity (a thing with distinct and independent existence), the belief is false

*

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

Ascriptions of truth give rise to an explanatory asymmetry. For instance, we accept '<Rex is barking> is true because Rex is barking' but reject 'Rex is barking because <Rex is barking> is true'. Benjamin Schnieder and other philosophers have recently proposed a fresh explanation of this asymmetry: they have suggested that the asymmetry has a conceptual rather than a metaphysical source. The main business of this paper is to assess this proposal, both on its own terms and as an option for deflationists. I offer a pair of objections to the proposal and defend them from counter-objections. To conclude, I discuss how else to explain the asymmetry, and set out the implications for deflationism and correspondence theories of truth.

I. THE TRUTH ASYMMETRY

Suppose there is a dog called Rex. Furthermore, suppose that <Rex is barking>―that is, the proposition that Rex is barking―is true. Why is it true? The obvious explanation is that Rex is barking. If Rex is barking, it is no surprise that <Rex is barking> is true. Suppose we now turn our attention to Rex's behaviour and ask for an explanation of why he is barking. There may be many possible explanations: perhaps he has smelt a canine rival, or perhaps he is reminding his owner it is dinnertime. However we explain Rex's barking, we will not point to the possession of a semantic property by an invisible, intangible entity. In particular, we will not explain Rex's behaviour by pointing out that <Rex is barking> is true. Thus, we have an explanatory asymmetry: we accept

(A) <Rex is barking> is true because Rex is barking.

but reject

(ConA) Rex is barking because <Rex is barking> is true.

It is important that 'because' is read here as indicating an explanation. Perhaps there is another sense of 'because' in which (ConA) is true―say, a sense in which 'because' marks a valid inference.

Substituting other truths for 'Rex is barking' yields many similar cases. I call this phenomenon the truth asymmetry.

That there is an explanatory asymmetry here is not particularly surprising: there are few if any cases where we explain why p by pointing out that q and also explain why q by pointing out that p. If there are virtuous explanatory circles, they have a greater radius than that. But the asymmetry gives rise to an interesting question: Why does the explanation run in the direction it does? In other words, why is (A) right and (ConA) wrong? To answer these questions is to explain the truth asymmetry.

Many philosophers are attracted to deflationist accounts of truth. One deflationist, Paul Horwich, offered an explanation of the asymmetry in his 1998, but Horwich's explanation is widely believed to fail (as I will discuss in Section II). More recently, Benjamin Schnieder and other philosophers have offered a fresh explanation of the asymmetry: they have suggested that the asymmetry has its source in the concept of truth (Section III). The main business of this paper is to assess this proposal, both on its own terms and as an option for deflationists. I will offer a pair of objections to the proposal (Section IV) and defend them from counter-objections (Section V). To conclude, I discuss how else to explain the asymmetry, and set out the implications for deflationism and correspondence theories of truth (Section VI).

II. HORWICH'S EXPLANATION

Horwich's deflationism has four tenets.

Truth has no underlying nature.

To possess the concept of truth is to be disposed to believe the T-biconditionals.

The function of 'true' is expressive.

The T-biconditionals explain the phenomena of truth.

Let me briefly introduce these.

Some philosophers think that truth is correspondence to fact. Others think that truth is membership of a coherent set. Horwich rejects all such identifications and maintains that we can explain the phenomena of truth without their help. This is what is meant by the claim that truth has no underlying nature―tenet (i) (cf. Horwich 1998: 141-5).

Where the concept of truth is concerned, Horwich is similarly economical ( 1998: 136, 2001: 158, 159, 164 n. 23). He holds that to possess the concept of truth is to be disposed to believe the propositions expressed by instances of the schema:

(where 'iff' expresses the material biconditional). This is tenet (ii). Following David ( 2005), I'll call these propositions T-biconditionals.

Tenet (iii) concerns the predicate 'true'. Deflationists face the question of why we bother applying this predicate to anything, and their answer (following Quine 1970: 10-13) is that the predicate 'true' performs an expressive function. The idea is that the function of 'true' is to allow us to generalize and thus enhance our expressive power. For instance, 'What John said is true' gives me a quick way of endorsing John's claim, however long and complicated it was, and regardless of whether I know what he said, or even am in a position to understand it. Horwich ( 1998: 33) claims that we have the predicate 'true' because it performs this function. That is how I will understand (iii). (Note that Horwich's view is nothing to do with the position in metaethics known as 'expressivism'; in particular, Horwich does not deny that ascriptions of truth are truth-evaluable.)

Tenet (iv) is that the T-biconditionals explain the phenomena of truth: for instance, that material implication preserves truth, that true beliefs tend to lead to success in action, and that true theories yield accurate predictions. According to Horwich (1998: 23-5), we need assume no more about truth than the T-biconditionals to explain such phenomena. We may need to invoke principles that do not concern truth, but the only claims about truth required are the T-biconditionals.

Given tenet (iv), we would expect Horwich to offer an explanation of the truth asymmetry which appeals to no claims about truth other than T-biconditionals. This is what Horwich does: he argues that his deflationist theory leads to something very similar to (A), namely:

(1) <Snow is white> is true because snow is white.

Horwich writes:

In mapping out the relations of explanatory dependence between phenomena, we naturally and properly grant ultimate explanatory priority to such things as the basic laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe. From these facts we attempt to deduce, and thereby explain, why, for example,

(2) Snow is white.

And only then, invoking the minimal theory, do we deduce, and thereby explain, why

(3) <Snow is white> is true. (Horwich 1998: 105, numbering altered)

This is how Horwich offers to explain the direction of the truth asymmetry. Notice that (1) explains the truth of <Snow is white> in terms of snow's being white; so the part of Horwich's account which concerns how to explain why snow is white is irrelevant. The same account should apply even if the colour of snow could not be explained in Horwich's way, or even if it could not be explained at all (Künne 2003: 156, 157; Wright 1992: 27). Stripped of irrelevance, Horwich's argument is that his theory explains (A) because the following deduction is valid:

(2) Snow is white.

(E-Snow) <Snow is white> is true iff snow is white. (Instance of ( E)).

The problem with Horwich's argument is that, since (E-Snow) is a biconditional, the following deduction is also valid:

(E-Snow) <Snow is white> is true iff snow is white.

(2) Snow is white.

So if Horwich's theory implies (A), it implies (ConA) as well. But this means it cannot explain the asymmetry (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005: 27). Moreover, this casts doubt on Horwich's claim that his theory implies (A), because (as we have seen) it is implausible that both (A) and (ConA) hold. It was never very plausible to think that the mere deducibility of (3) gives us (1): a familiar point from the philosophy of science is that entailment is insufficient for explanation (see Bromberger 1966). So Horwich's discussion of (A) does not indicate any way for deflationists to explain the truth asymmetry.

The failure of Horwich's explanation should make us doubt that his form of deflationism can be used to explain the truth asymmetry. Horwich's starting point is the T-biconditionals, and these are entirely symmetrical. Even if Rex is barking, there is no way to get from the symmetrical biconditional

<Rex is barking> is true iff Rex is barking.

to the asymmetrical explanation

<Rex is barking> is true because Rex is barking.

(Künne 2003: 151, 152; Vision 2004: 118, 119). So the T-biconditionals do not suffice to explain the asymmetry. But if Horwich employs other claims about truth to explain the asymmetry, then he renounces his deflationism by renouncing tenet (iv).

III. THE PROPOSED CONCEPTUAL EXPLANATION OF THE ASYMMETRY

As Gupta ( 1993) and David ( 2002) have argued, it is very hard to explain the phenomena of truth using only the T-biconditionals and principles that do not concern truth. Let us consider a weakened version of Horwich's view, which I'll call mild deflationism. This is just the same as deflationism except that tenet (iv)―that the T-biconditionals explain the phenomena of truth―is replaced with

(iv′) The phenomena of truth can be explained by the T-biconditionals and tenets (i)-(iii).

Spelled out more fully, (iv′) says that we need assume no more about truth than the T-biconditionals and tenets (i)-(iii) to explain the phenomena of truth; we may also need to invoke principles that do not concern truth.

Can mild deflationism explain the truth asymmetry? It is hard to see how truth's lack of underlying nature [tenet (i)] or the expressive function of 'true' [tenet (iii)] could help explain the asymmetry, but tenet (ii) (that the T-biconditionals exhaust the concept of truth) is more promising. Expanding on a suggestion in Künne ( 2003: 154, 155), Schnieder ( 2006b: 35, 36, 2006a: 404-6) offers an explanation of the truth asymmetry of this sort. Dodd ( 2007: 399, 400) makes similar claims, and Horwich himself has recently done so as well, albeit in just two sentences ( 2008: 266 n. 13). The most developed explanation is Schnieder's. I will argue that it is unacceptable. (I should mention, for the record, that Schnieder does not commit himself to deflationism.)

Schnieder isolates a class of explanations which he dubs 'conceptual explanations'. His examples of conceptual explanations include:

(E1) Xanthippe became a widow, because Socrates died.

(E2) This vase is coloured because it is red.

Schnieder ( 2006a: 32) tells us that conceptual explanations are non-causal and 'are based on certain conceptual relations'. For instance, we can relate the concept widow to other concepts by analysing it as woman whose husband has died. According to Schnieder, (E1) is based on these conceptual relations. He holds that not all conceptual explanations rest on a conceptual analysis. For instance, the concept being coloured cannot be analysed in terms of the concepts of particular colours, but (E2) is still a conceptual explanation, since it is based on a conceptual relation: that being red is sufficient for being coloured. Although Schnieder does not use the term 'analytic', it seems fair to report him as believing that for every conceptual explanation there is a corresponding analytic truth―a sentence true in virtue of its meaning―which records the conceptual connection on which the explanation rests: for instance, 'Something is a widow if and only if it is a woman whose husband has died' for (E1), and 'If something is red, it is coloured' for (E2).

In both (E1) and (E2), the concepts invoked in the explanandum are arguably more complex than those invoked in the explanans. Schnieder holds that this holds more generally:

[A]s the order of explanation (explanations are in general asymmetric) is determined, in the case of causal explanations, by the order of the causal relation itself, it will be owed to factors of conceptual complexity and primitiveness in the case of conceptual explanation. In general, statements involving complex or elaborated concepts are explained with recourse to more primitive concepts (which may or may not enter into an analysis of the complex concepts). (Schnieder 2006a: 406)

This principle offers mild deflationists a possible explanation of the truth asymmetry. According to Schnieder, the explanation flows in the direction it does because of the conceptual relations between true and other concepts. He claims that it is 'constitutive of our mastery' of the concept of truth to accept instances of

He continues:

This fact about the concept of truth gives rise to the correctness of (T) [∀ p: If it is true that p at all, then it is true that p, because p] and its instances. The explanatory force of (T) is comparable to that in the examples of conceptual explanations discussed so far; it is an explanation of a proposition employing a logically elaborate concept, the concept expressed by 'true', by a conceptually simpler proposition. This latter proposition does not employ concepts which enter into an analysis of the concept expressed by 'true'; truth is not analysable in terms of the concepts expressed by 'white' and 'snow', because someone can have a grasp of the concept of truth without knowing anything about snow or the colour white. But mastery of the concept is constituted by the ability to relate statements involving it to statements involving only conceptual resources already at hand. ( 2006a: 36, footnotes removed)

Schnieder's idea is that, although none of the T-biconditionals is a conceptual analysis of 'true', each of them is an analytic truth. To use a phrase of Künne's ( 2003: 155), the right-hand side of each one 'elucidates the sense' of the left. For instance, 'Snow is white' elucidates the sense of '<Snow is white> is true'. Speaking schematically: if p, then the explanation '< p> is true because p' is based on the conceptual relations which underpin the sentence '< p> is true iff p'. For instance, (A) is based on the conceptual relations which underpin the sentence '<Rex is barking> is true iff Rex is barking '. And the explanations run in the direction they do―Schnieder claims―because '< p> is true' is of greater conceptual complexity than ' p'.

IV. TWO PROBLEMS FOR THE CONCEPTUAL EXPLANATION

It would be good to be given a fuller account of just what conceptual complexity is, and to be told more about how to compare the conceptual complexity of two statements. But Schnieder's account is detailed enough to be going on with. I'll argue that even if we grant Schnieder all his claims about conceptual complexity, his explanation of the asymmetry runs into two major difficulties.

The first difficulty for Schnieder's explanation is that, although the instances of ( E) are often assumed to be analytic, they are actually poor candidates for analyticity. To see this, note that if such a sentence as

(E-tiger) <All tigers are tigers> is true iff all tigers are tigers.

is analytic, then so is the logical truth 'All tigers are tigers'. But these jointly logically entail that <All tigers are tigers> is true. And that entails that there is something, namely <All tigers are tigers>. So if (E-tiger) is analytic, we have a purely conceptual proof that there is something rather than nothing. (For a similar argument, see Halbach 2001: 179.) But this is fishy. It is plausible to think that the lesson of the ontological argument is that conceptual truths lack ontological entailments. Field ( 1989: 5) puts the point well: 'An investigation of conceptual linkages can reveal conditions that things must satisfy if they are to fall under our concepts; but it can't yield that there are things that satisfy those concepts (as Kant pointed out in his critique of the ontological argument for the existence of God).' If Field is right, the instances of ( E) are not conceptual truths, because they logically entail existence claims. That means that the conceptual connections required to support conceptual explanation are absent. And in that case Schnieder's account of the asymmetry fails.

There are further reasons to doubt the analyticity of the instances of ( E). On many accounts of propositions, some propositions contain contingently existing things and are therefore contingent existents themselves. For example, if Rex is a component of <Rex is barking>, then <Rex is barking> would not have existed if Rex had not. And the same goes for <Rex does not exist>. But that means that the sentence

<Rex does not exist> is true iff Rex does not exist.

is only contingently true: it would not have been true if Rex had failed to exist, for if Rex had failed to exist, the sentence would not have expressed a proposition. (Fine 1977: 136, makes a similar point.) Since the sentence does not possess any of the familiar sources of contingent analyticity (for example, it is free of indexicals), its contingency casts doubt on its analyticity (see David 2005: 387-92). The plausibility of these popular accounts of propositions therefore challenges the analyticity of the instances of ( E).

The second difficulty for Schnieder's explanation of the truth asymmetry concerns the very idea of conceptual explanation. Let us go back to Schnieder's initial examples:

(E1) Xanthippe became a widow, because Socrates died.

(E2) This vase is coloured because it is red.

It is appealing to think that these explanations rest on conceptual relations. But it is striking that the explananda have nothing to do with concepts: they concern a particular woman and a particular vase. It is hard to see how the fact that the concept widow can be analysed as woman whose husband has died bears on the explanation of why Xanthippe became a widow. Similarly, even though it is a conceptual truth that everything red is coloured, it remains to be seen how that conceptual connection is relevant to the explanation of why the vase is coloured. Prima facie, these facts about concepts are irrelevant to the phenomena to be explained. Admittedly, Xanthippe falls under the concept widow and the vase falls under the concept coloured, but then each thing falls under many concepts. How do concepts help us to explain why someone is a widow or why a particular vase is coloured?

For a parallel, let us switch from concepts to predicates. Each thing satisfies many predicates: for instance, Xanthippe satisfies the predicate 'is a widow' and the vase satisfies the predicate 'is coloured'. These predicates are related to others: for instance, something satisfies 'is a widow' just in case it satisfies 'is a woman whose husband has died', and something satisfies 'is coloured' if it falls under 'is red'. But it is far from clear how these relations between predicates could help explain the phenomena allegedly explained in (E1) and (E2). Schnieder and other proponents of conceptual explanation make the surprising claim that concepts do help. They need to explain how they help-and it is not clear how to go about doing this. The point is independent of any particular theory of the nature of concepts. Some philosophers regard concepts as abstract objects; others think of them as mental representations or mental capacities (see Margolis and Laurence 2007). In each case, we are entitled to an account of the relevance of these entities. Let me emphasize that my aim is not to cast doubt on (E1) and (E2), but on whether facts about concepts 'give rise to their correctness' (as Schnieder puts it).

Consider:

(E1-C) Xanthippe falls under widow, because Socrates died.

(E2-C) This vase falls under coloured because it is red.

These seem to be good explanations. The explananda are closely related to the explananda of (E1) and (E2). In (E1-C) and in (E2-C), we explain why a certain concept applies to an object by citing the fulfilment of a sufficient condition for its application. Take (E1-C). For someone to fall under the concept widow, it is sufficient for them to be a woman whose husband has died. That follows from the fact, highlighted by Schnieder, that widow can be analysed as woman whose husband has died. To anyone who knows that Socrates was Xanthippe's husband, (E1-C) explains the applicability of widow by citing the fulfilment of the condition. Similarly, (E2-C) explains why the vase falls under coloured by appeal to a sufficient condition for falling under coloured-being red. Its sufficiency follows from a fact about conceptual relations, namely, the fact that falling under red is sufficient for falling under coloured.

My purpose in introducing these explanations is to explain away the appeal of the idea that (E1) and (E2) are conceptual explanations in Schnieder's sense. There are good explanations in the vicinity which rely on conceptual relations, namely, (E1-C) and (E2-C). The difference between (E1-C) and (E1) is subtle, as is the difference between (E2-C) and (E2). For most purposes, the distinction between being a widow and falling under widow is of no importance, for instance. So it is plausible that our intuitive feeling that (E1) and (E2) must have something to do with conceptual relations really stems from the fact that (E1-C) and (E2-C) do have to do with conceptual relations (in the manner just described), combined with a failure to register the-usually unimportant-distinctions between (E1-C) and (E1), and between (E2-C) and (E2). Let us call this the conceptual proposal.

Consider also these explanations:

(E1-P) Xanthippe satisfies 'is a widow', because Socrates died.

(E2-P) This vase satisfies 'is coloured' because it 'is red'.

These are further examples of good explanations which owe their success to conceptual relations. Suppose the predicate 'F' applies to all and only the things which fall under the concept Fness, and suppose the predicate 'G' applies to all and only the things which fall under the concept Gness. Suppose furthermore that Fness and Gness are related in such a way that falling under Fness is sufficient for falling under Gness (for instance, perhaps Fness can be analysed as Gness). Then satisfying 'F' suffices for satisfying 'G'. That means, in turn, that we can explain why something satisfies 'G' by describing it as F (that is, by applying 'F' to it). Explanations (E1-P) and (E2-C) thus trade on conceptual relations. Now such distinctions as the distinction between being red and satisfying 'red' are typically of no importance. So we have another reason to expect that we will be tempted to regard (E1) and (E2) as having something to do with conceptual relations: (E1-P) and (E2-P) trade on conceptual relations and the respective differences between these and (E1) and (E2) are unimportant, so it is no wonder that we might think that (E1) and (E2) rely on conceptual relations for their correctness. Let us call this the metalinguistic proposal. (The metalinguistic proposal expands on a suggestion of Mark Johnston's; see his 1993: 330.)

One of Künne's examples of conceptual explanation is as follows.

(R*) He is your first cousin because he is a child of a sibling of one of your parents.

Regarding

(S*) The statement that snow is white is true, because snow is white,

Künne (2003: 155) writes: '[W]e can understand (S*) along the same lines as (R*). Why is it correct to say of him that he is your first cousin? The second clause of (R*) gives the answer. Why is it correct to say of the statement that snow is white that it is true? The second clause of (S*) gives the answer.' Notice that Künne writes 'Why is it correct to say of him that he is your first cousin?', not 'Why is he your first cousin?', and 'Why is it correct to say of the statement that snow is white that it is true?', rather than 'Why is the statement that snow is white true?'. Elsewhere, Künne maintains: '[I]f the statement that there are no Martians is true, then it is true because there are no Martians. This claim explains why 'true' is correctly applied to a certain statement if it is applied to it at all ....' (p. 165). These passages suggest that Künne has confused the explanation of why something is true with the explanation of why 'true' applies to it. My challenge to Schnieder is to establish that his explanation of the truth asymmetry does not rely on any such confusion.

V. REPLIES TO OBJECTIONS

V.i. A severe confusion?

Schnieder (2010) contains, in effect, a defence of conceptual explanation against the second objection I have given. The defence is partial because Schnieder only considers the metalinguistic proposal, not the conceptual proposal, and because he does not consider the role of concepts in giving rise to the correctness of metalinguistic explanations such as (E1-P) and (E2-P). In addition, he presupposes that advocates of the metalinguistic proposal will deny (E1) and (E2) and will try to explain away their apparent truth. The objection I am exploring here does not involve denying (E1) or (E2), although it does involve denying that facts about concepts 'give rise to their correctness'. Still, the proposals are sufficiently similar that it is worth assessing whether Schnieder's defence causes my objection any trouble.

Schnieder offers two main counter-arguments, the first of which rests on the idea that the metalinguistic proposal attributes to us an unacceptably severe confusion. Schnieder suggests that, according to that proposal, we confuse

(B1) A bachelor is a bachelor because he is an unmarried male.

with

(B1′) A bachelor is correctly called 'bachelor' because he is an unmarried male.

and also confuse

(B2) Donald is a bachelor because he is an unmarried male.

with

(B2′) Donald is correctly called 'bachelor' because he is an unmarried male.

But―if we ignore sceptical arguments about apriority―(B1) is a priori, whereas (B1′) is a posteriori. Moreover, (B1) is necessary, whereas (B1′) is contingent. Schnieder writes (2010: 334): 'The confusion that is ascribed to people who mistake [(B1)] for [(B1′)]―or [(B2)] for [(B2′)]―is quite a severe one'. And he implies that it is wrong to ascribe such a degree of confusion to us.

Let me make two comments on this argument. Firstly, (B2) and (B2′) are red herrings. Since they both imply that Donald is a bachelor, both of them are contingent and a posteriori. We can run them together without falling into modal or epistemological confusion.

Secondly, even if we concede the differences in modal and epistemological status between (B1) and (B1′), it should be unsurprising that we are prone to confuse claims which differ in this way. A disposition to make use-mention errors is widespread, as every philosophy teacher knows, and it is clear that such errors lead us to confuse claims which differ in modal and epistemological status. For instance, it is a priori and necessary that everything is self-identical, but it is a posteriori and contingent that everything is correctly called 'self-identical'-so if one confuses being self-identical with being correctly called 'self-identical', one will confuse an a priori necessity with an a posteriori contingency. Only if we are not prone to make use-mention confusions is it wrong to portray us as liable to confuse claims which differ in modal and epistemological status. But we are prone to make use-mention confusions, so it is not wrong to portray us as liable to confuse claims which differ in modal and epistemological status. It is therefore not at all clear that my objection attributes to us an unacceptable degree of confusion.

V.2. Overgeneration?

The second counter-argument (Schnieder 2010: 334, 335) maintains that the metalinguistic proposal makes an erroneous prediction. It predicts that we will accept

(D1) Donald is an unmarried male because he is a bachelor.

because we accept

(D1′) Donald is correctly called 'unmarried male' because he is a bachelor.

and mistake being an unmarried male for being correctly called one. In fact―Schnieder claims―we reject (D1), causing trouble for the metalinguistic proposal.

I am prepared to grant to Schnieder that we reject (D1). But I think that this rejection is entirely compatible with the metalinguistic proposal. To explain why (E1) and (E2) seem to have something to do with conceptual relations, for instance, it is enough to say that we are disposed to confuse them with explanations which do have to do with conceptual relations, such as such as (E1-P) and (E2-P), and make this confusion on the basis of a tendency to blur use and mention. There is no need to make the stronger claim that we make such confusions in every case.

This reply will not be satisfying, however, until it is explained why (D1) is an exception. But here I can appeal to some claims made by Schnieder himself. Schnieder (2010: 333) reports that he has observed a number of (philosophically trained) people going metalinguistic when asked to justify (B1), and argues that this observation gives little if any support to the proposal, because our inclination to do so can be explained away. This can be done by noting that explanations such as (B1) can be used in teaching someone part of the language: for instance, someone who has not yet mastered 'bachelor' will find (B1) helps them to learn the meaning of the word. This follows from the more general point that by using a word, we can help other people learn how to use it. As Schnieder observes, this is far from showing that everything we say is covertly metalinguistic.

I have no quarrel with these comments of Schnieder's. Rather, my point is that they help to defuse his second counter-argument against the metalinguistic proposal. We were wanting a reason to expect that we will not be led to accept (D1) even though we accept (D1′). The reason is that (D1) would be of little use in teaching someone the word 'bachelor': (B1) would be much more helpful. Someone who does not understand 'unmarried male' is unlikely to understand 'bachelor', so they are unlikely to receive much help from (D1). More generally, we teach the less familiar expressions by using more familiar ones. Since (D1) is not appropriately assertible in language-learning contexts, and it is hard to think of other contexts where it would be appropriately assertible, we probably reject (D1) on the grounds that it is not assertible. For these reasons, I am unpersuaded that Schnieder's counter-arguments to the metalinguistic proposal cause my objections any trouble that cannot be overcome.

V.3. Avoid the instances of (E)?

Schnieder might reply to my objections by modifying his explanation of the truth asymmetry. Instead of appealing to the instances of ( E), he might appeal to other principles which are more plausibly regarded as analytic, and claim that these record the conceptual connections on which explanations such as (A) are based.

Consider

(E-tiger*) If <All tigers are tigers> exists, then: <All tigers are tigers> is true iff all tigers are tigers.

and the other instances of

(The colon indicates that 'If ... then' is the main connective.) These are much more promising candidates for analyticity than the instances of ( E). Because they are conditional on the existence of propositions, they cannot be used to show that propositions exist (compare Field 1989: 168, 169). And they avoid the contingency objection: if Rex is a component of <Rex is barking>, then the sentence

<Rex does not exist> is true iff Rex does not exist.

is only contingently true, but the corresponding instance of ( E*)-

If <Rex does not exist> exists, then: <Rex does not exist> is true iff Rex does not exist.

-is still necessary (Fine 1977: 136).

It is hard to see how the instances of ( E*) could underpin explanations of the truth of propositions. The reason is that Schnieder's examples of conceptual explanations involve a conceptually sufficient condition for the explanandum (see Section III), whereas instances of ( E*) do not do this. For instance,

(E2) This vase is coloured because it is red.

is supposed to rest on the conceptual relation that being red is sufficient for being coloured-but no instance of ( E*) states a conceptually sufficient condition for the truth of the proposition whose truth is supposed to be being explained. However, notice that each instance of ( E*) entails an instance of ( E**):

-and this provides a sufficient condition for < p>'s being true. If these instances are analytic, then perhaps the conceptual connections they record give rise to conceptual explanations of the truth of propositions. Such explanations would take the following form:

for instance:

<Rex is barking> is true because Rex is barking and <Rex is barking> exists.

It might then be claimed that (A) is an abbreviated version of this explanation.

The problem with this proposal is that the existence of the proposition does not help to explain why it is true. Once we have pointed out that Rex is barking, we have explained the truth of <Rex is barking>. Although the existence of the proposition is a necessary condition of its truth, the existence of the proposition is not part of the explanation. So this modified version of Schnieder's explanation fails.

It is plausible that explanations such as (A) have a contrastive element: Rex's barking explains why <Rex is barking> is true rather than untrue. From this perspective, it is unsurprising that the proposition's existence is not part of the explanation, for it is clear that the proposition's existence does not help to explain why it is true rather than untrue. Contrastive explanation has been discussed in the literature on causal explanation, largely thanks to Lipton ( 1990), but should be taken into account in non-causal cases as well.

VI. IMPLICATIONS

VI.1. Implications for deflationism

It is hard to see how Horwich's deflationism could explain the truth asymmetry. The asymmetry cannot be explained using the only allowable resources concerning truth, the (symmetrical) T-biconditionals (Section II). Mild deflationists allow themselves to appeal to tenets (i)-(iii) in order to explain the phenomena of truth, but it is hard to see how any of these apart from (ii) could help. And I have argued that the most developed appeal to (ii) runs into serious problems and thus cannot be regarded as a successful explanation for the mild deflationist to use (Sections IV and V). I conclude that the asymmetry is a serious problem for both deflationism and mild deflationism.

My arguments carry over to other forms of deflationism. For instance, I have taken propositions as truthbearers, but the same objections can be made to forms of deflationism, such as Field's ( 1994), which take sentences instead. Some deflationists, such as Hill ( 2002: ch. 2) and Künne ( 2003: section 6.2) try to generalize the T-biconditionals and thereby give an explicit definition of truth: but I do not see how that would help them to explain the truth asymmetry or evade my arguments against the proposed conceptual explanation.

Deflationists may try to avoid the problem by denying that there is an asymmetry: if there is no asymmetry, then there is no asymmetry to be explained. Presumably they will not want to endorse both (A) and (ConA), for then they would be saying that explanation runs in both directions. A deflationist who denies the asymmetry is much more likely to deny both (A) and (ConA), and find some way to explain why we are tempted to think that there is an asymmetry.

Such a response would fail. I assume that deflationists think that some propositions are true; to deny (A) would leave them with the task of explaining why they are true. But the obvious explanations of why propositions are true take the form of (A): there are no other credible candidates. (This is not to deny that (A) can be deepened by appending an explanation of why Rex is barking.) Once the deflationist has denied (A), they will be at a loss to find an explanation. And I do not think that it at all comfortable to say that there is no explanation of why (for example) <Rex is barking> is true.

Perhaps some will claim that, according to deflationism, for <Rex is barking> to be true just is for Rex to be barking, so the proposition's truth has been explained once we have explained the behaviour of the dog. But that would be to confuse deflationism with the redundancy theory, which should be rejected in any case (see Künne 2003: 34-53).

A more radical response for the deflationist is to deny that anything is true and thus deny (A) and (ConA). There is a question about whether the resulting theory would count as a form of deflationism, but, setting that terminological matter aside, it would clearly be a very different theory to the forms of deflationism currently under discussion, and I will not say any more about it here.

VI.2. A metaphysical explanation of the asymmetry

Deflationism aside, how might one go about explaining the truth asymmetry? An attractive way is to make some claims of grounding. Let me briefly introduce this term. The notion it expresses is familiar, though our theoretical understanding of it is fairly dim as yet. It is the notion we have in mind when we say that the existence of Socrates' singleton set depends on the existence of Socrates; when we say that containing vodka makes a drink alcoholic; when we speak of the mass of an object being owed to the masses of its parts; and when we describe something as flexible in virtue of its microphysical properties, or beautiful on account of its colour. Grounding is referred to in many different ways in philosophy too: it is variously known as 'non-causal dependence', 'ontological dependence', 'ontological priority', and 'priority in nature'. I will assume that 'explanations work only in virtue of the determinative relations that exist in the world. ... [W]e explain something by showing what determines that thing to be as it is' (Ruben 1990: 231; see also Kim 1994; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005: 27, 28). From this perspective, the direction of explanation is determined by the direction of grounding, just as we causally explain events by pointing to their causes, not their effects. It is controversial whether grounding is a relation and, if it is, what it relates: I will assume that it is a relation between facts, and I will write 'the fact that p' as '[ p]'.

We can now see a natural way to explain the truth asymmetry: claim (for instance) that (A) is underpinned by some relevant grounding, whereas (ConA) is not. More precisely, claim that [<Rex is barking> is true] is grounded by [Rex is barking], whereas [Rex is barking] is not grounded by [<Rex is barking> is true] (indeed, for no proposition x is [Rex is barking] grounded by [ x is true]). On this view, the explanatory asymmetry is explained by a metaphysical asymmetry. The same strategy could be applied to the many similar pairs. The metaphysical doctrine that [< p> is true] is generally grounded by [ p], but not vice versa, is enough to explain the truth asymmetry.

Although this explanation is attractive, it is unavailable to deflationists, since it involves grounding claims which go beyond the T-biconditionals (and their generalizations). Anyone who invokes grounding to explain the phenomena of truth has left deflationism behind.

It is worth noting that the explanation also puts pressure on the deflationist doctrine that truth has no underlying nature. If one asserts that [< p> is true] is generally grounded by [ p], one should ideally offer to explain this correlation―and it seems likely that any explanation will appeal to some feature of truth itself. For instance, one might say that it is part of the nature of truth that facts of the type [< p> is true] are grounded in this way (compare Fine 1994, 1995). But then truth has an underlying nature. If the truth asymmetry is to be explained by appeal to grounding, then it seems that not much of deflationism will be left.

The explanation is compatible with other accounts of truth. For instance, take the following formulation of the correspondence theory:

For all propositions x, x is true iff there is a fact to which x corresponds.

This formulation needs to be clarified: what is it for a proposition to 'correspond' to a fact? The following constraint may be part of the answer to this question:

If the theory incorporates this constraint, then it entails the claims about grounding which can explain the asymmetry. But I do not claim that the correspondence theory is the only theory which can explain it. Any theory which makes the relevant grounding claims will suffice.

VII. CONCLUSION

No satisfactory deflationist explanation of the truth asymmetry has yet been provided, and there is reason to suspect that none can be provided. We are able to explain the explanatory asymmetry by pointing to an underlying metaphysical asymmetry―but deflationists are barred from endorsing this explanation. The simplicity of deflationism makes it an appropriate starting-point, but we must now turn to consider accounts of truth which invoke the notion of grounding.

REFERENCES

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Deflationism, Conceptual Explanation, and the Truth Asymmetry

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Ascriptions of truth give rise to an explanatory asymmetry. For instance, we accept ' is true because Rex is barking' but reject 'Rex is barking because is true'. Benjamin Schnieder and other philosophers have recently proposed a fresh explanation of this asymmetry: they have suggested that the asymmetry has a conceptual rather than a metaphysical source.

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Possible Area of Knowledge / Related Concept

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Possible Area of Knowledge / Related Concept

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The scientific explanation has a specific basis to qualify knowledge as a true statement.

- Natural Science
Chemistry, Physics, Biology
- Human Science
Psychology, Economics
#Theory #
- language, ethics

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Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. There were a number of views of truth under discussion at that time, the most significant for the contemporary literature being the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth.

These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question: what is the nature of truth? They take this question at face value: there are truths, and the question to be answered concerns their nature. In answering this question, each theory makes the notion of truth part of a more thoroughgoing metaphysics or epistemology. Explaining the nature of truth becomes an application of some metaphysical system, and truth inherits significant metaphysical presuppositions along the way.

The goal of this section is to characterize the ideas of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatist theories which animate the contemporary debate. In some cases, the received forms of these theories depart from the views that were actually defended in the early 20th century. We thus dub them the 'neo-classical theories'. Where appropriate, we pause to indicate how the neo-classical theories emerge from their 'classical' roots in the early 20th century.

Perhaps the most important of the neo-classical theories for the contemporary literature is the correspondence theory. Ideas that sound strikingly like a correspondence theory are no doubt very old. They might well be found in Aristotle or Aquinas. When we turn to the late 19th and early 20th centuries where we pick up the story of the neo-classical theories of truth, it is clear that ideas about correspondence were central to the discussions of the time. In spite of their importance, however, it is strikingly difficult to find an accurate citation in the early 20th century for the received neo-classical view. Furthermore, the way the correspondence theory actually emerged will provide some valuable reference points for the contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form. For an overview of the correspondence theory, see David (2018).

The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are - to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy. Its modern history starts with the beginnings of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.

Let us pick up the thread of this story in the years between 1898 and about 1910. These years are marked by Moore and Russell's rejection of idealism. Yet at this point, they do not hold a correspondence theory of truth. Indeed Moore (1899) sees the correspondence theory as a source of idealism, and rejects it. Russell follows Moore in this regard. (For discussion of Moore's early critique of idealism, where he rejects the correspondence theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991). Hylton (1990) provides an extensive discussion of Russell in the context of British idealism. An overview of these issues is given by Baldwin (2018).)

In this period, Moore and Russell hold a version of the identity theory of truth. They say comparatively little about it, but it is stated briefly in Moore (1899; 1902) and Russell (1904). According to the identity theory, a true proposition is identical to a fact. Specifically, in Moore and Russell's hands, the theory begins with propositions, understood as the objects of beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. They are also, according to this theory, the primary bearers of truth. When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is correct. (Related ideas about the identity theory and idealism are discussed by McDowell (1994) and further developed by Hornsby (2001).)

The identity theory Moore and Russell espoused takes truth to be a property of propositions. Furthermore, taking up an idea familiar to readers of Moore, the property of truth is a simple unanalyzable property. Facts are understood as simply those propositions which are true. There are true propositions and false ones, and facts just are true propositions. There is thus no "difference between truth and the reality to which it is supposed to correspond" (Moore, 1902, p. 21). (For further discussion of the identity theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991), Candlish (1999), Candlish and Damnjanovic (2018), Cartwright (1987), Dodd (2000), and the entry on the identity theory of truth.)

Moore and Russell came to reject the identity theory of truth in favor of a correspondence theory, sometime around 1910 (as we see in Moore, 1953, which reports lectures he gave in 1910-1911, and Russell, 1910b). They do so because they came to reject the existence of propositions. Why? Among reasons, they came to doubt that there could be any such things as false propositions, and then concluded that there are no such things as propositions at all.

Why did Moore and Russell find false propositions problematic? A full answer to this question is a point of scholarship that would take us too far afield. (Moore himself lamented that he could not "put the objection in a clear and convincing way" (1953, p. 263), but see Cartwright (1987) and David (2001) for careful and clear exploration of the arguments.) But very roughly, the identification of facts with true propositions left them unable to see what a false proposition could be other than something which is just like a fact, though false. If such things existed, we would have fact-like things in the world, which Moore and Russell now see as enough to make false propositions count as true. Hence, they cannot exist, and so there are no false propositions. As Russell (1956, p. 223) later says, propositions seem to be at best "curious shadowy things" in addition to facts.

As Cartwright (1987) reminds us, it is useful to think of this argument in the context of Russell's slightly earlier views about propositions. As we see clearly in Russell (1903), for instance, he takes propositions to have constituents. But they are not mere collections of constituents, but a 'unity' which brings the constituents together. (We thus confront the 'problem of the unity of the proposition'.) But what, we might ask, would be the 'unity' of a proposition that Samuel Ramey sings - with constituents Ramey and singing - except Ramey bearing the property of singing? If that is what the unity consists in, then we seem to have nothing other than the fact that Ramey sings. But then we could not have genuine false propositions without having false facts.

As Cartwright also reminds us, there is some reason to doubt the cogency of this sort of argument. But let us put the assessment of the arguments aside, and continue the story. From the rejection of propositions a correspondence theory emerges. The primary bearers of truth are no longer propositions, but beliefs themselves. In a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact.

Views like this are held by Moore (1953) and Russell (1910b; 1912). Of course, to understand such a theory, we need to understand the crucial relation of correspondence, as well as the notion of a fact to which a belief corresponds. We now turn to these questions. In doing so, we will leave the history, and present a somewhat more modern reconstruction of a correspondence theory. (For more on facts and proposition in this period, see Sullivan and Johnston (2018).)

The correspondence theory of truth is at its core an ontological thesis: a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity - a fact - to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity, the belief is false.

Facts, for the neo-classical correspondence theory, are entities in their own right. Facts are generally taken to be composed of particulars and properties and relations or universals, at least. The neo-classical correspondence theory thus only makes sense within the setting of a metaphysics that includes such facts. Hence, it is no accident that as Moore and Russell turn away from the identity theory of truth, the metaphysics of facts takes on a much more significant role in their views. This perhaps becomes most vivid in the later Russell (1956, p. 182), where the existence of facts is the "first truism." (The influence of Wittgenstein's ideas to appear in the Tractatus (1922) on Russell in this period was strong, and indeed, the Tractatus remains one of the important sources for the neo-classical correspondence theory. For more recent extensive discussions of facts, see Armstrong (1997) and Neale (2001).)

Consider, for example, the belief that Ramey sings. Let us grant that this belief is true. In what does its truth consist, according to the correspondence theory? It consists in there being a fact in the world, built from the individual Ramey, and the property of singing. Let us denote this \(\langle\) Ramey, Singing\(\rangle\). This fact exists. In contrast, the world (we presume) contains no fact \(\langle\) Ramey, Dancing\(\rangle\). The belief that Ramey sings stands in the relation of correspondence to the fact \(\langle\) Ramey, Singing\(\rangle\), and so the belief is true.

What is the relation of correspondence? One of the standing objections to the classical correspondence theory is that a fully adequate explanation of correspondence proves elusive. But for a simple belief, like that Ramey sings, we can observe that the structure of the fact \(\langle\) Ramey, Singing\(\rangle\) matches the subject-predicate form of the that-clause which reports the belief, and may well match the structure of the belief itself.

So far, we have very much the kind of view that Moore and Russell would have found congenial. But the modern form of the correspondence theory seeks to round out the explanation of correspondence by appeal to propositions. Indeed, it is common to base a correspondence theory of truth upon the notion of a structured proposition. Propositions are again cast as the contents of beliefs and assertions, and propositions have structure which at least roughly corresponds to the structure of sentences. At least, for simple beliefs like that Ramey sings, the proposition has the same subject predicate structure as the sentence. (Proponents of structured propositions, such as Kaplan (1989), often look to Russell (1903) for inspiration, and find unconvincing Russell's reasons for rejecting them.)

With facts and structured propositions in hand, an attempt may be made to explain the relation of correspondence. Correspondence holds between a proposition and a fact when the proposition and fact have the same structure, and the same constituents at each structural position. When they correspond, the proposition and fact thus mirror each-other. In our simple example, we might have:

\[\begin{matrix} \text{proposition that} & \text{Ramey} & \text{sings} \\ & \downarrow & \downarrow \\ \text{fact} & \langle Ramey, & Singing \rangle \end{matrix}\]

Propositions, though structured like facts, can be true or false. In a false case, like the proposition that Ramey dances, we would find no fact at the bottom of the corresponding diagram. Beliefs are true or false depending on whether the propositions which are believed are.

We have sketched this view for simple propositions like the proposition that Ramey sings. How to extend it to more complex cases, like general propositions or negative propositions, is an issue we will not delve into here. It requires deciding whether there are complex facts, such as general facts or negative facts, or whether there is a more complex relation of correspondence between complex propositions and simple facts. (The issue of whether there are such complex facts marks a break between Russell (1956) and Wittgenstein (1922) and the earlier views which Moore (1953) and Russell (1912) sketch.)

According to the correspondence theory as sketched here, what is key to truth is a relation between propositions and the world, which obtains when the world contains a fact that is structurally similar to the proposition. Though this is not the theory Moore and Russell held, it weaves together ideas of theirs with a more modern take on (structured) propositions. We will thus dub it the neo-classical correspondence theory. This theory offers us a paradigm example of a correspondence theory of truth.

The leading idea of the correspondence theory is familiar. It is a form of the older idea that true beliefs show the right kind of resemblance to what is believed. In contrast to earlier empiricist theories, the thesis is not that one's ideas per se resemble what they are about. Rather, the propositions which give the contents of one's true beliefs mirror reality, in virtue of entering into correspondence relations to the right pieces of it.

In this theory, it is the way the world provides us with appropriately structured entities that explains truth. Our metaphysics thus explains the nature of truth, by providing the entities needed to enter into correspondence relations.

For more on the correspondence theory, see David (1994, 2018) and the entry on the correspondance theory of truth.

Though initially the correspondence theory was seen by its developers as a competitor to the identity theory of truth, it was also understood as opposed to the coherence theory of truth.

We will be much briefer with the historical origins of the coherence theory than we were with the correspondence theory. Like the correspondence theory, versions of the coherence theory can be seen throughout the history of philosophy. (See, for instance, Walker (1989) for a discussion of its early modern lineage.) Like the correspondence theory, it was important in the early 20th century British origins of analytic philosophy. Particularly, the coherence theory of truth is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting.

Many idealists at that time did indeed hold coherence theories. Let us take as an example Joachim (1906). (This is the theory that Russell (1910a) attacks.) Joachim says that:

Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole (p. 76).

We will not attempt a full exposition of Joachim's view, which would take us well beyond the discussion of truth into the details of British idealism. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage.

Perhaps most importantly, Joachim talks of 'truth' in the singular. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism. Joachim insists that what is true is the "whole complete truth" (p. 90). Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth. Such judgments are, according to Joachim, only true to a degree. One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments. But even these systems are only true to a degree, measuring the extent to which they express the content of the single 'whole complete truth'. Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true.

To flesh out Joachim's theory, we would have to explain what a significant whole is. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e.g., that it is a "process of self-fulfillment" (p. 77). But it is clear that Joachim takes 'systematic coherence' to be stronger than consistency. In keeping with his holism about content, he rejects the idea that coherence is a relation between independently identified contents, and so finds it necessary to appeal to 'significant wholes'.

As with the correspondence theory, it will be useful to recast the coherence theory in a more modern form, which will abstract away from some of the difficult features of British idealism. As with the correspondence theory, it can be put in a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.

To further the contrast with the neo-classical correspondence theory, we may add that a proposition is true if it is the content of a belief in the system, or entailed by a belief in the system. We may assume, with Joachim, that the condition of coherence will be stronger than consistency. With the idealists generally, we might suppose that features of the believing subject will come into play.

This theory is offered as an analysis of the nature of truth, and not simply a test or criterion for truth. Put as such, it is clearly not Joachim's theory (it lacks his monism, and he rejects propositions), but it is a standard take on coherence in the contemporary literature. (It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker (1989), for instance. See also Young (2001) for a recent defense of a coherence theory.) Let us take this as our neo-classical version of the coherence theory. The contrast with the correspondence theory of truth is clear. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other.

The coherence theory of truth enjoys two sorts of motivations. One is primarily epistemological. Most coherence theorists also hold a coherence theory of knowledge; more specifically, a coherence theory of justification. According to this theory, to be justified is to be part of a coherent system of beliefs. An argument for this is often based on the claim that only another belief could stand in a justification relation to a belief, allowing nothing but properties of systems of belief, including coherence, to be conditions for justification. Combining this with the thesis that a fully justified belief is true forms an argument for the coherence theory of truth. (An argument along these lines is found in Blanshard (1939), who holds a form of the coherence theory closely related to Joachim's.)

The steps in this argument may be questioned by a number of contemporary epistemological views. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism. As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard (in America). An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. More generally, an idealist will see little (if any) room between a system of beliefs and the world it is about, leaving the coherence theory of truth as an extremely natural option.

It is possible to be an idealist without adopting a coherence theory. (For instance, many scholars read Bradley as holding a version of the identity theory of truth. See Baldwin (1991) for some discussion.) However, it is hard to see much of a way to hold the coherence theory of truth without maintaining some form of idealism. If there is nothing to truth beyond what is to be found in an appropriate system of beliefs, then it would seem one's beliefs constitute the world in a way that amounts to idealism. (Walker (1989) argues that every coherence theorist must be an idealist, but not vice-versa.)

The neo-classical correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation. It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition. The neo-classical coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation. The coherence theory requires some metaphysics which can make the world somehow reflect this, and idealism appears to be it. (A distant descendant of the neo-classical coherence theory that does not require idealism will be discussed in section 6.5 below.)

For more on the coherence theory, see Walker (2018) and the entry on the coherence theory of truth.

A different perspective on truth was offered by the American pragmatists. As with the neo-classical correspondence and coherence theories, the pragmatist theories go with some typical slogans. For example, Peirce is usually understood as holding the view that:

Truth is the end of inquiry.

(See, for instance Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §3.432.) Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:

Truth is satisfactory to believe.

James (e.g., 1907) understands this principle as telling us what practical value truth has. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. Likewise, Peirce's slogan tells us that true beliefs will remain settled at the end of prolonged inquiry. Peirce's slogan is perhaps most typically associated with pragmatist views of truth, so we might take it to be our canonical neo-classical theory. However, the contemporary literature does not seem to have firmly settled upon a received 'neo-classical' pragmatist theory.

In her reconstruction (upon which we have relied heavily), Haack (1976) notes that the pragmatists' views on truth also make room for the idea that truth involves a kind of correspondence, insofar as the scientific method of inquiry is answerable to some independent world. Peirce, for instance, does not reject a correspondence theory outright; rather, he complains that it provides merely a 'nominal' or 'transcendental' definition of truth (e.g Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §5.553, §5.572), which is cut off from practical matters of experience, belief, and doubt (§5.416). (See Misak (2004) for an extended discussion.)

This marks an important difference between the pragmatist theories and the coherence theory we just considered. Even so, pragmatist theories also have an affinity with coherence theories, insofar as we expect the end of inquiry to be a coherent system of beliefs. As Haack also notes, James maintains an important verificationist idea: truth is what is verifiable. We will see this idea re-appear in section 4.

For more on pragmatist theories of truth, see Misak (2018). James' views are discussed further in the entry on William James. Peirce's views are discussed further in the entry on Charles Sanders Peirce.

Modern forms of the classical theories survive. Many of these modern theories, notably correspondence theories, draw on ideas developed by Tarski.

In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that his seminal work on truth (1935) is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his (1931), and as much as anything this work lays the ground-work for the modern subject of model theory - a branch of mathematical logic, not the metaphysics of truth. In this respect, Tarski's work provides a set of highly useful tools that may be employed in a wide range of philosophical projects. (See Patterson (2012) for more on Tarski's work in its historical context.)

Tarski's work has a number of components, which we will consider in turn.

In the classical debate on truth at the beginning of the 20th century we considered in section 1, the issue of truth-bearers was of great significance. For instance, Moore and Russell's turn to the correspondence theory was driven by their views on whether there are propositions to be the bearers of truth. Many theories we reviewed took beliefs to be the bearers of truth.

In contrast, Tarski and much of the subsequent work on truth takes sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. This is not an entirely novel development: Russell (1956) also takes truth to apply to sentence (which he calls 'propositions' in that text). But whereas much of the classical debate takes the issue of the primary bearers of truth to be a substantial and important metaphysical one, Tarski is quite casual about it. His primary reason for taking sentences as truth-bearers is convenience, and he explicitly distances himself from any commitment about the philosophically contentious issues surrounding other candidate truth-bearers (e.g., Tarski, 1944). (Russell (1956) makes a similar suggestion that sentences are the appropriate truth-bearers "for the purposes of logic" (p. 184), though he still takes the classical metaphysical issues to be important.)

We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6.1. For the moment, it will be useful to simply follow Tarski's lead. But it should be stressed that for this discussion, sentences are fully interpreted sentences, having meanings. We will also assume that the sentences in question do not change their content across occasions of use, i.e., that they display no context-dependence. We are taking sentences to be what Quine (1960) calls 'eternal sentences'.

In some places (e.g., Tarski, 1944), Tarski refers to his view as the 'semantic conception of truth'. It is not entirely clear just what Tarski had in mind by this, but it is clear enough that Tarski's theory defines truth for sentences in terms of concepts like reference and satisfaction, which are intimately related to the basic semantic functions of names and predicates (according to many approaches to semantics). For more discussion, see Woleński (2001).

Let us suppose we have a fixed language \(\mathbf{L}\) whose sentences are fully interpreted. The basic question Tarski poses is what an adequate theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}\) would be. Tarski's answer is embodied in what he calls Convention T:

An adequate theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}\) must imply, for each sentence \(\phi\) of \(\mathbf{L}\)

\(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi\).

(We have simplified Tarski's presentation somewhat.) This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. Given the assumption that \(\mathbf{L}\) is fully interpreted, we may assume that each sentence \(\phi\) in fact has a truth value. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct, i.e., have as its extension all and only the true sentences of \(\mathbf{L}\).

Convention T draws our attention to the biconditionals of the form

\(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi \urcorner\),

which are usually called the Tarski biconditionals for a language \(\mathbf{L}\).

Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it. One of his insights is that if the language \(\mathbf{L}\) displays the right structure, then truth for \(\mathbf{L}\) can be defined recursively. For instance, let us suppose that \(\mathbf{L}\) is a simple formal language, containing two atomic sentences 'snow is white' and 'grass is green', and the sentential connectives \(\vee\) and \(\neg\).

In spite of its simplicity, \(\mathbf{L}\) contains infinitely many distinct sentences. But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion.

1. Base clauses:

1. 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white.

2. 'Grass is green' is true if and only if grass is green.

2. Recursion clauses. For any sentences \(\phi\) and \(\psi\) of \(\mathbf{L}\):

1. \(\ulcorner \phi \vee \psi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true or \(\ulcorner \psi \urcorner\) is true.

2. \(\ulcorner \neg \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if it is not the case that \(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true.

This theory satisfies Convention T.

This may look trivial, but in defining an extensionally correct truth predicate for an infinite language with four clauses, we have made a modest application of a very powerful technique.

Tarski's techniques go further, however. They do not stop with atomic sentences. Tarski notes that truth for each atomic sentence can be defined in terms of two closely related notions: reference and satisfaction. Let us consider a language \(\mathbf{L}'\), just like \(\mathbf{L}\) except that instead of simply having two atomic sentences, \(\mathbf{L}'\) breaks atomic sentences into terms and predicates. \(\mathbf{L}'\) contains terms 'snow' and 'grass' (let us engage in the idealization that these are simply singular terms), and predicates 'is white' and 'is green'. So \(\mathbf{L}'\) is like \(\mathbf{L}\), but also contains the sentences 'Snow is green' and 'Grass is white'.)

We can define truth for atomic sentences of \(\mathbf{L}'\) in the following way.

1. Base clauses:

1. 'Snow' refers to snow.

2. 'Grass' refers to grass.

3. \(a\) satisfies 'is white' if and only if \(a\) is white.

4. \(a\) satisfies 'is green' if and only if \(a\) is green.

2. For any atomic sentence \(\ulcorner t\) is \(P \urcorner\): \(\ulcorner t\) is \(P \urcorner\) is true if and only if the referent of \(\ulcorner t \urcorner\) satisfies \(\ulcorner P\urcorner\).

One of Tarski's key insights is that the apparatus of satisfaction allows for a recursive definition of truth for sentences with quantifiers, though we will not examine that here. We could repeat the recursion clauses for \(\mathbf{L}\) to produce a full theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}'\).

Let us say that a Tarskian theory of truth is a recursive theory, built up in ways similar to the theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}'\). Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. A Tarskian theory of truth for a language \(\mathbf{L}\) can be used to show that theories in \(\mathbf{L}\) are consistent. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent.

For more, see Ray (2018) and the entries on axiomatic theories of truth, the Liar paradox, and Tarski's truth definitions.

The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be. We suggested that, against a background like the metaphysics of facts, it does so in a straightforward way. But the idea of correspondence is certainly not specific to this framework. Indeed, it is controversial whether a correspondence theory should rely on any particular metaphysics at all. The basic idea of correspondence, as Tarski (1944) and others have suggested, is captured in the slogan from Aristotle's Metaphysics Γ 7.27, "to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true" (Ross, 1928). 'What is', it is natural enough to say, is a fact, but this natural turn of phrase may well not require a full-blown metaphysics of facts. (For a discussion of Aristotle's views in a historical context, see Szaif (2018).)

Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1.1 loses substance. This has led to two distinct strands in contemporary thinking about the correspondence theory. One strand seeks to recast the correspondence theory in a way that does not rely on any particular ontology. Another seeks to find an appropriate ontology for correspondence, either in terms of facts or other entities. We will consider each in turn.

Tarski himself sometimes suggested that his theory was a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Whether his own theory is a correspondence theory, and even whether it provides any substantial philosophical account of truth at all, is a matter of controversy. (One rather drastic negative assessment from Putnam (1985-86, p. 333) is that "As a philosophical account of truth, Tarski's theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.") But a number of philosophers (e.g., Davidson, 1969; Field, 1972) have seen Tarski's theory as providing at least the core of a correspondence theory of truth which dispenses with the metaphysics of facts.

Tarski's theory shows how truth for a sentence is determined by certain properties of its constituents; in particular, by properties of reference and satisfaction (as well as by the logical constants). As it is normally understood, reference is the preeminent word-to-world relation. Satisfaction is naturally understood as a word-to-world relation as well, which relates a predicate to the things in the world that bear it. The Tarskian recursive definition shows how truth is determined by reference and satisfaction, and so is in effect determined by the things in the world we refer to and the properties they bear. This, one might propose, is all the correspondence we need. It is not correspondence of sentences or propositions to facts; rather, it is correspondence of our expressions to objects and the properties they bear, and then ways of working out the truth of claims in terms of this.

This is certainly not the neo-classical idea of correspondence. In not positing facts, it does not posit any single object to which a true proposition or sentence might correspond. Rather, it shows how truth might be worked out from basic word-to-world relations. However, a number of authors have noted that Tarski's theory cannot by itself provide us with such an account of truth. As we will discuss more fully in section 4.2, Tarski's apparatus is in fact compatible with theories of truth that are certainly not correspondence theories.

Field (1972), in an influential discussion and diagnosis of what is lacking in Tarski's account, in effect points out that whether we really have something worthy of the name 'correspondence' depends on our having notions of reference and satisfaction which genuinely establish word-to-world relations. (Field does not use the term 'correspondence', but does talk about e.g., the "connection between words and things" (p. 373).) By itself, Field notes, Tarski's theory does not offer an account of reference and satisfaction at all. Rather, it offers a number of disquotation clauses, such as:

1. 'Snow' refers to snow.

2. \(a\) satisfies 'is white' if and only if \(a\) is white.

These clauses have an air of triviality (though whether they are to be understood as trivial principles or statements of non-trivial semantic facts has been a matter of some debate). With Field, we might propose to supplement clauses like these with an account of reference and satisfaction. Such a theory should tell us what makes it the case that the word 'snow' refer to snow. (In 1972, Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference.) This should inter alia guarantee that truth is really determined by word-to-world relations, so in conjunction with the Tarskian recursive definition, it could provide a correspondence theory of truth.

Such a theory clearly does not rely on a metaphysics of facts. Indeed, it is in many ways metaphysically neutral, as it does not take a stand on the nature of particulars, or of the properties or universals that underwrite facts about satisfaction. However, it may not be entirely devoid of metaphysical implications, as we will discuss further in section 4.1.

Much of the subsequent discussion of Field-style approaches to correspondence has focused on the role of representation in these views. Field's own (1972) discussion relies on a causal relation between terms and their referents, and a similar relation for satisfaction. These are instances of representation relations. According to representational views, meaningful items, like perhaps thoughts or sentences or their constituents, have their contents in virtue of standing in the right relation to the things they represent. On many views, including Field's, a name stands in such a relation to its bearer, and the relation is a causal one.

The project of developing a naturalist account of the representation relation has been an important one in the philosophy of mind and language. (See the entry on mental representation.) But, it has implications for the theory of truth. Representational views of content lead naturally to correspondence theories of truth. To make this vivid, suppose you hold that sentences or beliefs stand in a representation relation to some objects. It is natural to suppose that for true beliefs or sentences, those objects would be facts. We then have a correspondence theory, with the correspondence relation explicated as a representation relation: a truth bearer is true if it represents a fact.

As we have discussed, many contemporary views reject facts, but one can hold a representational view of content without them. One interpretation of Field's theory is just that. The relations of reference and satisfaction are representation relations, and truth for sentences is determined compositionally in terms of those representation relations, and the nature of the objects they represent. If we have such relations, we have the building blocks for a correspondence theory without facts. Field (1972) anticipated a naturalist reduction of the representation via a causal theory, but any view that accepts representation relations for truth bearers or their constituents can provide a similar theory of truth. (See Jackson (2006) and Lynch (2009) for further discussion.)

Representational views of content provide a natural way to approach the correspondence theory of truth, and likewise, anti-representational views provide a natural way to avoid the correspondence theory of truth. This is most clear in the work of Davidson, as we will discuss more in section 6.5.

There have been a number of correspondence theories that do make use of facts. Some are notably different from the neo-classical theory sketched in section 1.1. For instance, Austin (1950) proposes a view in which each statement (understood roughly as an utterance event) corresponds to both a fact or situation, and a type of situation. It is true if the former is of the latter type. This theory, which has been developed by situation theory (e.g., Barwise and Perry, 1986), rejects the idea that correspondence is a kind of mirroring between a fact and a proposition. Rather, correspondence relations to Austin are entirely conventional. (See Vision (2004) for an extended defense of an Austinian correspondence theory.) As an ordinary language philosopher, Austin grounds his notion of fact more in linguistic usage than in an articulated metaphysics, but he defends his use of fact-talk in Austin (1961b).

In a somewhat more Tarskian spirit, formal theories of facts or states of affairs have also been developed. For instance, Taylor (1976) provides a recursive definition of a collection of 'states of affairs' for a given language. Taylor's states of affairs seem to reflect the notion of fact at work in the neo-classical theory, though as an exercise in logic, they are officially \(n\)-tuples of objects and intensions.

There are more metaphysically robust notions of fact in the current literature. For instance, Armstrong (1997) defends a metaphysics in which facts (under the name 'states of affairs') are metaphysically fundamental. The view has much in common with the neo-classical one. Like the neo-classical view, Armstrong endorses a version of the correspondence theory. States of affairs are truthmakers for propositions, though Armstrong argues that there may be many such truthmakers for a given proposition, and vice versa. (Armstrong also envisages a naturalistic account of propositions as classes of equivalent belief-tokens.)

Armstrong's primary argument is what he calls the 'truthmaker argument'. It begins by advancing a truthmaker principle, which holds that for any given truth, there must be a truthmaker - a "something in the world which makes it the case, that serves as an ontological ground, for this truth" (p. 115). It is then argued that facts are the appropriate truthmakers.

In contrast to the approach to correspondence discussed in section 3.1, which offered correspondence with minimal ontological implications, this view returns to the ontological basis of correspondence that was characteristic of the neo-classical theory.

For more on facts, see the entry on facts.

The truthmaker principle is often put as the schema:

If \(\phi\), then there is an \(x\) such that necessarily, if \(x\) exists, then \(\phi\).

(Fox (1987) proposed putting the principle this way, rather than explicitly in terms of truth.)

The truthmaker principle expresses the ontological aspect of the neo-classical correspondence theory. Not merely must truth obtain in virtue of word-to-world relations, but there must be a thing that makes each truth true. (For one view on this, see Merricks (2007).)

The neo-classical correspondence theory, and Armstrong, cast facts as the appropriate truthmakers. However, it is a non-trivial step from the truthmaker principle to the existence of facts. There are a number of proposals in the literature for how other sorts of objects could be truthmakers; for instance, tropes (called 'moments', in Mulligan et al., 1984). Parsons (1999) argues that the truthmaker principle (presented in a somewhat different form) is compatible with there being only concrete particulars.

As we saw in discussing the neo-classical correspondence theory, truthmaker theories, and fact theories in particular, raise a number of issues. One which has been discussed at length, for instance, is whether there are negative facts. Negative facts would be the truthmakers for negated sentences. Russell (1956) notoriously expresses ambivalence about whether there are negative facts. Armstrong (1997) rejects them, while Beall (2000) defends them. (For more discussion of truthmakers, see Cameron (2018) and the papers in Beebee and Dodd (2005).)

The neo-classical theories we surveyed in section 1 made the theory of truth an application of their background metaphysics (and in some cases epistemology). In section 2 and especially in section 3, we returned to the issue of what sorts of ontological commitments might go with the theory of truth. There we saw a range of options, from relatively ontologically non-committal theories, to theories requiring highly specific ontologies.

There is another way in which truth relates to metaphysics. Many ideas about realism and anti-realism are closely related to ideas about truth. Indeed, many approaches to questions about realism and anti-realism simply make them questions about truth.

In discussing the approach to correspondence of section 3.1, we noted that it has few ontological requirements. It relies on there being objects of reference, and something about the world which makes for determinate satisfaction relations; but beyond that, it is ontologically neutral. But as we mentioned there, this is not to say that it has no metaphysical implications. A correspondence theory of truth, of any kind, is often taken to embody a form of realism.

The key features of realism, as we will take it, are that:

1. The world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it.

2. Our thoughts and claims are about that world.

(Wright (1992) offers a nice statement of this way of thinking about realism.) These theses imply that our claims are objectively true or false, depending on how the world they are about is. The world that we represent in our thoughts or language is an objective world. (Realism may be restricted to some subject-matter, or range of discourse, but for simplicity, we will talk about only its global form.)

It is often argued that these theses require some form of the correspondence theory of truth. (Putnam (1978, p. 18) notes, "Whatever else realists say, they typically say that they believe in a 'correspondence theory of truth'.") At least, they are supported by the kind of correspondence theory without facts discussed in section 3.1, such as Field's proposal. Such a theory will provide an account of objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and show how these determine the truth or falsehood of what we say about the world. Field's own approach (1972) to this problem seeks a physicalist explanation of reference. But realism is a more general idea than physicalism. Any theory that provides objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and builds up a theory of truth from them, would give a form of realism. (Making the objectivity of reference the key to realism is characteristic of work of Putnam, e.g., 1978.)

Another important mark of realism expressed in terms of truth is the property of bivalence. As Dummett has stressed (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), a realist should see there being a fact of the matter one way or the other about whether any given claim is correct. Hence, one important mark of realism is that it goes together with the principle of bivalence: every truth-bearer (sentence or proposition) is true or false. In much of his work, Dummett has made this the characteristic mark of realism, and often identifies realism about some subject-matter with accepting bivalence for discourse about that subject-matter. At the very least, it captures a great deal of what is more loosely put in the statement of realism above.

Both the approaches to realism, through reference and through bivalence, make truth the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or builds truth from a determinate reference relation, does most of the work of giving a realistic metaphysics. It might even simply be a realistic metaphysics.

We have thus turned on its head the relation of truth to metaphysics we saw in our discussion of the neo-classical correspondence theory in section 1.1. There, a correspondence theory of truth was built upon a substantial metaphysics. Here, we have seen how articulating a theory that captures the idea of correspondence can be crucial to providing a realist metaphysics. (For another perspective on realism and truth, see Alston (1996). Devitt (1984) offers an opposing view to the kind we have sketched here, which rejects any characterization of realism in terms of truth or other semantic concepts.)

In light of our discussion in section 1.1.1, we should pause to note that the connection between realism and the correspondence theory of truth is not absolute. When Moore and Russell held the identity theory of truth, they were most certainly realists. The right kind of metaphysics of propositions can support a realist view, as can a metaphysics of facts. The modern form of realism we have been discussing here seeks to avoid basing itself on such particular ontological commitments, and so prefers to rely on the kind of correspondence-without-facts approach discussed in section 3.1. This is not to say that realism will be devoid of ontological commitments, but the commitments will flow from whichever specific claims about some subject-matter are taken to be true.

For more on realism and truth, see Fumerton (2002) and the entry on realism.

It should come as no surprise that the relation between truth and metaphysics seen by modern realists can also be exploited by anti-realists. Many modern anti-realists see the theory of truth as the key to formulating and defending their views. With Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1991), we might expect the characteristic mark of anti-realism to be the rejection of bivalence.

Indeed, many contemporary forms of anti-realism may be formulated as theories of truth, and they do typically deny bivalence. Anti-realism comes in many forms, but let us take as an example a (somewhat crude) form of verificationism. Such a theory holds that a claim is correct just insofar as it is in principle verifiable, i.e., there is a verification procedure we could in principle carry out which would yield the answer that the claim in question was verified.

So understood, verificationism is a theory of truth. The claim is not that verification is the most important epistemic notion, but that truth just is verifiability. As with the kind of realism we considered in section 4.1, this view expresses its metaphysical commitments in its explanation of the nature of truth. Truth is not, to this view, a fully objective matter, independent of us or our thoughts. Instead, truth is constrained by our abilities to verify, and is thus constrained by our epistemic situation. Truth is to a significant degree an epistemic matter, which is typical of many anti-realist positions.

As Dummett says, the verificationist notion of truth does not appear to support bivalence. Any statement that reaches beyond what we can in principle verify or refute (verify its negation) will be a counter-example to bivalence. Take, for instance, the claim that there is some substance, say uranium, present in some region of the universe too distant to be inspected by us within the expected lifespan of the universe. Insofar as this really would be in principle unverifiable, we have no reason to maintain it is true or false according to the verificationist theory of truth.

Verificationism of this sort is one of a family of anti-realist views. Another example is the view that identifies truth with warranted assertibility. Assertibility, as well as verifiability, has been important in Dummett's work. (See also works of McDowell, e.g., 1976 and Wright, e.g., 1976; 1982; 1992.)

Anti-realism of the Dummettian sort is not a descendant of the coherence theory of truth per se. But in some ways, as Dummett himself has noted, it might be construed as a descendant - perhaps very distant - of idealism. If idealism is the most drastic form of rejection of the independence of mind and world, Dummettian anti-realism is a more modest form, which sees epistemology imprinted in the world, rather than the wholesale embedding of world into mind. At the same time, the idea of truth as warranted assertibility or verifiability reiterates a theme from the pragmatist views of truth we surveyed in section 1.3.

Anti-realist theories of truth, like the realist ones we discussed in section 4.1, can generally make use of the Tarskian apparatus. Convention T, in particular, does not discriminate between realist and anti-realist notions of truth. Likewise, the base clauses of a Tarskian recursive theory are given as disquotation principles, which are neutral between realist and anti-realist understandings of notions like reference. As we saw with the correspondence theory, giving a full account of the nature of truth will generally require more than the Tarskian apparatus itself. How an anti-realist is to explain the basic concepts that go into a Tarskian theory is a delicate matter. As Dummett and Wright have investigated in great detail, it appears that the background logic in which the theory is developed will have to be non-classical.

For more on anti-realism and truth, see Shieh (2018) and the papers in Greenough and Lynch (2006) and the entry on realism.

Many commentators see a close connection between Dummett's anti-realism and the pragmatists' views of truth, in that both put great weight on ideas of verifiability or assertibility. Dummett himself stressed parallels between anti-realism and intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics.

Another view on truth which returns to pragmatist themes is the 'internal realism' of Putnam (1981). There Putnam glosses truth as what would be justified under ideal epistemic conditions. With the pragmatists, Putnam sees the ideal conditions as something which can be approximated, echoing the idea of truth as the end of inquiry.

Putnam is cautious about calling his view anti-realism, preferring the label 'internal realism'. But he is clear that he sees his view as opposed to realism ('metaphysical realism', as he calls it).

Davidson's views on truth have also been associated with pragmatism, notably by Rorty (1986). Davidson has distanced himself from this interpretation (e.g., 1990), but he does highlight connections between truth and belief and meaning. Insofar as these are human attitudes or relate to human actions, Davidson grants there is some affinity between his views and those of some pragmatists (especially, he says, Dewey).

Another view that has grown out of the literature on realism and anti-realism, and has become increasingly important in the current literature, is that of pluralism about truth. This view, developed in work of Lynch (e.g. 2001b; 2009) and Wright (e.g. 1992; 1999), proposes that there are multiple ways for truth bearers to be true. Wright, in particular, suggests that in certain domains of discourse what we say is true in virtue of a correspondence-like relation, while in others it is its true in virtue of a kind of assertibility relation that is closer in spirit to the anti-realist views we have just discussed.

Such a proposal might suggest there are multiple concepts of truth, or that the term 'true' is itself ambiguous. However, whether or not a pluralist view is committed to such claims has been disputed. In particular, Lynch (2001b; 2009) develops a version of pluralism which takes truth to be a functional role concept. The functional role of truth is characterized by a range of principles that articulate such features of truth as its objectivity, its role in inquiry, and related ideas we have encountered in considering various theories of truth. (A related point about platitudes governing the concept of truth is made by Wright (1992).) But according to Lynch, these display the functional role of truth. Furthermore, Lynch claims that on analogy with analytic functionalism, these principles can be seen as deriving from our pre-theoretic or 'folk' ideas about truth.

Like all functional role concepts, truth must be realized, and according to Lynch it may be realized in different ways in different settings. Such multiple realizability has been one of the hallmarks of functional role concepts discussed in the philosophy of mind. For instance, Lynch suggests that for ordinary claims about material objects, truth might be realized by a correspondence property (which he links to representational views), while for moral claims truth might be manifest by an assertibility property along more anti-realist lines.

For more on pluralism about truth, see Pedersen and Lynch (2018) and the entry on pluralist theories of truth.

We began in section 1 with the neo-classical theories, which explained the nature of truth within wider metaphysical systems. We then considered some alternatives in sections 2 and 3, some of which had more modest ontological implications. But we still saw in section 4 that substantial theories of truth tend to imply metaphysical theses, or even embody metaphysical positions.

One long-standing trend in the discussion of truth is to insist that truth really does not carry metaphysical significance at all. It does not, as it has no significance on its own. A number of different ideas have been advanced along these lines, under the general heading of deflationism.

Deflationist ideas appear quite early on, including a well-known argument against correspondence in Frege (1918-19). However, many deflationists take their cue from an idea of Ramsey (1927), often called the equivalence thesis:

\(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true \(\urcorner\) has the same meaning as \(\phi\).

(Ramsey himself takes truth-bearers to be propositions rather than sentences. Glanzberg (2003b) questions whether Ramsey's account of propositions really makes him a deflationist.)

This can be taken as the core of a theory of truth, often called the redundancy theory. The redundancy theory holds that there is no property of truth at all, and appearances of the expression 'true' in our sentences are redundant, having no effect on what we express.

The equivalence thesis can also be understood in terms of speech acts rather than meaning:

To assert that \(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true is just to assert that \(\phi\).

This view was advanced by Strawson (1949; 1950), though Strawson also argues that there are other important aspects of speech acts involving 'true' beyond what is asserted. For instance, they may be acts of confirming or granting what someone else said. (Strawson would also object to my making sentences the bearers of truth.)

In either its speech act or meaning form, the redundancy theory argues there is no property of truth. It is commonly noted that the equivalence thesis itself is not enough to sustain the redundancy theory. It merely holds that when truth occurs in the outermost position in a sentence, and the full sentence to which truth is predicated is quoted, then truth is eliminable. What happens in other environments is left to be seen. Modern developments of the redundancy theory include Grover et al. (1975).

The equivalence principle looks familiar: it has something like the form of the Tarski biconditionals discussed in section 2.2. However, it is a stronger principle, which identifies the two sides of the biconditional - either their meanings or the speech acts performed with them. The Tarski biconditionals themselves are simply material biconditionals.

A number of deflationary theories look to the Tarski biconditionals rather than the full equivalence principle. Their key idea is that even if we do not insist on redundancy, we may still hold the following theses:

1. For a given language \(\mathbf{L}\) and every \(\phi\) in \(\mathbf{L}\), the biconditionals \(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi \urcorner\) hold by definition (or analytically, or trivially, or by stipulation ...).

2. This is all there is to say about the concept of truth.

We will refer to views which adopt these as minimalist. Officially, this is the name of the view of Horwich (1990), but we will apply it somewhat more widely. (Horwich's view differs in some specific respects from what is presented here, such as predicating truth of propositions, but we believe it is close enough to what is sketched here to justify the name.)

The second thesis, that the Tarski biconditionals are all there is to say about truth, captures something similar to the redundancy theory's view. It comes near to saying that truth is not a property at all; to the extent that truth is a property, there is no more to it than the disquotational pattern of the Tarski biconditionals. As Horwich puts it, there is no substantial underlying metaphysics to truth. And as Soames (1984) stresses, certainly nothing that could ground as far-reaching a view as realism or anti-realism.

If there is no property of truth, or no substantial property of truth, what role does our term 'true' play? Deflationists typically note that the truth predicate provides us with a convenient device of disquotation. Such a device allows us to make some useful claims which we could not formulate otherwise, such as the blind ascription 'The next thing that Bill says will be true'. (For more on blind ascriptions and their relation to deflationism, see Azzouni, 2001.) A predicate obeying the Tarski biconditionals can also be used to express what would otherwise be (potentially) infinite conjunctions or disjunctions, such as the notorious statement of Papal infallibility put 'Everything the Pope says is true'. (Suggestions like this are found in Leeds, 1978 and Quine, 1970.)

Recognizing these uses for a truth predicate, we might simply think of it as introduced into a language by stipulation. The Tarski biconditionals themselves might be stipulated, as the minimalists envisage. One could also construe the clauses of a recursive Tarskian theory as stipulated. (There are some significant logical differences between these two options. See Halbach (1999) and Ketland (1999) for discussion.) Other deflationists, such as Beall (2005) or Field (1994), might prefer to focus here on rules of inference or rules of use, rather than the Tarski biconditionals themselves.

There are also important connections between deflationist ideas about truth and certain ideas about meaning. These are fundamental to the deflationism of Field (1986; 1994), which will be discussed in section 6.3. For an insightful critique of deflationism, see Gupta (1993).

For more on deflationism, see Azzouni (2018) and the entry on the deflationary theory of truth.

One of the important themes in the literature on truth is its connection to meaning, or more generally, to language. This has proved an important application of ideas about truth, and an important issue in the study of truth itself. This section will consider a number of issues relating truth and language.

There have been many debates in the literature over what the primary bearers of truth are. Candidates typically include beliefs, propositions, sentences, and utterances. We have already seen in section 1 that the classical debates on truth took this issue very seriously, and what sort of theory of truth was viable was often seen to depend on what the bearers of truth are.

In spite of the number of options under discussion, and the significance that has sometimes been placed on the choice, there is an important similarity between candidate truth-bearers. Consider the role of truth-bearers in the correspondence theory, for instance. We have seen versions of it which take beliefs, propositions, or interpreted sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. But all of them rely upon the idea that their truth-bearers are meaningful, and are thereby able to say something about what the world is like. (We might say that they are able to represent the world, but that is to use 'represent' in a wider sense than we saw in section 3.2. No assumptions about just what stands in relations to what objects are required to see truth-bearers as meaningful.) It is in virtue of being meaningful that truth-bearers are able to enter into correspondence relations. Truth-bearers are things which meaningfully make claims about what the world is like, and are true or false depending on whether the facts in the world are as described.

Exactly the same point can be made for the anti-realist theories of truth we saw in section 4.2, though with different accounts of how truth-bearers are meaningful, and what the world contributes. Though it is somewhat more delicate, something similar can be said for coherence theories, which usually take beliefs, or whole systems of beliefs, as the primary truth-bearers. Though a coherence theory will hardly talk of beliefs representing the facts, it is crucial to the coherence theory that beliefs are contentful beliefs of agents, and that they can enter into coherence relations. Noting the complications in interpreting the genuine classical coherence theories, it appears fair to note that this requires truth-bearers to be meaningful, however the background metaphysics (presumably idealism) understands meaning.

Though Tarski works with sentences, the same can be said of his theory. The sentences to which Tarski's theory applies are fully interpreted, and so also are meaningful. They characterize the world as being some way or another, and this in turn determines whether they are true or false. Indeed, Tarski needs there to be a fact of the matter about whether each sentence is true or false (abstracting away from context dependence), to ensure that the Tarski biconditionals do their job of fixing the extension of 'is true'. (But note that just what this fact of the matter consists in is left open by the Tarskian apparatus.)

We thus find the usual candidate truth-bearers linked in a tight circle: interpreted sentences, the propositions they express, the belief speakers might hold towards them, and the acts of assertion they might perform with them are all connected by providing something meaningful. This makes them reasonable bearers of truth. For this reason, it seems, contemporary debates on truth have been much less concerned with the issue of truth-bearers than were the classical ones. Some issues remain, of course. Different metaphysical assumptions may place primary weight on some particular node in the circle, and some metaphysical views still challenge the existence of some of the nodes. Perhaps more importantly, different views on the nature of meaning itself might cast doubt on the coherence of some of the nodes. Notoriously for instance, Quineans (e.g., Quine, 1960) deny the existence of intensional entities, including propositions. Even so, it increasingly appears doubtful that attention to truth per se will bias us towards one particular primary bearer of truth.

For more on these issues, see King (2018).

There is a related, but somewhat different point, which is important to understanding the theories we have canvassed.

The neo-classical theories of truth start with truth-bearers which are already understood to be meaningful, and explain how they get their truth values. But along the way, they often do something more. Take the neo-classical correspondence theory, for instance. This theory, in effect, starts with a view of how propositions are meaningful. They are so in virtue of having constituents in the world, which are brought together in the right way. There are many complications about the nature of meaning, but at a minimum, this tells us what the truth conditions associated with a proposition are. The theory then explains how such truth conditions can lead to the truth value true, by the right fact existing.

Many theories of truth are like the neo-classical correspondence theory in being as much theories of how truth-bearers are meaningful as of how their truth values are fixed. Again, abstracting from some complications about meaning, this makes them theories both of truth conditions and truth values. The Tarskian theory of truth can be construed this way too. This can be seen both in the way the Tarski biconditionals are understood, and how a recursive theory of truth is understood. As we explained Convention T in section 2.2, the primary role of a Tarski biconditional of the form \(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi \urcorner\) is to fix whether \(\phi\) is in the extension of 'is true' or not. But it can also be seen as stating the truth conditions of \(\phi\). Both rely on the fact that the unquoted occurrence of \(\phi\) is an occurrence of an interpreted sentence, which has a truth value, but also provides its truth conditions upon occasions of use.

Likewise, the base clauses of the recursive definition of truth, those for reference and satisfaction, are taken to state the relevant semantic properties of constituents of an interpreted sentence. In discussing Tarski's theory of truth in section 2, we focused on how these determine the truth value of a sentence. But they also show us the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by these semantic properties. For instance, for a simple sentence like 'Snow is white', the theory tells us that the sentence is true if the referent of 'Snow' satisfies 'white'. This can be understood as telling us that the truth conditions of 'Snow is white' are those conditions in which the referent of 'Snow' satisfies the predicate 'is white'.

As we saw in sections 3 and 4, the Tarskian apparatus is often seen as needing some kind of supplementation to provide a full theory of truth. A full theory of truth conditions will likewise rest on how the Tarskian apparatus is put to use. In particular, just what kinds of conditions those in which the referent of 'snow' satisfies the predicate 'is white' are will depend on whether we opt for realist or anti-realist theories. The realist option will simply look for the conditions under which the stuff snow bears the property of whiteness; the anti-realist option will look to the conditions under which it can be verified, or asserted with warrant, that snow is white.

There is a broad family of theories of truth which are theories of truth conditions as well as truth values. This family includes the correspondence theory in all its forms - classical and modern. Yet this family is much wider than the correspondence theory, and wider than realist theories of truth more generally. Indeed, virtually all the theories of truth that make contributions to the realism/anti-realism debate are theories of truth conditions. In a slogan, for many approaches to truth, a theory of truth is a theory of truth conditions.

Any theory that provides a substantial account of truth conditions can offer a simple account of truth values: a truth-bearer provides truth conditions, and it is true if and only if the actual way things are is among them. Because of this, any such theory will imply a strong, but very particular, biconditional, close in form to the Tarski biconditionals. It can be made most vivid if we think of propositions as sets of truth conditions. Let \(p\) be a proposition, i.e., a set of truth conditions, and let \(a\) be the 'actual world', the condition that actually obtains. Then we can almost trivially see:

\(p\) is true if and only if \(a \in p\).

This is presumably necessary. But it is important to observe that it is in one respect crucially different from the genuine Tarski biconditionals. It makes no use of a non-quoted sentence, or in fact any sentence at all. It does not have the disquotational character of the Tarski biconditionals.

Though this may look like a principle that deflationists should applaud, it is not. Rather, it shows that deflationists cannot really hold a truth-conditional view of content at all. If they do, then they inter alia have a non-deflationary theory of truth, simply by linking truth value to truth conditions through the above biconditional. It is typical of thoroughgoing deflationist theories to present a non-truth-conditional theory of the contents of sentences: a non-truth-conditional account of what makes truth-bearers meaningful. We take it this is what is offered, for instance, by the use theory of propositions in Horwich (1990). It is certainly one of the leading ideas of Field (1986; 1994), which explore how a conceptual role account of content would ground a deflationist view of truth. Once one has a non-truth-conditional account of content, it is then possible to add a deflationist truth predicate, and use this to give purely deflationist statements of truth conditions. But the starting point must be a non-truth-conditional view of what makes truth-bearers meaningful.

Both deflationists and anti-realists start with something other than correspondence truth conditions. But whereas an anti-realist will propose a different theory of truth conditions, a deflationists will start with an account of content which is not a theory of truth conditions at all. The deflationist will then propose that the truth predicate, given by the Tarski biconditionals, is an additional device, not for understanding content, but for disquotation. It is a useful device, as we discussed in section 5.3, but it has nothing to do with content. To a deflationist, the meaningfulness of truth-bearers has nothing to do with truth.

It has been an influential idea, since the seminal work of Davidson (e.g., 1967), to see a Tarskian theory of truth as a theory of meaning. At least, as we have seen, a Tarskian theory can be seen as showing how the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by the semantic properties of its parts. More generally, as we see in much of the work of Davidson and of Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), giving a theory of truth conditions can be understood as a crucial part of giving a theory of meaning. Thus, any theory of truth that falls into the broad category of those which are theories of truth conditions can be seen as part of a theory of meaning. (For more discussion of these issues, see Higginbotham (1986; 1989) and the exchange between Higginbotham (1992) and Soames (1992).)

A number of commentators on Tarski (e.g., Etchemendy, 1988; Soames, 1984) have observed that the Tarskian apparatus needs to be understood in a particular way to make it suitable for giving a theory of meaning. Tarski's work is often taken to show how to define a truth predicate. If it is so used, then whether or not a sentence is true becomes, in essence, a truth of mathematics. Presumably what truth conditions sentences of a natural language have is a contingent matter, so a truth predicate defined in this way cannot be used to give a theory of meaning for them. But the Tarskian apparatus need not be used just to explicitly define truth. The recursive characterization of truth can be used to state the semantic properties of sentences and their constituents, as a theory of meaning should. In such an application, truth is not taken to be explicitly defined, but rather the truth conditions of sentences are taken to be described. (See Heck, 1997 for more discussion.)

Inspired by Quine (e.g., 1960), Davidson himself is well known for taking a different approach to using a theory of truth as a theory of meaning than is implicit in Field (1972). Whereas a Field-inspired representational approach is based on a causal account of reference, Davidson (e.g., 1973) proposes a process of radical interpretation in which an interpreter builds a Tarskian theory to interpret a speaker as holding beliefs which are consistent, coherent, and largely true.

This led Davidson (e.g. 1986) to argue that most of our beliefs are true - a conclusion that squares well with the coherence theory of truth. This is a weaker claim than the neo-classical coherence theory would make. It does not insist that all the members of any coherent set of beliefs are true, or that truth simply consists in being a member of such a coherent set. But all the same, the conclusion that most of our beliefs are true, because their contents are to be understood through a process of radical interpretation which will make them a coherent and rational system, has a clear affinity with the neo-classical coherence theory.

In Davidson (1986), he thought his view of truth had enough affinity with the neo-classical coherence theory to warrant being called a coherence theory of truth, while at the same time he saw the role of Tarskian apparatus as warranting the claim that his view was also compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth.

In later work, however, Davidson reconsidered this position. In fact, already in Davidson (1977) he had expressed doubt about any understanding of the role of Tarski's theory in radical interpretation that involves the kind of representational apparatus relied on by Field (1972), as we discussed in sections 3.1 and 3.2. In the "Afterthoughts" to Davidson (1986), he also concluded that his view departs too far from the neo-classical coherence theory to be named one. What is important is rather the role of radical interpretation in the theory of content, and its leading to the idea that belief is veridical. These are indeed points connected to coherence, but not to the coherence theory of truth per se. They also comprise a strong form of anti-representationalism. Thus, though he does not advance a coherence theory of truth, he does advance a theory that stands in opposition to the representational variants of the correspondence theory we discussed in section 3.2.

For more on Davidson, see Glanzberg (2013) and the entry on Donald Davidson.

The relation between truth and meaning is not the only place where truth and language relate closely. Another is the idea, also much-stressed in the writings of Dummett (e.g., 1959), of the relation between truth and assertion. Again, it fits into a platitude:

Truth is the aim of assertion.

A person making an assertion, the platitude holds, aims to say something true.

It is easy to cast this platitude in a way that appears false. Surely, many speakers do not aim to say something true. Any speaker who lies does not. Any speaker whose aim is to flatter, or to deceive, aims at something other than truth.

The motivation for the truth-assertion platitude is rather different. It looks at assertion as a practice, in which certain rules are constitutive. As is often noted, the natural parallel here is with games, like chess or baseball, which are defined by certain rules. The platitude holds that it is constitutive of the practice of making assertions that assertions aim at truth. An assertion by its nature presents what it is saying as true, and any assertion which fails to be true is ipso facto liable to criticism, whether or not the person making the assertion themself wished to have said something true or to have lied.

Dummett's original discussion of this idea was partially a criticism of deflationism (in particular, of views of Strawson, 1950). The idea that we fully explain the concept of truth by way of the Tarski biconditionals is challenged by the claim that the truth-assertion platitude is fundamental to truth. As Dummett there put it, what is left out by the Tarski biconditionals, and captured by the truth-assertion platitude, is the point of the concept of truth, or what the concept is used for. (For further discussion, see Glanzberg, 2003a and Wright, 1992.)

Whether or not assertion has such constitutive rules is, of course, controversial. But among those who accept that it does, the place of truth in the constitutive rules is itself controversial. The leading alternative, defended by Williamson (1996), is that knowledge, not truth, is fundamental to the constitutive rules of assertion. Williamson defends an account of assertion based on the rule that one must assert only what one knows.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. There were a number of views of truth under discussion at that time, the most significant for the contemporary literature being the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth.