Assessment-Sensitivity

Abstract

Abstract The chapter was originally published as a contribution to a book symposium on John MacFarlane’s Assessment-Sensitivity: Relative Truth and Its Applications (OUP, 2014). In his later work, Wittgenstein famously coined the slogan that meaning is use. One widely acknowledged implication of the slogan is that semantic theory for natural languages must answer to a manifestation constraint: the correctness of such a theory, in contradistinction to rivals, must be distinctively displayed in the linguistic practices of users. The chapter engages John Macfarlane’s argument for an alethic-relativist (assessment-sensitive) semantics for various discourses, including ascriptions of knowledge and claims of epistemic possibility, under the aegis of this constraint. To be sure, MacFarlane’s key arguments for the correctness of an alethic-relativist semantics for these and other discourses seem on the face of it designed to comply with the constraint since his central thought is that certain aspects of our use of statements in the discourses in question—most particularly our willingness to retract such claims in the face of new information—are indeed problematic for the most plausible non-relativistic alternative semantic treatments of them. The chapter directly challenges this. It is argued that a regular recursive truth-conditional semantics, for example, on the model familiar from Tarski and Davidson, plus a developed pragmatics incorporating norms of assertion, denial, retraction, and silence can predict all the linguistic phenomena that MacFarlane takes to favour an assessment-sensitive approach. There is no evidential need to relativize the truth of utterances of the relevant kinds to a context of assessment