Abstract
In recent discussions on contextualism and relativism, some have suggested that audience-sensitivity motivates a content relativist version of radical relativism, according to which a sentence as said at a context can have different contents with respect to the different perspectives from where it is assessed. The first aim of this note is to illustrate how this is not so. According to Egan himself, the phenomenon motivates at least refinement of the characteristic moderate contention that features of a single context determine the appropriate truth-value of the sentence. The second aim of this note is to explore how this may not be so.
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Notes
I propose to use ‘perspectives’ instead of MacFarlane’s ‘contexts of assessment.’ I think this terminology helps to avoid confusions with ‘context of use/utterance’ (‘context’ here) and with ‘circumstance of evaluation.’ The taxonomy of positions in recent debates on contextualism and relativism I am using is based on MacFarlane (2005, 2009), see for further discussion López de Sa (2011).
As I argue in López de Sa (2012), attention to these two different roles that features of context can play may contribute to dissolving some recent apparent disputes as to which kind of consideration would motivate relativization of truth to a given sort of feature. The situation is complicated further by the fact that some authors, arguably including Kaplan (1989) and MacFarlane (2009), seem to use the expression ‘circumstance of evaluation’ for tuples comprising features that play one or the other of these two roles.
Alternatively, one could hold that the content or “proposition” of your use of that sentence is the same to both Anders and Dylan, but it receives a different truth-value relative to the different circumstances of evaluation that include the different relevant features of the different auditions. For some misgivings regarding this alternative, see Egan (2009) and Parsons (2011).
Cappelen (2008) calls ‘content relativism’ a view according to which the content or “proposition” assigned to a sentence at a context (of utterance) varies between contexts of interpretation, where “a context of interpretation is just what you would think it is: a context from which an utterance is interpreted” (Cappelen 2008, fn. 8). It is not clear whether the “interpretation” alluded to here is the mechanism involved in the presence of audience-sensitive expression or that involving perspectives from which assessment takes place, which would exhibit a content relativist version of radical relativism, in the terms adopted here.
In such a situation (and if the notion of content or “proposition” is in place), one could use ‘utterance’ for something individuated at the level of sentences in context, and contend that one single utterance has different contents or “propositions” with respect to various audiences; or one could use ‘utterance’ for something at the level of sentences in context with respect to audiences, and contend that sentences in context are “utterance-bombs”, giving rise to different utterances with respect to different audiences, each expressing one single content or “proposition”. It is not clear to me that there is much of substance between these alternative terminological decisions—Egan himself seems partially sympathetic, see (Egan 2009, 270).
This alternative view of contexts as tuples of features is often associated with Kaplan. I tend to agree with Lewis (1980), however, that Kaplan’s contexts are, in fact, particular locations—see for instance what Kaplan says in ‘Afterthoughts:’
we should say that context provides whatever parameters are needed. [Footnote: This, rather than saying that context is the needed parameter, which seems more natural for the pretheoretical notion of a context of use, in which each parameter has an interpretation as a natural feature of a certain region of the world.] (p. 591, emphases in the original).
And, so far as I can tell, this interpretation seems to be, in any case, at least consistent with the formal system in “Demonstratives” (p. 543). For further discussion, see López de Sa (MS).
If such a collocation of people were ultimately intelligible, that could indeed motivate a refinement of the notion of contexts: see Liao (2012) for a discussion.
Actually, in my view this is one of the key—if perhaps underappreciated—lessons of his paper. For further discussion, see López de Sa (MS).
Notice that these contexts as tuples are not “positional” in either of the possible senses discussed: they are not particular locations, and they are not “speaker only”-centered in a way that excludes audience-sensitivity. Like the candidates Egan himself considers of refined, non-positional contexts, this conception respects the moderate contention that single contexts are involved. But furthermore, it also exhibits the feature that Egan claims in favor of his own alternative, involving two contexts as locations restricted to speaker and audience—namely, that “we can, for example, more easily isolate the different contributions made by the properties of the audience’s situation, and those made by the properties of the speaker’s” (Egan 2009, 273).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to audiences in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Paris, and to Manuel García-Carpintero, Dirk Kindermann, John MacFarlane, Eleonora Orlando, François Recanatí, Elia Zardini, and, specially, Andy Egan. Thanks also to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision. Research has been partially funded by FFI2008-06153, FFI2012-35026, and CSD2009-0056 (Gobierno de España), 2009SGR-1077 (Generalitat de Catalunya), and ITN FP7-238128 (European Community).
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López de Sa, D. Audience in Context. Erkenn 79, 241–253 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9490-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9490-z