Replies to Wright, MacFarlane and Sosa

Abstract

The main impetus for my book came from the widespread acceptance of relativistic views about truth and knowledge within the Academy, especially within the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. In its introductory sections, though, I noted that there is one discipline within the humanities in which the influence of relativistic views is quite weak?namely, within analytic philosophy itself. Ironically, no sooner had the ink dried on the final version of my manuscript sometime in mid-2005?although, of course it had been in the works for a number of years prior to that?than I began to become aware of a huge interest in certain kinds of relativistic views that was beginning to build within analytic philosophy. That interest?which is ongoing as I write?has been fueled to a considerable extent by the work of a younger generation of philosophers including John MacFarlane, Max K?lbel and Peter Lasersohn. ' Now, as we shall see, the sort of relativistic view that has been attracting attention of late?the sort that Crispin Wright mischievously dubs "New Age" relativism?is different from the sort of view that I was criticizing. I do not just mean that the relativisms at issue concern different domains (though that might also be true); but rather that New Age relativism uses a different template for generating a relativistic view of a given domain than I do. And this naturally raises the question whether my critical arguments against a relativistic view of the epistemic domain would continue to be effective were such a view given a New Age (NA) formulation rather than the formulation I gave it.