What can modes do for (moderate) relativism?
| Autor | Marques, Teresa |
François Recanati, Perspectival Thought: A Plea for (Moderate) Relativism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007, 308 pp.
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Background and Overview
Truth in thought and language is a fundamental philosophical issue, and much of François Recanati's philosophical production has concerned problems that gravitate around it, as is again the case with his most recent book, Perspectival Thought: A Plea for (Moderate) Relativism. In the introduction (p. 7), (1) Recanati lays down a conceptual map of the different ways a sentence may be context-sensitive; this provides an overview of Recanati's intended position within the contemporary debate on contextualism, to which most of his earlier work was devoted, and also shows how he places the debate on relativism within that broader scheme. According to Recanati, there are three forms of context-sensitivity: (i) indexicality, (ii) modulation, and (iii) circumstance-relativity. These are all, according to him, forms of semantic context-dependence. In the present book, Recanati defends a moderate version of the third and last type of context-dependence--circumstance relativity--that does not affect explicit content at all.
It is thought to be philosophical common sense that understanding what is said, or asserted, requires understanding what would have to be the case for the assertion to be true. Propositions are normally taken to be the contents of assertions and other speech acts, and are thought to be true or false only with respect to possible worlds. Prior, Kaplan and Lewis developed logic and semantic frameworks that expanded the normal relativization of truth to possible worlds to other parameters, for instance to times, places or individuals. In Perspectival Thought, François Recanati follows this tradition, and defends a version of circumstance-relativity, which he calls Strong Moderate Relativism (SMR henceforth). The book thus falls in place with a current relativistic trend in contemporary analytic philosophy, one that has been recently developed in different ways by people like Max Kólbel, Peter Lasersohn or John MacFarlane. The book in fact offers the reader the opportunity to become acquainted with some of the main positions within this debate, and with some other interestingly related views in the philosophy of language and mind, as it offers throughout very detailed overviews and discussions of some of the relevant literature.
Perspectival Thought has ah unusual structural organization. It consists of three books, divided in eleven parts altogether, and each in very short chapters. Book I, "Moderate Relativism", describes the core of SMR, from the framework and its background, to the classical discussion over temporalism, and to two alternative frameworks within which to treat circumstance-relativity: either a Lewisian or a Kaplanian one. Recanati proposes to defend a Kaplanian framework, arguing for the existence of three levels of content: the invariant linguistic meaning of sentence types, the context-dependent explicit content of interpreted sentences in contexts--the lekton--and the complete truth-conditional propositional content. Book II, "Experience and Subjectivity" is devoted to issues in the philosophy of mind, in particular those related to situated thought and experience. Recanati draws a distinction that is meant to tip the balance in favor of the three levels of content approach, the distinction between mode and content. He does so by covering issues on perception, episodic memory, de se thoughts and immunity to error through misidentification, and the imagination. The discussion is rather thorough and detailed, and the main aim is to argue that, in the case of mental content as in the case of linguistic content, there is room for relativized propositions, corresponding to the explicit content of interpreted sentences. Modes are types of mental states, and Recanati's proposal is that modes fix which parameters in circumstances of evaluation are part of the complete truth-conditional content of a mental state. Book III, "Egocentricity and Beyond" recovers the issues on relativism left unsolved in Book I. Recanati argues that in the case of mental content, modes can shift the relevant index, and that in the case of linguistic content, there mar be free shiftability of indices. Perspectival Thought is in effect an extended argument for the conclusion that subjects' intentions, mental states and cognitive situations can determine such parameters relevant for truth-evaluations; in this, Recanati departs from standard semantic frameworks like Lewis's or Kaplan's, where the relevant parameter or index is the index of the context.
I will critically discuss some aspects of Perspectival Thought, while offering a more detailed overview of the book. I suggest that the main aim Recanati proposes to achieve--that a moderate relativist should adopta Kaplanian framework with three levels of content, rather than a Lewisian framework with only two--seems nonetheless insufficiently motivated, and the arguments offered do not settle the issue. I suggest furthermore that the claim that subjects' mental states and cognitive situations can determine parameters or indices in circumstances of evaluation, even though this claim is not set up as the main aim, is an original and very interesting contribution in the book. IT is also an important one, since it sets further apart the radical from the moderate relativist, and it is relevant in the current relativism debate, where truth is deemed to be relative to parameters other than worlds, times, places and individuals. I will nonetheless also offer a few objections to some of the reasons Recanati puts forward in support of this latter claim; I will object in particular to those that depend on some considerations about psychological modes drawn from Book II.
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Circumstance Relativity
Recanati draws in Part 1 a distinction between two principles that, according to him, underlie the idea of truth relativity, duality and distribution. Given duality, truth-values are the product of content and the circumstance against which content is evaluated. Given distribution, there are determinants of truth-values that may be either part of contents or part of circumstances of evaluation. It is this principle that makes, according to Recanati, a case for moderate relativism. The idea of distribution comes, for instance, from the work of Perry or Kaplan. (2) For Perry, for example, we can distinguish between what an utterance is about and what it concerns. An uttered sentence (3) is about what is explicitly articulated in the content of the sentence uttered. Thus:
(1) It is raining here.
is about Barcelona, since I utter ir in Barcelona. A place is explicitly required to be supplied in the sentence. It differs from
(2) It is raining.
In the second case, no place or time is explicitly mentioned in the sentence, and as such the utterance is not about Barcelona, but it nonetheless concerns it, since I speak in Barcelona (and intend to speak about it). To get a truth-value an utterance of (2) must concern the time and place of utterance (or some other intended by the speaker), even if it is not about it. So, as the argument goes, times and places can either be ingredients of the explicit content of an utterance of a sentence or an aspect of circumstances of evaluation.
There are some classical Fregean objections against relativized propositions, in particular against the idea that some propositional contents can be true at some times, false at others. Gareth Evans (1985), for instance, argued that the content of assertions and thoughts couldn't be semantically incomplete nor fail to settle determinate truth-conditions. Assertions and beliefs must have stable evaluations.
One way to resist Evans's challenge is a radical relativist one, advanced by MacFarlane, denying that assertions must have stable evaluations. The radical relativist is committed to there being the possibility that some assertions are such that nothing in the context of utterance or within a subject's cognitive reach settles once and for all whether the assertion is correct or incorrect. The truth-values of assertions may still vary with respect to different contexts of assessment, perspectives from which they are evaluated, even after all the required context-dependent and circumstance-relative parameters are settled.
This is not Recanati's position. Evans's challenge does not affect the moderate relativist like Recanati, because he agrees with Evans's Fregean point that an assertion's complete truth-conditional content, covering both the explicitly articulated content and the circumstance with respect to which that content is to be evaluated, cannot fail to yield a stable truth-value. As becomes clear in the rest of the book, what is a distinctive feature of moderate relativist positions (like Recanati's here) is that ir is some feature of the context of utterance, or of the context and the speaker's intentions and cognitive situation, that fixes the relevant parameter in the circumstance of evaluation which will complete the content of an assertion. Therefore, what is required for an assertion to be correct or incorrect is fixed in the context of utterance, even for the moderate relativist. This is a deep divergence with the radical relativist, for whom, as was said above, it may happen that nothing in the context of utterance or in the speaker's intentions and cognitive situation, settles the conditions of the truth or falsehood of an utterance. In Book I, Recanati does not make this difference sufficiently clear. Rather, he elucidates radical relativism just as a view on which complete contents can possibly have different evaluations in different situations; this is an elucidation of radical relativism from which MacFarlane himself appears to disagree, as his view is independent from whether contents are complete or not (of. footnote 32, p. 89).
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