Abstract
This paper compares two ‘relativist’ theories about deliciousness: truth-relativism, and Kit Fine’s non-factualism about a subject-matter. Contemporary truth-relativism is presented as a linguistic thesis; its metaphysical underpinning is often neglected. I distinguish three views about the obtaining of worldly states of affairs concerning deliciousness, and argue that none yields a satisfactory version of truth-relativism. Finean non-factualism about deliciousness is not subject to the problems with truth-relativism. I conclude that Finean non-factualism is the better relativist theory. As I explain, non-facualism about deliciousness is happily combined with an invariantist semantics for the word “delicious”. On this approach, relativism is a matter for a metaphysical theory, not a linguistic one.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
As will emerge in Sect. 8, I think there is no distinctive linguistic data in the case of deliciousness and morality. Suppose there is distinctive linguistic data in the case of epistemic modals. Then plausibly the puzzling behaviour of epistemic modals should be treated by a linguistic theory, and relativism about deliciousness and morality by a non-linguistic theory (a metaphysical one). At the very least, we can’t assume that deliciousness and epistemic modals should receive a unified treatment. Recent work on epistemic modals includes the essays in Egan and Weatherson (2011) and MacFarlane (2014, Chap. 10).
MacFarlane (2014) initially presents the idea as the imperative to call something delicious if it is pleasing to you, and call it not delicious if it is not pleasing to you (p. 4; cf. pp. 21–22). He calls an assertion in line with that imperative ‘permitted’ (pp. 103–111), ‘correct’ (p. 73, 200, 306), and ‘right’ (p. 195). (For reasons I won’t go into, MacFarlane (2014, pp. 103–111) says the relativist also gives a distinctive account of when an assertion must be retracted.)
MacFarlane might have endorsed something like the evenhandedness monologue earlier work (2007, pp. 28–29). Whether or not MacFarlane (2007, pp. 22–25) had it in mind, consider the alternative view that correctness (in the deep sense) is relative to an assessor. This approach says that relative to me, I’m correct and my Dad’s incorrect; relative to my Dad, I’m incorrect and he’s correct. On this approach, there is no perspective relative to which both judgements are correct. But that’s just not what we want to say. Consider an alternate case in which someone replaces our food with a very bland curry without my Dad or I yet noticing. In the original case, our judgements of deliciousness reflect our own tastes; in this alternate case, our judgements about whether the curry will be delicious are contrary to our own tastes. If correctness is relative to an assessor, then both the original and alternate cases are ones in which my Dad’s judgement is correct relative to one of us and incorrect relative to the other. But surely our judgements are worse off in the alternate case than in the original case. Surely the original case is one in which we both judge correctly in the metaphysically serious sense, and the alternate case is one in which we both judge incorrectly.
Schafer says that in the crucial sense, what it is ‘permissible’ to judge is determined by the judge’s tastes (2014, p. 19). He refuses to call permissible judgements ‘correct’, but I don’t think anything deep rests on the point.
I criticize a less demanding desideratum for relativism at the end of Sect. 5.
MacFarlane (2014, Chap. 6) claims that there isn’t a single intuitive notion of disagreement about a content. I disagree.
The intuition that we disagree remains strong when we follow Cappelen and Hawthorne’s recommendation not to rely on intuitions about generics, such as whether curry is delicious (not just this one) (2009, pp. 107–109, 111–114). They claim that when I consider that there is a deep sense in which my Dad judges ‘correctly’, my intuition that we disagree goes away (2009, pp. 119–120). But suppose I am pondering the deeper sense in which my Dad judges ‘correctly’. Still, if asked whether I disagree with my Dad about whether the curry is delicious, it seems that I do. I may then say that our disagreement isn’t a ‘deep’ one, as the matter is ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’, in a sense that needs explaining, as this paper attempts to do. Cappelen & Hawthorne also point out that judges realize they shouldn’t disagree about whether Ovaltine is delicious, if their pleasure at drinking Ovaltine differs only because one of them always eats dates beforehand, and the other eats chickpeas first (p. 118). The observation is compatible with motivating relativism: those judges should agree that Ovaltine is delicious when drunk after eating dates, and disgusting when drunk after eating chickpeas; no such agreement between my Dad and I suggests itself.
Wright says that being on one side of a disagreement makes impossible “the kind of even-handed assessment of [the] disagreement that relativism ought intuitively to make possible” (2008, p. 183). He claims that there is no way to have “the appropriate kind of equality of respect for contrasting opinions,” as one is “stuck with an opinion of [one’s] own on the matter in question” (p. 181). This assumes correspondence. Mark Richard thinks it refutes relativism to observe that I am committed to thinking that my Dad is “mistaken”, because “if you have a false belief, you are mistaken” (2008, p. 132). This objection assimilates the relativist’s two notions of correctness, i.e. assumes correspondence. Carol Rovane also assimilates the two notions of correctness, charging that the evenhandedness monologue incoherently claims that my Dad is and is not wrong (Rovane 2010, p. 48).
There is a raw intuition that my Dad and I disagree about whether the curry is delicious (possibly supported by linguistic arguments). We may then argue that my Dad judges ‘correctly’ by rejecting non-reductive and reductive realism about deliciousness, and the error theory. Maybe we reject non-reductive realism on the grounds that irreducible facts about what’s delicious are not naturalistically respectable. Then we reject reductive realism about deliciousness, according to which what’s delicious is determined by what the majority of people find delicious (or: what chemical property “delicious” refers to is determined by what the majority find delicious). For if reductive realism were true, then finding out that the majority of people disagree with you about whether American ‘domestic’ beer is delicious would force you to change your mind on the matter; but one is not forced by metaphysical considerations to adopt the majority view on such matters. One can dismiss the majority as plebians (cf. Lasersohn 2005, pp. 651–652). Finally, we take it to be an undeniable piece of common-sense that the curry is delicious (or whatever dish or beverage you enjoy), so we reject the error theory. We conclude that judgements of deliciousness do not “aim to correspond to some objective fact of the matter”; rather they “aim to reflect the tastes of the judge”. So in the deep sense, my Dad is ‘correct’ to judge that the curry is not delicious.
The view is ‘unworldly’ in that it does not appeal to worldly facts about what’s delicious.
One might think that Stephenson (2007) is a relationalist truth-relativist who denies that our ordinary judgements attribute a 1-placed property of deliciousness. I don’t understand the view thus attributed to Stephenson. She thinks many attributions of deliciousness have the content that X is delicious PRO \(_{J}\), where \(\hbox {PRO}_{J}\) is a “silent nominal item... that refers to the judge [i.e. the assessor]” (p. 500). Suppose those attributions take deliciousness to be a relation (not a 1-placed property). They relate a dish and...what? Neither a specific judge, nor a function from judges to themselves, are acceptable answers to that question. Maybe Stephenson is best interpreted as taking ordinary attributions of deliciousness to embed a metaphysical mistake (a view I explain in the following paragraph).
A fast train makes a circular journey. According to modern physics, the duration of the journey is (in some sense) relative to a frame of reference: a clock on the train should record a shorter time than one on the platform. Pinillos (2011) argues that judges ignorant of the physics attribute unrelativized duration to the journey. He claims it is objectionably uncharitable to (merely) say such judgements are false (p. 66). Rather, such judgements are true relative to some frames of reference. The relationalist truth-relativist says it is not the case that a 2-placed duration relation holds between the journey and some length of time, contrary to our ordinary judgements of duration. Contra Pinillos, this suggests ordinary judgements of duration are defective attempts to get at facts of the form: the journey, t seconds, and frame F bear a 3-placed duration relation. Yet the ordinary judgements are in the ballpark of a truth, unlike judgements that someone is a witch. The relationalist attributes relative truth to unqualified attributions of duration to soften the blow of finding them all incorrect.
I say our judgements ‘concern’ different aspects of reality, rather than that they are ‘about’ them, to allow for the ‘temporalist’ view of contents described (and rejected) in the next paragraph.
Einheuser (2008) formulates a view like holding-relativism about deliciousness, calling it ‘factual relativism’. She admits that on such a view, my Dad and I are judging “about” different aspects of reality (p. 196). She says this is a lesser kind of disagreement than one over a single realm of fact, but is a kind of disagreement nevertheless (p. 193). I think the case of holding-relativism about time shows it is no kind of disagreement at all.
I’m rejecting ‘non-indexical contextualism’ about deliciousness here (MacFarlane 2014, Chaps. 4–5). According to that view, the propositional content of my judgement is just that the curry is delicious, but my tastes nevertheless determine the truth or falsity of my judgement. On this view, I should think that my Dad’s judgement is true, though what he judges is false. I find that an unattractive combination.
I am not sure whether the cited truth-relativists have this thin conception of ‘correctness’. Schafer says the relevant kind of correctness is that determined by the “fundamental linguistic or conceptual norms” (2014, p. 87). MacFarlane says that it is “constitutive” of assertion and judgement that they are governed by the relevant standard (2014, pp. 101–103).
Unworldly truth-relativism need not deny that states of affairs concerning deliciousness obtain: it can be ‘minimalist’ about them. That is, the unworldly truth-relativist can say that \(<\)[the curry is delicious] holds absolutely\(>\) is true relative to me, but false relative to my Dad. The unworldly truth-relativist does not appeal to such states of affairs to explain the relative truth of propositions about what’s delicious.
Fine describes non-factualism about morality thus:
Of course, the obvious standard of correctness [for moral beliefs] will be nonfactual; for the correctness of the judgement that abortion is wrong, say, will simply amount to abortion’s being wrong.... But this nonfactual standard of correctness lives in the shadow, as it were, of a factual standard. ... So for the expressivist, for example, the factual standard of correctness for a judgement might be that it faithfully reflects one’s (possibly implicit) commitments.... (Fine 2001, p. 23).
Fine also requires the non-factualist to say in virtue of what people have beliefs about the subject-matter, without invoking the allegedly non-factual elements. For example, the moral non-factualist must say in virtue of what people have beliefs about which acts are wrong, without invoking moral wrongness. That strikes me as neither necessary nor sufficient for non-factualism. It is not necessary, because one can think that facts about what people believe are fundamental, and do not hold in virtue of anything else, and yet still be a non-factualist about morality. It is not sufficient, as one can give a functionalist account of what it is to believe something to be good, without mentioning goodness itself, yet be a crude realist about goodness. (Dreier 2004 claims inspiration from Fine 2001, but focuses on what I’ve argued is the mistaken element in Fine’s characterization of non-factualism.)
Intensional semantics employs the notion of a sentence-type being true in a context. This notion \((\hbox {truth}_{3})\) is not obscure, because it is intimately related to ordinary propositional truth \((\hbox {truth}_{1})\) and utterance truth \((\hbox {truth}_{2})\) as follows. Firstly: utterance u is \(\hbox {true}_{2}\) iff u is an utterance of some sentence-type s such that s is \(\hbox {true}_{3}\) in the context of utterance of u. Secondly: utterance u is \(\hbox {true}_{2}\) iff u says that p and p is \(\hbox {true}_{1}\). Relative truth* cannot be thus domesticated. See Kölbel (2008, Sect. 2) for more details. (I am not persuaded by Kölbel’s claim (2008, Sect. 3) that relative truth* is not obscure because it overlaps with ordinary truth for objective matters.)
A further point: I think claims about truth* are only used to explain which judgements are metaphysically correct. (Some of those judgements have contents like: \(<\)My Dad is wrong\(>,\) or \(<\)I was wrong\(>.\)) But the only claims that explain correctness are of the form: \(\hbox {J}_{1}\)’s judgement that p is true* relative to \(\hbox {J}_{1}\). So the truth-relativist theory contains lots of explanatorily idle claims of the form: \(\hbox {J}_{1}\)’s judgement that p is true* relative to \(\hbox {J}_{2}\), where \(\hbox {J}_{1}\ne \hbox {J}_{2}\).
A truth-relativist could adopt the approach to semantics I recommend to the Finean non-factualist. That’s not the view of the truth-relativists cited, and it would leave truth-relativism unmotivated.
“The antifactualist should be a quasi-realist and attribute to the nonfactual all those features that were traditionally thought to belong to the factual ... [Non-factual propositions] will be capable of being true or false, believed or asserted, embedded in larger linguistic contexts, and so on.” (Fine 2001, p. 5).
I am ignoring certain irrelevant issues, such as the vagueness in how delicious something must be in order to be delicious tout court.
As I explain in footnote 22, Dreier (2004) focuses on a mistaken aspect of Fine’s account.
‘Carving nature at the joints’ is an expression prominently employed by Sider (2011). I don’t mean to endorse his way of precisifying the idea.
Fine (2001) cannot say these nice things because he rejects non-factualism about tables, cities, and the like. He says truths about tables are ‘reducible’: they are not facts-in-reality, but they are ultimately grounded in facts-in-reality. According to Fine, a reducible truth p is not a fact-in-reality, but our judgements that p are still made metaphysically correct or not by whether p. (Reducible truths are still ‘factual’.) That is, our judgements are to be understood metaphysically as engaging with p’s being the case. We don’t ‘project’ tables onto the world, but neither are they constituents of any facts-in-reality. I find this combination baffling; things are clearer if we reject Fine’s category of ‘reducible’ truths.
References
Blackburn, S. (1993). Essays in quasi-realism. Oxford: OUP.
Boghossian, P. (2010). Three versions of relativism. In S. Hales (Ed.), Blackwell companion to relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cappelen, H., & Hawthorne, J. (2009). Relativism and monadic truth. Oxford: OUP.
Dreier, J. (2004). Meta-ethics and the problem of creeping minimalism. Philosophical Perspectives, 18, 23–44.
Dreier, J. (2009). Relativism (and expressivism) and the problem of disagreement. Philosophical Perspectives, 23, 79–110.
Egan, A., & Weatherson, B. (Eds.). (2011). Epistemic modality. Oxford: OUP.
Einheuser, I. (2008). Three forms of truth relativism. In M. Kölbel & M. Garcia-Carpintero (Eds.), Relative truth. Oxford: OUP.
Fine, K. (2001). The question of realism. Philosophers’ Imprint 1/1.
Fine, K. (2005). Tense and reality. Chapter 8 in his Modality and tense, Oxford: OUP.
Francén, R. (2010). No deep disagreement for new relativists. Philosophical Studies, 151, 19–37.
Gibbard, A. (2003). Thinking how to live. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Glanzberg, M. (2009). Semantics and truth relative to a world. Synthese, 166, 281–307.
Holton, R. (1997). Some telling examples: Reply to Tsohatzidis. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 625–628.
Jackson, A. (2010). The inflexibility of relative truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 110(3), 409–418.
Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology of demonstratives and other indexicals. In P. Almog & H. Wettstein (Eds.) Themes from kaplan, Oxford: OUP.
Kölbel, M. (2003). Faultless disagreement. Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, 104(1), 53–73.
Kölbel, M. (2008). Truth in semantics. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 32, 242–257.
Kölbel, M. (2009). The evidence for relativism. Synthese, 166(2), 375–395.
Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28(6), 643–686.
Lasersohn, P. (2009). Relative truth, speaker commitment, and control of implicit arguments. Synthese, 166(2), 359–374.
MacFarlane, J. (2007). Relativism and disagreement. Philosophical Studies, 132, 17–31.
MacFarlane, J. (2014). Assessment sensitivity: Relative truth and its applications. Oxford: OUP.
Pinillos, A. (2011). Time dilation, context and relative truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82(1), 65–92.
Richard, M. (2008). When truth gives out. Oxford: OUP.
Rovane, C. (2010). Relativism requires alternatives, not disagreement or relative truth. In S. Hales (Ed.), Blackwell companion to relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schafer, K. (2014). Constructivism and three forms of perspective-dependence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(1), 68–101.
Schaffer, J. (2011). Perspective in taste predicates and epistemic modals. In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic modality, Oxford: OUP.
Sider, T. (2011). Writing the book of the world. Oxford: OUP.
Stephenson, T. (2007). Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(4), 487–525.
Stojanovic, I. (2007). Talking about taste: Disagreement, implicit arguments, and relative truth. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(6), 691–706.
Sundell, T. (2011). Disagreements and taste. Philosophical Studies, 155(2), 267–288.
Wright, C. (2008). Haphazard thoughts about relativism about truth itself. In M. Kölbel & M. Garcia-Carpintero (Eds.) Relative Truth, Oxford: OUP.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following for helpful comments and conversations: Corine Besson, Andrew Cortens, Stephen Crowley, Kit Fine, John Hawthorne, Brian Kierland, Angel Pinillos, Ted Sider, Ernie Sosa, several anonymous reviewers, and those attending a meeting of the LEM forum at the University of London’s Institute of Philosophy.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jackson, A. From relative truth to Finean non-factualism. Synthese 193, 971–989 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0787-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0787-0