Relativism Without Relative Truth (taken down for revisions)
Abstract
I don’t think truth-relativism is the best version of relativism about matters of taste, such as whether curry is delicious. Contemporary truth-relativism is presented as a linguistic thesis, about how to model the contents of our utterances and judgements. The metaphysical underpinning for the theory is often neglected. How are things, if the truth of our judgements about them is relative? I will argue that no satisfactory underpinning can be given (§§3-5). Then I will sketch a different kind of relativism, which is not subject to my objection to truth-relativism (§6). On my proposal, whether a subject-matter is relative is a metaphysical question; it is irrelevant to explaining how linguistic communication works, and thus to what semantic values we should assign natural language expressions (§7).
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