Relativism and Monadic Truth [Paperback]

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics.Relativism and Monadic Truthaims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

1. Overview: Simplicity, Possible Worlds Semantics and Relativism
2. Diagnostics for Shared Content: From 'Say' to 'Agree'
3. Operators, the Anaphoric 'That' and Temporally Neutral Propositions
4. Predicates of Personal Taste
Bibliography

Herman Cappelenhas written numerous papers in philosophy of language and two previous books,Insensitive SemanticsandLanguage Turned on Itself(both with Ernie Lepore). He is currently a Professor at the Arche Philosophical Research Centre and the University of St. Andrews and research director at CSMN at the University of Oslo. Previously he has held positions at Oxford University and Somerville College, the University of Oslo, and Vassar College.


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