Abstract
As a contribution to the debate on the intelligibility of the notion of relative truth,I discuss three issues that are of some interest in the way of bush-beating. They are (1) whether relative truth can be explicated as truth in a subjective world, (2) whether alleged relative truth could just be belief (i.e., “p is true for X” = “X believes that p”), and, finally (3) whether plain truth could, or should be defined on the basis of relative truth. The first two questions receive a negative answer, while the third is seen to depend on further decisions on the nature of relative truth, though one particular attempt at articulating the relation between plain and relative truth (Kölbel, Relative truth, 2002) is shown to be unconvincing.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For another statement of the prima facie implausibility of the very notion of relative truth see Richard (2004, p. 226, p. 230).
- 3.
Reading the implicit operator “in my world” as both modal and indexical.
- 4.
Such vague intuitions are reported by Lasersohn (2005, p. 643) among others.
- 5.
This is in agreement with Crispin Wright’s (2006, p. 42) suggestion that relativism is best seen as a theoretical attempt to make sense of the properties (= faultless disagreement) that exchanges such as (1) to (2) are ordinarily attributed.
- 6.
In Kölbel’s (2009) terminology it clearly is not, as he reserves the phrase ‘simple truth’ for the relative notion.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Andrea Iacona for useful criticism of a previous version.
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Marconi, D. (2014). Three Easy Points on Relative Truth. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_10
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