Three Forms of Truth Relativism

AbstractSeveral authors have argued that a range of linguistic data calls for a relativization of propositional truth to contexts of assessment or, more generally, perspectives. This chapter defends the more orthodox view that the truth of a proposition depends only on what the world is like. It develops an account — factual relativism — on which what the world is like depends, in some respects, on a perspective. The resulting model, which allows for a natural account of faultless disagreement and of the evaluation of perspectival representations from different points of view, is applied both to discourse about taste and discourse involving epistemic modals. Finally, it is argued that a plausible propositional relativism is bound to reduce to either indexical or factual relativism.