Contextualism and relativism

This paper argues that epistemic circularity is not a flaw but an inescapable feature of all knowledge systems. Building on recent work in coherentism (Olsson, 2017), structural realism (French, 2014), and virtue epistemology (Sosa, 2015), we demonstrate that even our most trusted epistemic frameworks-logic, mathematics, and empiricism-rely on selfvalidating structures. We propose a novel framework of "parameterized pluralism" that evaluates knowledge systems through measurable performance indicators rather than foundational certainty. Our central contribution is the "circular wrap" metaphor, which reconceptualizes knowledge as cognitive structures that achieve varying degrees of fit with reality's patterns, without requiring epistemic access to reality itself. This approach addresses key debates in contemporary epistemology: (1) it dissolves rather than resolves the coherentism-foundationalism debate, (2) it provides a graduated solution to the demarcation problem following Pigliucci (2013), and (3) it offers a middle path between scientific realism and anti-realism aligned with Chakravartty's (2017) semi-realism and Massimi's (2018) perspectival realism. We demonstrate how this framework legitimizes diverse epistemic practices while avoiding relativism through explicit, measurable parameters including predictive coherence, manipulative power, and intersubjective alignment. The paper concludes by showing how embracing circularity transforms epistemology from a quest for impossible foundations into an iterative process of pattern refinement, with implications for scientific methodology, institutional knowledge hierarchies, and cross-cultural epistemology.

According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation.

I offer a critique of the dominant representationalist understanding of the moral 'must' and argue for an alternative understanding that is second-personal and performative. The representationalist understanding, I argue, faces serious theoretical difficulties, having to do with the nature of the necessity that is supposedly referred to by the moral 'must'; and it is also morally problematic, in that it encourages us to suppose that utterances of the form 'N (morally) must φ' may be understood, and their truth assessed, altogether apart from such morally significant matters as the nature and history of the relationship between the speaker and her addressee(s) or the illocutionary force of the utterance. The alternative understanding dissolves the theoretical difficulties faced by those who have tried to vindicate a representational understanding of the moral 'must'. It is also morally superior, in that it underscores the dependence of the sense of sentences of the form 'N must φ'-as uttered in moral contexts, and first and foremost in the second person-on morally significant contextual features such as who addresses whom, and with what illocutionary force, and what puts the first person in a position to address the other with these words and in that way.

D. Davidson argues that the existence of alternative conceptual schemes presupposes the Kantian scheme-content dualism, which requires a scheme-neutral empirical content and a fixed, sharp scheme-content distinction. The dismantlement of such a Kantian schemecontent dualism, which Davidson calls "the third dogma of empiricism", would render the notion of alternative conceptual schemes groundless. To counter Davidson's attack on the notion of alternative conceptual schemes, I argue that alternative conceptual schemes neither entail nor presuppose the Kantian scheme-content dualism. On the contrary, it is exactly the abandonment of the concept-neutral content and the denial of a fixed, absolute schemecontent distinction that turns the Kantian conceptual absolutism upside down and thus makes alternative conceptual schemes possible. Proposing common-sense experience as the empirical content of alternative schemes, I construct and defend a non-Kantian schemecontent dualism based on a non-fixed, relative scheme-content distinction. The proposed non-Kantian scheme-content dualism is not only "innocent" enough to be immune from Davidson's charge of the third dogma of empiricism, but also "solid" enough to be able to sustain alternative conceptual schemes. I conclude that in terms of our conceptual schemes, we are connected to the world as closely as possible; only through conceptual schemes can we be connected to the world.

This paper explores José Medina's Pragmatic Contextualism as a compelling approach to longstanding dilemmas in jurisprudence, challenging traditional theories of legal interpretation. In the legal realm, by highlighting the role of discursive agency, Pragmatic Contextualism not only clarifies legal intelligibility but also illuminates the evolving nature of interpretation and the crucial responsibility of interpreters in the stability and change of legal language.

What does 'Smith knows that it might be raining' mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which 'Smith knows that it might be raining' is equivalent to 'it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining' or 'Smith doesn't know that it isn't raining'. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein's 'safety semantics' and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss.

Truth is a property of our statements and of our thoughts, but also what these aim at, and a norm for our thinking in general. But how to understand this normative tie between belief and truth? Norms by themselves seem unable to motivate or to guide us. These difficulties are stated, and the answer given is that the norm of belief is actually knowledge, which explains why we value it, and how it can also be a value.

Cappelen (2012) argues against the Thesis of Centrality, that is, against the idea that analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidential support for their theories. Cappelen challenges this notion by targeting the "Argument from 'Intuition'-Talk", i.e., the idea that intuitions must play a decisive role in the arguments of analytic philosophers because they use intuition talk profusely. This paper empirically examines this claim by assessing the prevalence of intuition talk in critical parts of the arguments. Specifically, it explores whether intuition talk coincides with reasoning markers signifying premises and conclusions. To accomplish this, I will first compile a corpus of articles on taste disagreements. Then, I will conduct two types of analysis: a frequency list analysis, and an analysis of the dispersion of both types of vocabulary along the corpus.

Gricean theories of reference define what it is for a speaker to refer to an item in terms of the speaker meaning something about that item. This raises a question posed by Stephen Schiffer. “What could be the point of trading in facts about meaning for facts about the content of beliefs if one ends up with nothing to say about the latter?” In the case of reference in particular, what do we gain when we explain a speaker’s referring to a particular thing by appealing to beliefs that in some unexplained way refer to that thing? Building on the work of Stephen Neale and Schiffer, I offer a Gricean account of reference and then show what the account explains even though it assumes referential beliefs.

This short paper demonstrates the consistent intellectual thought in the philosophical work of Dr Neville Buch. This is done by considering three concepts as applications: basic and defeating contradiction, parallel logic, and logical compatibility in time. These concepts explain how principles work correctly in our thinking, consistently, and intellectually.

Indexical contextualism has trouble explaining disagreements between utterances of "X is tasty" and "X is not tasty" because it treats them as semantically expressing propositions containing perspectives (e.g., judges) as their constituents. They are thus not incompatible. To overcome the problem, some philosophers suggested extending indexical contextualism with a pragmatic explanation of disagreements according to which the speakers of "X is tasty" and "X is not tasty" disagree because they pragmatically convey incompatible propositions by their respective utterances. The main aim of the present paper is to show that at least some pragmatically extended indexical contextualist theories face a serious problem. This is because the pragmatically conveyed propositions turn out to be inherently perspective-dependent, which means that the alleged incompatibility between them does not arise. Moreover, it is by no means easy to overcome the problem of the inherent perspective-dependence of pragmatically conveyed propositions. Although the discussion primarily focuses on Julia Zakkou's superiority theory, which is rather novel and has not yet been subjected to thoroughgoing critical examination, its outcomes apply to some other theories too. Keywords Disagreement about matters of personal taste • Lost disagreement • Pragmatically extended indexical contextualism • The problem of inherent perspective-dependence • The superiority theory * Marián Zouhar

5 METAETHICAL MORAL RELATIVISM AND THE ANALOGY WITH PHYSICS ALEXANDRE ERLER LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD Abstract This paper deals with a specific version of metaethical moral relativism, known as “speaker-relativism”. It starts by explaining the position, ...

Certain passages in Kaplan's 'Demonstratives' are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator 'always' would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan's intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd consequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber.

© ,--' Martin Montminy <www.philosophersimprint.org/--'--)/> S &!&./# 0.12103 4/!& .&0&(2#+ /.5$&6 that contextualists cannot consistently maintain their advertised neutrality between skepticism and anti-skepticism. This spells trouble for contextualism, since part of this view’s appeal is that it avoids taking sides in the seemingly intractable debate about skepticism. The skeptic’s knowledge denial is plausible, since it seems correct to deny knowledge to a subject who cannot eliminate possibilities of error; yet in everyday contexts, we readily attribute knowledge to subjects who have acquired their beliefs on the basis of fallible evidence. Contextualism proposes to have it both ways. On this view, the truth conditions of a knowledge claim depend in part on the epistemic standards that are in place in the conversational context. The skeptic’s knowledge denial made in the skeptical context is true, since such a context involves epistemic standards that are impossibl...

Contextualism about vagueness holds that the content of vague predicates is context sensitive. I contrast this view with a similar view called nonindexical contextualism, and explain why my brand of contextualism should be preferred to it. I then defend contextualism against three objections that have been recently raised against it. I show that these objections are actually more damaging to rival views than to contextualism itself.

We constantly assess each other's epistemic positions. We attempt to distinguish valuable from worthless information, reliable from unreliable informants, etc. Without established social practices of epistemic evaluations we could not navigate the flood of information we are exposed to every day in order to perform essential selections of valiable information. Yet the way we epistemically evaluate each other, ascribe or deny knowledge, who we deem knowledgeable or ignorant, and whom we refer to as an expert or a layman also crucially shape our epistemic milieu and the structure of our society. Epistemic asymmetry often results in and reflects social asymmetry; higher epistemic appraisal often increases social standing. Also, epistemic evaluations such as knowledge ascriptions are commonly performed against the background of certain epistemic and non-epistemic (e.g., practical) concerns and interests. Consequently, epistemic and non-epistemic factors interact in guiding our epistemic practice. To advance our understanding of how they do so is not only a worthwhile project from an epistemological point of view but can be expected to have repercussions on decision making, in debates within political and social theory as well as within ethics, and help us understand and evaluate how we act and even how to act. Moreover, it might shed light on the perennial question of how theoretical and practical rationality relate to one another. A much-discussed question in recent debates on knowledge ascriptions is the question of whether-and if so, how-epistemic standards (standards of how much it takes to count as knowing or as a knower) are influenced by, and/or contextually vary with, non-epistemic factors such as stakes, interests, aims, etc., and whether this in turn affects the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions or only their assertibility (or sayability) conditions. This has been a main point of contention between contextualists, invariantists and relativists (of various brands) concerning knowledge acsriptions (cf.,

The following paper investigates the crucial notion of a "canonical ascription statement" in Bruno Molder's Mind Ascribed , and argues that the reasons given for preferring the book's approach of canonicallity to a more common understanding of canonicallity in terms of the ascriptions we would "ideally" make are not only unpersuasive, but also leave the interpretivist position more open to skeptical worries than it should be. The paper further argues that the resources for a more compelling justification of Molder's conception of canonicality are already in Molder's book itself.

In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions – predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc. – intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this paper, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made.

Conversational contextualists claim that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims depend upon the dynamics of the conversation in which the knowledge claim is made. However, they have failed to appreciate the ways in which conversational dynamics are influenced by unjust distributions of power. What would the implications be for conversational contextualism if its proponents were not guilty of this oversight? I ask this question for Blome-Tillmann's presuppositional epistemic contextualism (PEC), perhaps the most sophisticated form of conversational contextualism. The investigation turns up a host of counterintuitive implications of PEC that count against it. I suggest placing moral constraints on conversational dynamics as a way of revising PEC in order to avoid the identified counterintuitive implications.

I take issue in this talk with AI formalizations of context, primarily the formalization by McCarthy and Buvač, that regard context as an undefined primitive whose formalization can be the same in many different kinds of AI tasks. In particular, any theory of context in natural language must take the special nature of natural language into account and cannot regard context simply as an undefined primitive. I show that there is no such thing as a coherent theory of context simpliciter-context pure and simple-and that context in natural language is not the same kind of thing as context in KR. In natural language, context is constructed by the speaker and the interpreter, and both have considerable discretion in so doing. Therefore, a formalization based on pre-defined contexts and pre-defined 'lifting axioms' cannot account for how context is used in real-world language.

In his recent Autonomous Knowledge monograph, J. Adam Carter develops a non-standard anti-intellectualist account of know-how. On this account, an agent manifesting know-how necessarily involves her exhibiting a particular kind of cognitive grasp of the mechanism by which she performs her action. Carter considers a potential problem for his new antiintellectualism: namely, whether it precludes less cognitively sophisticated agents from knowing how. In this discussion piece, I argue that his attempts to assuage such concerns-by appeal to work by Duncan Pritchard-fails to compellingly address the problem.

Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Usually, the plans that motivate such utterances include being understood by others and having an effect on their behavior as a result. The use of language belongs squarely in what Frege called the causal realms, the physical and the mental. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a parta very important partof the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. Charles Morris, in Signs, Language, and Behavior (1946), divided "semiotics," the study of signs, into three parts: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 1 Taking language as a system of signs, pragmatics is the study of how language is used, "how to do things with words," as Austin says. Austin developed his theory of speech acts in the 1950s, and Searle and others have further criticized and developed it (Searle 1985). Speech act theory categorizes and describes actions in terms of what we do to perform them, and what we do in and by performing them. Perhaps by uttering a sentence I say something about a politician (a locutionary act); in saying that, I insult the politician (an illocutionary act); by insulting the politician I annoy his powerful friends (a perlocutionary act), and so on. All of this depends on syntax and semantics to get started, but it is basically pragmatics. A bit later, H. P. Grice (1975) introduced the concept of implicature, which is something conveyed by an utterance beyond the proposition it expresses, We are grateful to the members of the Zoom group of philosophical discussion for their constant inspiration. The first two authors acknowledge two grants, one by the Spanish Government

Several recent studies (see Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2015; Marques, 2018; Kneer, 2021a) address linguistic retraction from an experimental perspective. In these studies, speakers’ intuitions regarding the mandatory nature of retraction are tested. Pace MacFarlane, competent speakers (of English) do not consider retraction to be obligatory. This paper examines two methodological features of the above-mentioned studies: they do not take into consideration the difference between public and private contexts; neither do they incorporate the distinction between evaluative and descriptive statements. In this paper, we report the results of two studies conducted to empirically test the hypothesis that retraction is, above all, a public phenomenon. Our findings show that context exerts a significant effect on speakers’ attitudes toward retraction.

The present paper presents a unified analysis of free and embedded indirect speech, with a specific focus on German. First we need a context-based analysis of indexicals (rigid/shiftable) which can capture their orientation in uses in indirect speech. The analysis includes a treatment of the German reportative subjunctive as a shiftable indexical tense. Indirect speech in embedded clauses of the type Peter said that S forces us to extend this context-based analysis of indexicals by an adequate link to the matrix clause. I assume that the event introduced by the matrix verb (‘say’, ‘think’ etc.) provides the context parameter for the embedded clause. The resulting analysis makes correct predictions for a wide range of phenomena such as quantification over embedded speech, embedding under passive clauses and indirect speech in nominalizations.

Recent research gives perspectivism the status of a stand-alone epistemological research program. As part of this development, it must be distinguished from other epistemologies, especially relativism. Not only do relativists and perspectivists use a similar vocabulary—even the supposed tenets (features of the doctrine) seem to partially overlap. To clarify the relation between these programs, I suggest drawing two important distinctions. The first is between the (1) terminological and (2) doctrinal components of epistemologies, the second between the (2a) analytical and (2b) synthetic doctrinal components. The method of the originalistic linguistic analysis that I introduce in this article shows that both relativism and perspectivism use the same matrix of interconnected linguistic expressions that belong to what I call the universal epistemic language. Furthermore, this method reveals which doctrinal components necessarily follow from this linguistic basis and the terms ‘relativism’ and ‘perspectivism’ and which are a result of deliberate philosophical constructions. As for the linguistic basis and analytical doctrinal components, relativism and perspectivism are complementary members of one epistemology. Doctrinal additions that transform the original meaning of the terms ‘relativism’ and ‘perspectivism’, such as ‘indifferentism’ and ‘non-absolutism’, should always be explicitly mentioned to avoid confusion and straw men debates in philosophy.

This study aims to expose certain weaknesses in Moore’s moral objectivist argument against moral relativism and subjectivism. It suggests that a moral objectivist argument has to explain moral diversity against moral relativism. Moral relativism is one of the most critical debates in metaethics, and it can be interpreted in two different ways: one as moral realism and the other as moral anti-realism. Moral realism, when reduced to moral objectivism, excludes moral relativism and subjectivism beyond moral realism. I will refer to this interpretation as narrowed moral realism. But moral realism can be extended in an inclusive way such as moral subjectivism and relativism. I will refer to this as extended moral realism. Due to the focus of the study, I will introduce both extended moral realism and narrowed moral realism in the introduction section. Then, I will address G. E. Moore's narrowed moral realism. I will criticize his arguments for their failure to explain the diversity of moral codes. Finally, I suggest that moral subjectivism and moral relativism can be appropriately addressed within extended moral realism. Contrary to Moore's claims, I contend that moral relativism and moral subjectivism would be claims within moral realism. I also evaluate the two main claims from a moral realist perspective. Moral subjectivism claims that moral reality is constructed by an individual’s mental state. Moral relativism argues that social codes of human conduct completely determine moral reality. In the first section of the study, I discussed moral relativism from a Moorean perspective, which asserts that there are self-evident and indefinable truths at the foundation of objective morality. The second section contends that if Moore is correct, however, it necessitates an explanation for why different cultures accept different moral codes. The third section argues the fact that Moore fails to provide any explanation for this. In the conclusion part, I claim that moral relativism and moral subjectivism can be viewed as moral realist theories based on the failure of Moore's arguments.

If Gendler and Walton illustrate the limitations of philosophical analysis then Goldman's work illustrates the need for critical philosophical reflection to inform the interpretation of neuroscientific results. It might be true that our visual imagination involves our deploying the same regions of the brain and engaging in the same oculormotor activities as genuine perception. But without further argument it is not clear why this should entail that there is any sort of deep connection between images and perceptions, any more than, say, the fact that 'small' and 'malls' share the same letters shows there is a deep connection between malls and small things. Nor is it clear why a rich E-imagination need necessarily involve states that are facsimiles or simulations of ordinary states. It is not obvious, for example, why there could not be creatures who had particular cognitive structures dedicated to supporting states functionally equivalent to, but neurologically quite different from, those generated by our visual imagination. Now this is not at all to say that Goldman is wrong. Far from it. But it is to point out that we must be cautious when drawing consequences about the nature of the imagination from the neuroscientific data. Careful philosophical reflection is needed to interpret that data. To sum up, Nichols's collection makes an important contribution to a growing field. It will be of particular interest to those interested in the nature of our engagement with fiction, modal epistemology, thought experiments, and the emotions. But it will also be of considerable interest to anyone interested in aesthetics or the study of the mind. Indeed, I suspect that any analytic philosopher will gain a great deal indeed from reading this book.

Gina Gustavsson argues that Isaiah Berlin's case against positive liberty in "Two Concepts of Liberty" is best explained and justified by a psychological connection that has hitherto been neglected in the critical literature. 1 Criticisms of Berlin's view as logically flawed are beside the point, and attempts to justify it by reference to historical context (the Cold War) tend to undermine its current relevance. Rather, Berlin is best understood as pointing to an underlying pattern of human psychology according to which positive conceptions of liberty-that is, liberty as self-mastery by contrast with the "negative" liberty of noninterference-tend in fact (although not in logic) to draw people towards authoritarian political conclusions. Gustavsson illustrates this process by reference to the French ban, in 2010, on the wearing of full-face Muslim veils in public. The ban on veils is an example, she argues, of the very problem that Berlin warns us of in positive liberty, the presentation of coercion as liberation. Gustavsson's position, although stimulating throughout, should also be questioned in some of its key aspects. Most fundamentally, it invites us to return to a critique of positive liberty according to which all versions are equally impugned, thus abandoning the more recent tendency to accept that Berlin's warning applies more convincingly to some versions rather than to others. The latter, more nuanced picture remains preferable. Berlin is right to suspect certain kinds of positive liberty as potentially complicit with tyranny. But a blanket condemnation of positive liberty is also a mistake, since in at least one version, personal autonomy, the psychological danger described by Gustavsson is absent. Indeed, positive liberty understood as personal autonomy makes an important contribution to the ideals and norms of liberal democracy, and this can be illustrated from the debate on Muslim veils.

In one of his most famous essays, Isaiah Berlin quotes a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, 1 HEDGEHOG AND FOX but the hedgehog knows one big thing ’ (‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, in Berlin (1978c, 22)). The contrast is a metaphor for the crucial distinction at the heart of Berlin’s thought between monist and pluralist accounts of moral value. According to monism, a single value or narrow set of values overrides all others, while on the pluralist view human goods are multiple, conflicting and incommensurable. Monism, Berlin believes, harbours political dangers that pluralism avoids. While the great authoritarian visions of politics have all rested on monist foundations, pluralism is naturally aligned with toleration, moderation and liberalism. Berlin, the pluralist and liberal, thus tends to present himself as

What does it take for some epistemological thinking to be epistemically justified? Indeed, is that outcome even possible? This paper argues that it is not possible: no epistemological thinking can ever be epistemically justified. A vicious infinite regress of epistemological reflection is the price that would have to be paid for having some such justification. Clearly, that price would be too high.

It is not unusual for epistemologists to argue that ordinary epistemic practice is a setting within which (infallibilist) scepticism will not arise. Such scepticism is deemed to be an alien invader, impugning such epistemic practice entirely from without. But this paper argues that the suggested sort of analysis overstates the extent to which ordinary epistemic practice is antipathetic to some vital aspects of such sceptical thinking. The paper describes how a gradualist analysis of knowledge can do more justice to what sceptics seek to achievewhile also showing how sceptical thinking can even be part of (and is able to have some muted epistemic impact within) ordinary epistemic practice. Keywords Knowledge. Scepticism. Skepticism. Ordinary epistemic practice. Fallibilism. Gradualism 1. How resistant to sceptical possibilities is ordinary epistemic practice? Many epistemologists have been tempted to conceive of such practice as setting or manifesting standards which render such possibilities ineffective by being irrelevant. Indeed, it is common among epistemologists to say that ordinary contexts of inquiry are ordinary in part because of their being so inhospitable towards sceptical possibilities. This is particularly true (it is thought) of infallibilist sceptical possibilities. 1 In this paper, I question that assumption, in a way which seeks to expand our understanding of the epistemic significance of both ordinary epistemic practice and (infallibilist) sceptical thinking. 2

This chapter focuses on the connection between moral disagreement and moral relativism. Moral relativists, generally speaking, think both (i) that there is no unique objectively correct moral standard and (ii) that the rightness and wrongness of an action depends in some way on a moral standard accepted by some group or an individual. This chapter will first consider the metaphysical and epistemic arguments for moral relativism that begin from the premise that there is considerable amount of moral disagreement both within individual societies and between them. The second half of the chapter, by contrast, focuses on the objection that moral relativism threatens to make us unable to have moral disagreements because it seems to make us speak past one another. This part of the chapter also evaluates relativist responses to this disagreement problem that rely on semantic opacity, disagreement in attitude, metalinguistic negotiations, and truth relativism. The chapter finally concludes by considering future directions of research in this area.

Contextualist theories of truth appeal to context to solve the liar paradox: different stages of reasoning occur in different contexts, and so the contradiction is dispelled. The word 'true' is relativized by the contextualists to contexts of use. This paper shows that contextualist approaches to the liar are committed to a form of semantic relativism: that the truth value of some sentences depends on the context of assessment, as well as the context of use. In particular, it is shown how Simmons's and Glanzberg's contextualist approaches entail relativism. In both cases, the liar sentence gets different semantic evaluations as uttered in a fixed context of use but assessed from different contexts. Shift in context of use alone cannot provide the full explanation of the liar. These contextualist approaches, as originally presented, were thus mischaracterised and they should be re-evaluated according to their full implications.

Contextualist theories of truth appeal to context to solve the liar paradox: different stages of reasoning occur in different contexts, and so the contradiction is dispelled. The word 'true' is relativized by the contextualists to contexts of use. This paper shows that contextualist approaches to the liar are committed to a form of semantic relativism: that the truth value of some sentences depends on the context of assessment, as well as the context of use. In particular, it is shown how Simmons's and Glanzberg's contextualist approaches entail relativism. In both cases, the liar sentence gets different semantic evaluations as uttered in a fixed context of use but assessed from different contexts. Shift in context of use alone cannot provide the full explanation of the liar. These contextualist approaches, as originally presented, were thus mischaracterised and they should be re-evaluated according to their full implications.

you are upset'' and can be used to convey different types of modality depending on contextual factors. When used epistemically, these expressions mark the necessity or possibility of an underlying or prejacent proposition relative to a body of evidence or knowledge. Consider, for example, the following exchange between three colleagues who are having lunch in the office break room:

The Uniqueness Thesis (U), according to Richard Feldman and Roger White, says that for a given set of evidence E and a proposition P, only one doxastic attitude about P is rational given E. Luis Rosa has recently provided two counterexamples against U which are supposed to show that even if there is a sense in which choosing between two doxastic attitudes is arbitrary, both options are equally and maximally rational. Both counterexamples work by exploiting the idea that 'ought implies can' and trying to spell out situations in which some inferences are beyond the capabilities of some reasoners. I argue that on a descriptive account of doxastic rationality, questions of whether 'epistemic ought implies can' can be bracketed and that at least one of the inferential moves that Rosa describes in his cases is irrational. I further argue that a descriptive account of doxastic rationality is the appropriate notion of rationality that is to be considered when evaluating U. If my argument for a descriptive account of rationality is successful, then we have reason to revise our use of the term rationality to fit this descriptive understanding.

Ankara : Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent University, 2001.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2001.Includes bibliographical references leaves 57-60.This thesis aims to investigate Rousseau’s General Will in the light of Isaiah Berlin’s views on negative freedom, positive freedom, political monism and political pluralism. It is argued that, along with the romanticist readings of the General Will which rely on compassion to explain the General Will, a rationalist reading of the General Will, as exampled by Isaiah Berlin, is also a possibility. According to that reading, the General Will is associated with positive freedom (i.e. rational autonomy) and therefore taken as a rationalist project. The singularity (or monism) of the General Will is criticized in the thesis since it might possibly lead to authoritarianism. However it is also argued that pluralism, as exampled by Berlin, might also turn out to be authoritarian if it seeks to ground i...

Il contributo introduce una prima parte dei lavori che sono stati presentati al 3° Convegno internazionale intitolato EN TEORÍA HAY MUJERES (EN TEORÍA), tenutosi in date 7 e 8 luglio 2023 presso l'Università degli Studi di Milano. Nella presentazione si ricordano genesi e obiettivi della iniziativa nata nel 2018 e si accennano alcune riflessioni su taluni, tra i moltissimi, nodi irrisolti del dibattito giuridico-filosofico-politico-etico contemporaneo sulla rilevanza/irrilevanza delle questioni di genere a livello teorico e pratico. Parole chiave: eguaglianza; simboli; genere; impegno civile; pluralismo The paper presents a first part of the contributions presented at the 3rd international conference entitled EN TEORÍA HAY MUJERES (EN TEORÍA), which took place on 7 and 8 July 2023 at the University of Milan. The presentation recalls the genesis and objectives of the initiative launched in 2018 and mentions some

At the time of its first publication, relativism was proclaimed by the publisher's advertisement for Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne's book to be "currently the hottest topic in philosophy". Maybe that was commercial license but there is no denying that the debates provoked by the reinvention of relativism as a thesis not of speculative metaphysics but of descriptive semantic theory 1 have been intense and have attracted much attention. Relativism, as understood in these debates, is the claim that, for at least certain distinguished regions of discourse-in the recent literature, the relativistic case has been argued for discourses concerning each of epistemic mights and coulds, knowledge, taste, indicative conditionals, probability statements, and future contingents 2-we obtain the best theoretical characterisation of our actual linguistic practice by allowing that the truth value of an assertion is not determined purely by the state of the world in relevant respects 3 but depends upon and may vary with additional parameters whose values may be different across different thinkers. 4 Cappelen and Hawthorne's short book 5 belongs to the first wave of reaction against this tendency, and at the time of writing remains the only book-length critique of it. Its heart is a systematic defence of a cluster of traditional ideas that together amount to the thesis that its authors caption as Simplicity, incorporating the following five ingredient claims (p. 1):

This work contains three comments related to different passages from L’interpretazione nel diritto, by Giorgio Pino. The first comment introduces some nuances regarding the assertion that certain consolidated interpretative practices can transform any text into a source of law. The second comment criticizes the alleged impossibility of observing (in reality) an integral formalism or substantialism, and also that this could be the reason for supporting the gradual nature of the distinction between formalist and substantialist legal ideologies. Finally, the third comment includes two observations related to the understanding of the literal argument and to the supposed implicit function of the literal interpretation within all interpretive legal arguments.

sanna Radovic, with whom I have had inspiring and thought-provoking conversations over the years. A special thanks goes to Rasmus Blanck, for helping out with typesetting, and Monica Havström, who designed a wonderful cover for the book. For good measure, I would like to thank Jesper Ahlström and the ITsupport at the faculty for fixing my crashed computer, and Agnetha Eng, Martin Tuneberg and the staff at Campusservice Lorensberg for assisting me by mounting whiteboards and numerous other tasks. The administrative staff at the department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science has always been eager to help; a special thanks goes to Helena Bjärnlind, Matilde Eriksson and Linda Aronsson for helping out with forms, room bookings, and a lot of other pieces of work. I owe a collective thanks to everyone at the Department of Swedish, where I have worked during the last two years. The positive work environment made it possible to write up the final parts of the dissertation in my spare time. Finally, a thanks goes to Kungliga och Hvitfeldtska stiftelsen and Stiftelsen Erik och Gurli Hultengrens fond för filosofi vid Lunds Universitet for financial support. Preliminary material from the dissertation was presented at the conference Knowledge, language and ideology, University of Valladolid (organized by Cristina Corredor), in 2015, and The Swedish Congress of Philosophy, Linköping University (organized by Fredrik Stjernberg), in 2015 as well, and at Umeå University (organized by Per Sundström, Daniela Cutas and Torfinn Huvenes), in 2019. I would like to thank the audiences at these conferences for constructive discussion and feedback. On a personal note, I would like to thank my wife, my love, and my everything Rebecka Petersson. From an intellectual perspective, it's clear to me that I would have had completely different trains of thought, if I hadn't had the luck to meet you and to live with you and our amazing three children. Your knowledge of religion, feminist theory and literature has always impressed and influenced me, and the encounters with people I hadn't met otherwise, made possible through your important ministry work, have provided new dimensions and important insights. On the same note, I am grateful to my parents, Christina Rosén and Lars-Olof Petersson, for always supporting me. I somehow developed the confidence to pursue a PhD in theoretical philosophy: I owe this confidence to my parents. And thank you for helping us with the upbringing and care of the children. I would also like to say thank you to my parents-in-law, Margit and Bengt Olausson, for helping out with the kids, and for providing a relaxing and joyful atmosphere at Hamburgö, where we have spent many summer days.

The contrast between Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Boghossian on epistemic justification and relativism of justification illuminates the background issue of normative pluralism at stake in their distinctive rejections of relativism. In a significant sense, MacIntyre's views on relativism and epistemic justification are closer to Putnam's (and those of Dewey and Hook). Both Putnam and MacIntyre contest elements of epistemology found in Boghossian's, and other more analytic approaches. The following passage comes from the "Postscript" included in the second edition (1984) of MacIntyre's widely read study, After Virtue. "Morality," MacIntyre argues, "which is no particular society's morality is to be found nowhere."