Relative Truth

It appears that indexicals must have fine-grained senses for us to explain
things involving human action and emotions, and we typically identify these different senses with different modes of expression. On the other hand, we also express the very same thought in very different ways. The first problem is the problem of cognitive significance. The second problem is what Branquinho (1999) has called the problem of cognitive dynamics. The question is how we can solve both of those problems at the same time. Vojislav Božičković (2021) offers one solution in which the cognitive
dynamics runs through the objects of the attitudes. I discuss this solution and offer an alternative in which the theory of cognitive dynamics has no use for the objects of the attitudes to unify expressions of attitudes. When we say or believe “the same thing” using different modes of expressions, it is by virtue of our deploying a dynamic theory of attitude expression. Like Lewis Carrol’s Red Queen, we must run to stay in place.

The triumph of the Copernican revolution is commonly associated with the introduction of the scientific method, mainly by Galileo. The nature of science presumably depends on the way observation passes judgment on theory. This is how, according to empiricism, the practice of science improves our worldviews. Some historically inclined philosophers of science, most notably Kuhn and Feyerabend, have insisted on paying attention to what Galileo actually said and did. Shockingly, he drives a dagger through the heart of empiricism: observation does not have such priority over theory, because observation itself assumes theory. This is what he argues when dismantling Aristotle's Tower Argument, according to which a stone dropped from a tower falls straight down to the base of the tower. If this is so, the Earth cannot rotate, for it would carry the tower with it, making our observation of the stone's flight wildly different. According to Galileo, to conclude that the stone really falls vertically requires the assumption that the Earth does not movethe theoretical issue in question. Given Galileo's proper understanding of the nature of science, I view Feyerabend's principle of proliferation as the realization that a good strategy for the latter is to elaborate radical alternatives and, on their basis, reconsider what counts as evidence. Moreover, a science produced by human brains should be analyzed on the basis of evolutionary theory and neuroscience. From that perspective, we may be able to defend a sensible notion of relativism. These considerations have led me to the main arguments of my new book, A Theory of Wonder: Evolution, Brain, and the Radical Nature of Science (Philosophy of Science,

Resumo: O presente trabalho aborda a aplicação do Design Participativo (DP) no desenvolvimento de um jogo de ditado digital, em que o principal objetivo é auxiliar na aprendizagem da escrita e da ortografia. A metodologia aplicada trata-se de um estudo de caso que está inserido no campo pesquisa-ação, por seu caráter participativo e por realizar uma intervenção em uma realidade específica, neste caso, duas turmas de 3º ano do Ensino Fundamental (EF) de uma escola da rede pública de Porto Alegre – RS/Brasil. Neste trabalho, foram realizadas atividades que contemplaram a construção, a aplicação e a avaliação do jogo. As análises apontam que o uso deste recurso lúdico repercutiu na motivação, no engajamento e na colaboração dos alunos. Os resultados mostram que os alunos aprimoraram seu aprendizado referente à escrita, além de demonstrarem maior motivação em realizar as atividades, persistindo na competição até chegar ao acerto. Verificou-se, ainda, um maior engajamento dos alunos ao s...

This essay presents an array of arguments demonstrating that truth is necessarily pragmatic. Evaluations of truth derive from human experience, from the individual’s weltanschauung which molds their point of view and ideological perspective. Consequently, within any community, there exist alternative truths. Traditional takes on truth are reviewed. The fuzziness of many truths is examined. The existence within the community of alternative, sometimes contradictory, truths is explicated and shown to be fairly common in practice, even though it can occasionally lead to social dissension. The essay expatiates on the alleged incontrovertibility of logical, mathematical, and scientific truths (supposedly true in all possible worlds) showing that they are necessarily subject to specific conditions which render the assessment pragmatic. In sum, Φ is true resolves into Φ functions as true under specific conditions a 1…n . Certainly, a hegemonic group within the community will often assert a ...

The semantic blindness objection to contextualism challenges the view that there is no incompatibility between (i) denials of external-world knowledge in contexts where radical-deception scenarios are salient, and (ii) affirmations of external-world knowledge in contexts where such scenarios are not salient. Contextualism allegedly attributes a gross and implausible form of semantic incompetence in the use of the concept of knowledge to people who are otherwise quite competent in its use; this blindness supposedly consists in wrongly judging that there is genuine conflict between claims of type (i) and type (ii). We distinguish two broad versions of contextualism: relativistic-content contextualism and categorical-content contextualism. We argue that although the semantic blindness objection evidently is applicable to the former, it does not apply to the latter. We describe a subtle form of conflict between claims of types (i) and (ii), which we call différance-based affirmatory conflict. We argue that people confronted with radical-deception scenarios are prone to experience a form of semantic myopia (as we call it): a failure to distinguish between différance-based affirmatory conflict and outright inconsistency. Attributing such semantic myopia to people who are otherwise competent with the concept of knowledge explains the bafflement about knowledge-claims that so often arises when radical-deception scenarios are made salient. Such myopia is not some crude form of semantic blindness at all; rather, it is an understandable mistake grounded in semantic competence itself: what we call a competence-based performance error.

This article defends an intentionalist solution to cases of disagreement. Unlike conventionalist approaches, the paper shows that the truth-value of some sentences is shifted and relative to the concrete way the assertion is made. Unlike relativist accounts, it argues that cases of subjective meaning are just apparent, and really express normative content as included in embedded sentences. The paper advocates for a solution based on what I call the speaker's point of view, which understands disagreement as expressing the speaker's perspective in conversation about a particular matter without constraining the truth-value of the sentences of our natural language. Consequently, the speaker's utterance is a speech act necessarily related to the interlocutor's utterance, which is another speech act, since only by integrating the level of the communicative function into a dialogic interaction the real meaning of the utterances can completely show up.

This thesis compares truth relativism with non-indexical contextualism. These views are compared both as general approaches to account for the use of a linguistic expression in declarative sentences and as proposals about particular expressions such as personal taste, aesthetic and moral predicates, epistemic modals, knowledge ascriptions and future contingents. Four aims are set forth: (i) to show that truth relativism must be understood as an account of the assessment sensitivity of our ordinary monadic truth notion, (ii) to single out a problem this view faces to make sense of its non-monadic truth notion and identify the best strategy to solve it, (iii) to argue that, with the exception of future contingents, this strategy cannot be applied to the cases for which truth relativist accounts have been proposed, and (iv) to argue for non-indexical contextualist treatments of these cases. The thesis has two parts; (i) and (ii) are addressed in the first one, while (iii) and (iv) are ...

John MacFarlane has recently presented a novel argument in support of truth-relativism. According to this, contextualists fail to accommodate retrospective reassessments of propositional contents, when it comes to languages which are rich enough to express actuality. The aim of this note is twofold. First, it is to argue that the argument can be effectively rejected, since it rests on an inadequate conception of actuality. Second, it is to offer a more plausible account of actuality in branching time, along the line of David Lewis (Noûs 4:175-88, 1970; Postscripts to 'Anselm and actuality', Philosophical papers I, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983). Keywords Truth-relativism Á Contextualism Á Actuality Á Future contingents 1 Introduction In his ''Truth in the garden of forking paths'' (2008), John MacFarlane (MF) presents a novel argument strategy against contextualism and in favour of truth-relativism (if not otherwise specified, page references to MF's work will henceforth refer to MF (2008).

Vagueness is a double-edged sword in relation to lying and truthfulness. In situations in which a cooperative speaker is uncertain about the world, vagueness offers a resource for truthfulness: it avoids one’s having to commit oneself to more precise utterances that would be either false or unjustifiably true, and it is arguably an optimal solution to satisfy the Gricean maxims of Quality and Quantity. In situations in which a non-cooperative speaker is well-informed about the world, on the other hand, vagueness can be a deceptive mechanism. We distinguish two cases of that sort: cases in which the speaker is deliberately imprecise in order to hide information from the hearer; and cases in which the speaker exploits the semantic indeterminacy of vague predicates to produce utterances that are true in one sense, but false in another. Should such utterances, which we call half-truths, be considered lies? The answer, we argue, depends on the context: the lack of unequivocal truth is no...

La visión de que la ciencia es típicamente un proceso acumulativo y progresivo, como lo sugieren algunos historiadores de la ciencia y algunos realistas científicos, está minada tanto por la historia como por consideraciones evolutivas sobre la naturaleza de la ciencia. Los intentos de utilizar la biología evolutiva para retratar el desarrollo científico como continuo se basan en desafortunadas analogías con la evolución de la vida. Una aplicación adecuada de la biología evolutiva, en combinación con la neurociencia, derrota el caso del realismo en cuestión y conduce a la comprensión de que la ciencia no solo está abierta a la transformación radical, como lo indica la historia, sino que debería ser así. Los enfoques no evolutivos para la continuidad histórica de la ciencia, como el de Lakatos, no tienen mejor suerte. Como discutiré, la ciencia es una forma radical de conocimiento.

The aim of this paper is to explore what the different answers that might be given to the question about the role of perspective in language—indexical contextualism, nonindexical contextualism, and assessor relativism—amount to, using Perry’s work about thought without designation and thought without representation as our point of departure. In particular, I argue that Perry’s discussion of the possibility of making explicit the parameter on which the truth-value of a certain sentence depends provides us with a useful criterion to distinguish between indexical and nonindexical contextualism. Then, I show that some of MacFarlane’s insights can be seen as a continuation of Perry’s discussion. The most salient outcome of the comparison between Perry’s and MacFarlane’s frameworks will be the distinction between the superficial perspectivality that can be found in sentences like “It is raining” and the irreducible perspectivality that we find in sentences like “Licorice is tasty.” The apparently paradoxical conclusion will be that language is truly perspectival precisely when it does not encode a perspective.

“The representation of gappy sentences in four-valued semantics” (Martínez-Fernández & Martí 2021) presents a very compelling argument for applying a four-valued system to classifying sentences, i.e. assigning truth-values relative to contexts, that are problematic from a two-value perspective. Basically, it provides a way of not only assigning a value to sentences that are intuitively neither true nor false in context, but also allows us to distinguish between two flavors of this problematic case. Below, I slightly re-interpret and translate their approach into a distinct semantic idiom, attempt to show how the systems they suggest in the main part of their paper might work in this framework, and then sketch some “morals” of the story at the end.

In this chapter some basic notions and recent developments in the theories of judgement and truth will be applied, as a case study, to real estate estimates in order to answer the following questions: are they descriptive or evaluative judgements? Is their truth absolute or relative to some parameter? Is their truth a matter of correspondence with objective, mind-independent facts or is it a matter of coherence with some mind-dependent standards (in a broad sense of "mind-dependent" which includes cultural and social standards)? The answers to these questions will show that real estate estimates are an interesting borderline case between descriptive and evaluative judgements, absolute and relative truth, correspondence with an objective reality and coherence with mind-dependent standards.

According to MacFarlane, relativism is distinguished from contextualism (in particular, from non-indexical contextualism 2) by the relativist's insight that in certain domains of discourse, such as judgments of taste and epistemic modals, assertions have their truthvalues relative to contexts of assessment in addition to their contexts of use. He explains that the "practical" difference between the two positions is evinced in the relativist's retraction rule, viz., the rule that an assertion must be retracted if it is "untrue as used at the context of the original assertion and assessed from the context in which the retraction is being considered" (109). MacFarlane contends that only the relativist, not the contextualist, can account for speakers' retractions of their previous assertions: Our account should explain why speakers will retract (rather than stand by) an earlier assertion that something was tasty, if the flavor the thing had at the time of the assertion is not pleasing to their present tastes-even if it was pleasing to the tastes they had then (22). MacFarlane's account is penetrating and very, very subtle, and his defense of it is a tour de force. In these brief remarks, I will simply pose some questions and voice a methodological concern. The view has already been amply discussed in the literature, 3 so what I'll say is unlikely to be new. Hopefully it is worth repeating.

In this paper we motivate and develop a new approach to predicates of personal taste within the framework of semantic relativism. Our primary goal is to explain faultless disagreement—the phenomenon where two parties disagree, yet both have uttered something true—which is often thought to arise from the use of predicates of personal taste. We combine semantic relativism with an expressivist semantics to yield a novel hybrid theory which we call Expressive-Relativism. We motivate the theory by rehearsing a famous objection to Relativism from Frege which we interpret as severing the connection between contradiction and disagreement for relativists. Endorsing the objection, we respond by enriching relativism with an expressivist component which explains disagreement over matters of taste as a refusal to share perspectives rather than as resting on contradiction.

Veltman’s test semantics and developments thereof reject the canon about semantic contents and attitude ascriptions in favor of dynamic alternatives. According to these theories the semantic content of a sentence is not a proposition, but a context change potential (CCP). Similarly, beliefs are not taken to be relations between agents and propositions, but agents and CCPs. These deviations from the canon come at the cost of an elegant explanation about the correctness of belief. Standardly, it is taken that the content of a belief is correct just in case the content of that belief is true. The proponent of the test semantics cannot appeal to this explanation since they hold that certain contents, namely epistemically modalized contents, do not express propositions, and are neither true nor false. After motivating the need for an account of the correctness of belief within the dynamic framework, I argue that the few extant accounts in the literature are unsatisfactory. A novel account is proposed that avoids the problems of competing views.

I!focus!on!Richard's!repudiation!of!Frege's!doctrine!of!the!primacy!of!assertion!and! his!proposal!that!a!sui%generis!speech!act/attitude!of!denial,!or!rejection,1!is!needed to address both the phenomenon of borderline-case vagueness and the semantic paradoxes. I Richard's driving thought about vagueness is encapsulated in the following passage: If Jo is a borderline case of baldness, he is not bald. If so, it is a fact that Jo is not bald, and one can state that fact by seriously uttering (0) Jo is not bald And if Jo is a borderline case of baldness, it's a fact that it is not the case that Jo is not bald. And one can state that fact by seriously uttering (1) It's not the case that Joe is not bald. I do not lapse into incoherence simply by stating the facts. So I cannot be assertingthat is putting forward as truethe claims that Jo is not (truth functional) bald and that Jo is not not bald, for asserting both of these is incoherent. It's hard to credit the idea that I would be asserting some other claims in seriously non-figuratively uttering (0) and (1). So there must be a kind of utterance besides assertive utterance which counts as a 'stating of the facts'. What sort? Serious utterance of (0) when it is assumed that the claims that Jo is bald and its negation are without truth-value amounts to rejecting or denying the claim that Jo is bald. To reject a claim p is not to assert that p is not true; it is not to assert p's negation. It is not to assert anything at all, but to do something which is

Our propositional-attitude concepts are indispensable to us; our very survival depends on the ways we use those concepts to exploit others as sources of information about the extra-cranial world and to predict and explain our own and other people’s behavior. If, as many suppose, to have a propositional attitude is to stand in a propositional-attitude relation to a proposition, then we should find that propositions play an essential role in enabling propositional-attitude concepts to perform the jobs they perform for us, and if we found that things of some other kind—say, linguistic entities of some stripe or other—could do what propositions do better than, or even as well as, propositions, then we should doubt whether propositional attitudes really are relations to propositions. In this article I inventory the jobs that our propositional-attitude concepts do for us and explain how propositions enable them to do those jobs and why things of no other kind could enable them to do those...

Statements containing epistemic modals (e.g., “by spring 2023 most European countries may have the Covid-19 pandemic under control”) are common expressions of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, previous published findings (Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo & Phillips, 2018) on the opposition between Contextualism and Relativism for epistemic modals are re-examined. It is found that these findings contain a substantial degree of individual variation. To investigate whether participants differ in their interpretation of epistemic modals, an experiment with multiple phases and sessions is used to classify participants according to the three semantic theories of Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivism. Through this study, some of the first empirical evidence for the kind of truth-value shifts postulated by semantic Relativism is presented. It is furthermore found that participants’ disagreement judgments match their truth evaluations and that participants are capable of distinguishing between truth and justification. In a second experimental session, it is investigated whether participants thus classified follow the norm of retraction which Relativism uses to account for argumentation with epistemic modals. Here the results are less favorable for Relativism. In a second experiment, these results are replicated and the normative beliefs of participants concerning the norm of retraction are investigated following work on measuring norms by Bicchieri (2017). Again, it is found that on average participants show no strong preferences concerning the norm of retraction for epistemic modals. Yet, it was found that participants who had committed to Objectivism and had training in logics applied the norm of retraction to might-statements. These results present a substantial challenge to the account of argumentation with epistemic modals presented in MacFarlane (2014), as discussed.

Keywords: Epistemic Modals, Relativism, Norm Conflicts, Retraction, Semantics, Truth Conditions, Argumentation.

A natural view has it that truth plays a privileged role in the evaluation of judgements and assertions. The central theme of Mark Richard’s When Truth Gives Out is that there is a realm of judgements and assertions which ought not be evaluated in terms of truth, in some cases because the categories of truth and falsity are inapt, and in other cases because their truth or falsity is relative and hence cannot aid us in deciding which position to adopt. Though Richard marshals his formal resources in defence of emotivism, he also claims that nontruth-apt and relatively-true judgements and assertions are subject to reason, evidence, and argument. When Truth Gives Out is an interesting book that rewards careful study. It is also difficult and at times obscure. Crucial concepts are left underexplained, and it is unclear that Richard’s system can account for some of the phenomena he describes. Richard discusses an impressively diverse array of topics in 180 pages – racial slurs, vagueness...

Donald Davidson, Gilbert Harman y, en particular, John Wallace han identificado en diferentes obras citadas en el texto algunas dificultades que se dan cuando se intenta construir teorías de verdad absoluta para lenguajes que contienen operadores intensionales. Wallace sostiene que la cláusula de recursión estandar para la negación, (1), no tiene una cláusula analoga para la "necesidad" y para toda una gama de operadores intensionales. (2), por ejemplo, es falsa: 1. "No es el caso que p" es verdadera sii no es el caso que "p" es verdadera. 2. "Es necesario que p" es verdadera sii es necesario que "p" es verdadera. "Es necesario que los triángulos tengan tres lados" puede ser verdadera, aunque no es necesario que "los triángulos tienen tres lados" sea verdadera. La cita pudo haber significado algo distinto de lo que la proposición "los triángulos tienen tres lados" quiso decir. Anil Gupta y Christopher Pe...

According to conventionalist or conativist views about personal-identity, utterances of personal-identity sentences express propositions that are, in part, made true by the conative attitudes of relevant persons-stages. In this paper I introduce assessor relative conativism: the view that a personal-identity proposition can be true when evaluated at one person-stage's context and false when evaluated at another person-stage's context, because person-stages have different patterns of conative attitudes. I present several reasons to embrace assessor relative conativism over its more familiar realizer relative cousin.

A recent view about disagreement (Karczewska 2021) takes it to consist in the tension arising from proposals and refusals of those proposals to impose certain commitments on the interlocutors in a conversation. The view has been proposed with the aim of solving the problem “faultless disagreement” – a situation in which two interlocutors are intuited to be both in disagreement and not at fault – poses for contextualism about predicates of taste.
In this paper, I consider whether this view applies equally well to disagreements involving aesthetic adjectives. I show, first, that it applies quite straightforwardly to predicates like “beautiful”, which presumably generate faultless disagreement. However, aesthetic adjectives like “beautiful” don’t exhaust the aesthetic sphere. A term like “balanced”, for example, while still perspectival, is said to have a more “objective” feel, and usually doesn’t generate faultless disagreement: when the novice and the expert disagree using such a term, we take it that the expert is right and the novice is wrong. I argue that Karczewska’s view has trouble explaining this difference in the profile of the two types of aesthetic predicates vis-à-vis the generation of disagreement. I also consider possible ways to cope with the problem, reject them, and propose a different one that is suitable for most views in the debate.

Our ordinary assertions are often imprecise, insofar as the way we represent things as being only approximates how things are in the actual world. The phenomenon of assertoric imprecision raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. After clarifying these problems in detail, I develop a framework for resolving them. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of assertoric imprecision motivates a rejection of the widely held belief that a semantic theory for a language associates a single semantic value with each of the simple and complex expressions of that language, relative to the contexts in which they occur. Instead, I propose that we adopt a framework I call semantic pluralism.

According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane.

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs). According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective (subjects, experiencers or judges). Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspectival plurality in depth and assess several possible responses on behalf of advocates of relativism.

I am concerned with epistemic possibility expressions (EPEs) such as "It might be raining." Much of the discussion of EPEs has concerned the fact that a given EPE can seem true in one context and false in another. Motivated by this data, contextualists have argued that modal expressions are sensitive to information at a context of use. Contextualist analyses encounter problems when it comes to disagreements centered on EPEs. Relativists such as John Mac-Farlane 1 argue that epistemic modals are sensitive to information available to an assessor at a circumstance of evaluation. I side with a relativistic account of epistemic possibility, on which the truth conditions of EPEs depend not only on a context of use but also as on a context of assessment. The stipulation of contexts of assessments explains why third parties can judge an interlocutor's utterance false, and why the interlocutor will retract her previous utterance. However, judgements of falsity and retraction seem to be absent in future-oriented EPEs such as "It might rain tomorrow." I propose an amendment to John MacFarlane's semantics that better models this quirk of epistemic possibility expressions.

The verb ‘knows’ is often treated as an intensional operator, and the logic of knowledge is often modelled with a modal operator K—a quantifier over ways that things could be compatible with a subject’s knowledge (or evidence). ‘Knows’ is also often taken to be context-sensitive in an interesting way. What ‘knows’ means seems to be sensitive to the epistemic features of the context, e.g. the epistemic standard in play, the set of relevant alternatives, etc. There are standard model-theoretic semantic frameworks which deal with both intensional operators and contextsensitive expressions. The basic elements of these frameworks were developed by Montague (1968), Scott (1970), and Lewis (1970), and then received more sophisticated renditions and philosophical interpretations in Kaplan (1989a) and Lewis (1980). In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of the various moving parts of these frameworks, the roles of context and index, the need for double indexing, and the relationship be...

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in relativism. Proponents have defended various accounts that seek to model the truth-conditions of certain propositions along the lines of standard possible world semantics. The central challenge for such views has been to explain what advantage they have over contextualist theories with regard to the possibility of disagreement. I will press this worry against Max Kölbel's account of faultless disagreement. My case will proceed along two distinct but connected lines. First, I will argue that the sense of faultlessness made possible by his relativism conflicts with our intuitive understanding of disagreement. And second, that his metaepistemological commitments are at odds with the socio-epistemic function of disagreement. This latter problem for relativistic accounts of truth has thus far been largely ignored in the literature.

Propositions are thought to differ from sentences in the following ways: (1) Propositions are declarative sentences that in context, present the 'content' of S's thought. (2) A proposition is (metaphorically) 'what is said' by a declarative sentence. (3) Different sentences may be used to express the same proposition (relative to context). In other words, different sentences in context can mean 'the same thing' or have 'the same meaning.' (4) Sentences (and descriptive propositions) are true or false in context. From my perspective, all four of these intuitions are satisfactory. In addition to these, it is also thought that a proposition is (6) essentially true or false, and (7) that persons have attitudes towards propositions as the 'object' of a propositional 'attitude.' In this essay I argue that both of these metaphysical intuitions are false. I argue that (1) speakers can assert propositions that are 'truth' or 'non-truth' apt and (2) that persons don't really have a psychological-mental 'attitude' relationship to propositions. A series of twenty case studies about plausible linguistic intuitions, is primary evidence for a conceptual analysis.

A common objection to both contextualism and relativism about knowledge ascriptions is that they threaten knowledge norms of assertion and action. Consequently, if there is good reason to accept knowledge norms of assertion or action, there is good reason to reject both contextualism and relativism. In this paper we argue that neither contextualism nor relativism threaten knowledge norms of assertion or action.

Reviewed by Manuel GarcíaCarpintero, University of Barcelona This is the second compilation of Mark Richard's papers, after Context and the Attitudes. It has three parts with, respectively, papers on time and tense, on relativism and truth-bearers, and on quotation and opacity. Like the previous volume, this one includes both important papers that deservedly had a great impact on contemporary philosophy and some new material; hence it is very welcome. Researchers working on the philosophy of language (broadly conceived), the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics will want to have both compilations at hand. I'll describe the contents of each part, making small critical observations in passing.

The German modal verb wollen (ß want) easily embeds reports of interrogative knowledge (know whether), but is reluctant to take propositional knowledge reports (know that) as complements. The difference is accounted for in terms of presupposition projection and a bridge principle relating desire reports and knowledge. The overall setting is a presuppositional extension of Groenendijk & Stokhof's (1982; 1984) partition semantics, as proposed by Sæbø (2005).

The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane's assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to contextdependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom-up, building block, model, while expressivism is part of a different tradition, one that might include Lewis' epistemic contextualism and Frege's content individuation, with which it shares an organic model to deal with context-dependence. The buildingblock model and the organic model, and thus relativism and expressivism, are set apart with the aid of a particular test: only the building-block model is compatible with the idea that there might be analytically equivalent, and yet different, propositions.

This thesis defends the 'true-futurist' view, according to which statements about the future are either true or false, even if the future is open and unsettled in some robust, objective and mind-independent sense. A general argument for the validity of the principle of bivalence in the open future is advanced. The key feature of such argument is the 'principle of retrospective determinacy', stating that, for any proposition p, if it is now the case that p, then it was true that p would be the case. Different possible objections are discussed and dismissed. Second, two true-futurist theories are presented and shown to meet all the relevant desiderata of a true-futurist theory. In particular, much attention is devoted to the 'problem of counterfactual evaluation', concerning the truth-value of future-contingent statements in merely counterfactual scenarios. In addition, it is argued that that the choice between the two true-futurist theories depends upon which ...

John MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: assertions about the future that express propositions that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and aims to solve the puzzle, his truth relativism is not apt to solve the problem of future contingents. We argue that the theory fails to vindicate the intuition that future contingent propositions are neither true nor false, leaving the theory open to a charge of Reductio. We show that these problems cannot be answered while preserving the core tenets of truth relativism.