Semantic Relativism and Logical Implication
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Semantic Relativism and Logical Implication Leonid Tarasov1 Received: 10 January 2019 / Accepted: 22 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Semantic relativism is the view that the truth-value of some types of statements can vary depending on factors besides possible worlds and times, without any change in their propositional content. It has grown increasingly popular as a semantic theory of several types of statements, including statements that attribute knowledge of a proposition to a subject (knowledge attributions). The ways of knowing claim is the view that perception logically implies knowledge. In my “Semantic Relativism and Ways of Knowing” (2019) I argued that a relativist semantics for knowledge attributions is incompatible with the ways of knowing claim. I suggested that this incompatibility depends on some basic features of the logic of relativist semantics, and therefore can be shown to generalise beyond the discussion of knowledge attributions to semantic relativism more broadly. Here I make this generalisation. I demonstrate that for any proposition p expressed by a statement that does not have a relativist semantics, and for any proposition q expressed by a statement that does have a relativist semantics, p fails to logically imply q. I explain why this happens, discuss some of its philosophical consequences, and consider a way to modify relativist semantics to avoid it. I conclude that semantic relativism raises interesting philosophical questions that have gone largely unnoticed in discussions of this view until now.
1 Introduction Semantic relativism is now established as a formally rigorous and philosophically robust framework for the analysis of a number of expressions, including predicates of personal taste (e.g. ‘good’, ‘tasty’, ‘fun’), moral judgement (e.g. ‘wrong’), epistemic predicates (e.g. ‘know’), and others. It says that the truth-value of statements that contain these expressions can vary depending on factors besides possible worlds and times, without any change in their propositional content. For instance, if Rick and Morty say ‘Adventures are fun’ to each other, they may say the same thing at the same time, but what they say might be true relative to Rick and false relative to Morty. This will be * Leonid Tarasov [email protected]; [email protected] 1
The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
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made more precise in Section 2, but roughly the idea is that, besides the possible world and time of the utterance, the truth-value of ‘Adventures are fun’ is sensitive to a standard of fun that is different for different people. This works in a similar way for ‘wrong’, ‘know’, and other expressions, except here the sensitivity is to standards of morality, epistemic standards, and so on (see, e.g., Kölbel 2008; MacFarlane 2014). In a recent paper (2019), I argued that relativism about ‘know’ is incompatible with the ways of knowing claim. The ways of knowing claim is the claim that for any subject x a
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