Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications

by John MacFarlane

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 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 Francois Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

Genres: Philosophy, Logic, Language

344 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2014

Reviews

[Milana]

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[Kaidi Pan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether one agrees with it, this is an excellent piece of analytic philosophical writing.

[Dario Vaccaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Assessment Sensitivity" is a capital development in the current landscape of theoretical philosophy. It gives important contributions to the philosophy of language, by providing a new, beautifully crafted semantics for relativism, to the theory of truth, by finding a way to make sense of the concept of relative truth, to the theory of knowledge, of modal logic, and even to moral theory to an extent.
In short, this is a book every philosopher should know in order to engage fully with the contemporary landscape of discussions, be it to apply the new relativist semantics to their topic of interest, or to reject it.

I won't discuss the content of the book as this is not the appropriate place to do so; but I want to touch on the methodology adopted by MacFarlane, which I thought dubious. The vast majority of the book employs a deference to intuitions in order to show why we should use assessment sensitive (aka, relativist, in JMF's view) semantics to make sense of many topics of discussion (specifically discussions about taste, knowledge, future, epistemic probability and epistemic normativity). Only at the very end of the book, in Chapter 12, he gives a few scattered reasons to consider relativism more USEFUL than competing theories. Of course, it is not my place to decide how much space to give for each of JMF's goals in this book, but this last part felt neglected, as it was uncharacteristically rushed, didn't consider too many reasonable objections and was also literarily derivative of Hawthorne (2004). I deem this a big weakness in his defense of relativism, which makes me less compelled by this otherwise magnifically crafted work.