Wolfgang Schwarz

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Posts on: Relativism

Assessment-relativity and pretended dialogs

Does the semantic value of expressions in a language sometimes depend on other things than their utterance context? That depends on what is meant by "semantic value", but for the most part, I think not.

It can appear otherwise if one identifies the content of an utterance with the main proposition it conveys to competent hearers.

Alice, Bob and Carol are searching for honey. Alice sees a bee hive on a tree near Bob and wants to inform both Bob and Carol about this. That is, she wants Bob to acquire the self-locating belief that there is a bee hive on the tree near him, and she wants Carol to acquire the belief that there is a bee hive on the tree over there near Bob. She achieves both goals simultaneously by pointing at the relevant tree and saying, "there's a bee hive on the tree over there".

Since Alice conveys two different (centered) propositions to Bob and Carol with her sentence, one might conclude that her sentence expresses two different contents, one relative to Bob's context of assessment and one relative to Carol's. Content, then, is relative to both an utterance context and an assessment context. However, it is quite implausible that Alice's utterance really has these two propositions as its literal semantic value. Instead, what she expressed was just the proposition that there is a bee hive on the tree she is pointing at, and Bob and Carol figured out the centered propositions they were meant to learn from this information.

Relativism and Contextualism

Suppose we are relativists about moral judgements. That is, we believe that, for example,

"One should not engage in premarital sex"

may be truely asserted by somebody iff according to his moral code (or the moral code of his community, or something like that) one should not engage in premarital sex. The important part here is of course "truely". Noone denies that if you believe that one should not engage in premarital sex then if asked about it, you should say so. That's not relativism. Relativism as I understand it holds that what you said then would be true.

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