Assessment Sensitivity

Relative Truth and its Applications

John Macfarlane author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:17th Apr '14

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Assessment Sensitivity cover

John MacFarlane debates how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative, and how we might use this idea to give satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis. Although there is a substantial philosophical literature on relativism about truth, going back to Plato's Theaetetus, this literature (both pro and con) has tended to focus on refutations of the doctrine, or refutations of these refutations, at the expense of saying clearly what the doctrine is. In contrast, Assessment Sensitivity begins with a clear account of what it is to be a relativist about truth, and uses this view to give satisfying accounts of what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do. The book seeks to provide a richer framework for the description of linguistic practices than standard truth-conditional semantics affords: one that allows not just standard contextual sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context in which an expression is used), but assessment sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context from which a use of an expression is assessed). The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

... a masterful book that is both more original and more carefully crafted than the average contemporary philosophy book. * Max Kolbel, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online *
MacFarlanes account is penetrating and very, very subtle, and his defense of it is a tour de force * Diana Raffman, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research *
MacFarlanes book is a fascinating book, highly recommended to any philosopher interested in philosophy of language, formal semantics, epistemology, meta-ethics and beyond. It will serve as a springboard for future work both about relativism, as well as particular domains of application. * Christos Kyriacou, Dialectica *

ISBN: 9780199682751

Dimensions: 240mm x 162mm x 30mm

Weight: 696g

362 pages