Making Sense of Relative Truth

Abstract

This chapter addresses the substantive philosophical question that remains: what does it mean to talk of truth relative to a context of assessment? It does this by explaining how a semantic theory that assigns assessment‐relative truth values is connected to norms for assertion and retraction. Relativist and nonindexical contextualist theories make the same predictions about what may be asserted, but differ in their predictions about when previous assertions must be retracted. The combined theory of Chapters 3 to 5 allows us to formulate relativist semantic theories and derive from them substantive predictions about language use, so that they can be compared with and evaluated against non‐relativist alternatives. This is sufficient to have “made sense of relative truth” and warded off a priori objections to its intelligibility.

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