Here you will find drafts on modals, and relativism.
Deliberative modals (DMs) are deontic modals (like "ought") that order a set of possibilities according to how well they realize the preferences of a deliberative agent. DMs are informational: both what possibilities are relevant and how they are ordered, depend on contextually available information. I propose a modified Kratzerian semantics for DMs, capable of capturing this informational character. A standard Kratzerian account of DMs seems unable to capture how we use DMs in reasoning under uncertainty, for it distinguishes between worlds the agent cannot tell apart. I propose a revised semantics where the ordering source has a resolution constraint, making for it impossible to distinguish worlds the agent cannot tell apart. This may be done by relativizing the ordering source to a partition of the modal base, and by forcing the ordering source to equally rank worlds belonging to the same cell of the partition. The most natural such partition groups worlds according to the action the agent performs at them.
MacFarlane and Kolodny ("Ifs and oughts," JPhil 107(3), 2010) and MacFarlane (Assessment sensitivity, 2014, ch. 11) have argued that deliberative 'ought' is assessment sensitive, in the sense that its extension is sensitive to an information state provided by the context of assessment. Their strategy is two-fold. First, they describe a paradox of deontic modality, the Miner Paradox, whose resolution, they argue, requires a semantics that invalidates modus ponens. Second, they posit an assessment-sensitive semantics that accomplishes precisely that, and they argue that it fares better than other accounts of deontic modality when faced with the task of explaining assertion, rejection and retraction data concerning utterances containing deliberative use of the English deontic quasi-modal 'ought.' In this paper, I provide an alternative treatment of deliberative 'ought' that does not involve any deviation from standard context sensitivity, yet accounts for the data used to motivate assessment sensitivity.
Einheuser (2008) has proposed a metaphysical alternative to truth relativism, which she calls factual relativism. According to this view, it is facts, not truth, that are relative to a perspective. I argue that, despite her efforts, she has not been able to propose an alternative to truth relativism, but a reelaboration thereof. This paper is an exploration into the more metaphysical side of truth relativism, and concludes that Einheuser has provided a possible metaphysical elaboration of what truth relativim might be.
Inspired by Einheuser (2008), and by Rovane (The metaphysics and ethics of relativism), I attempt to address the issue of what a metaphysics for truth relativism could be, under the idea that it involves a particular take on how our world (understood as a totality of facts or true propositions) might be. I explore Einheusers multimundialist take on relativism, as well as different ways of articulating unimundial metaphysics for relativism. I attempt to assess to what may amount such a metaphysical debate.
As a followup of the previous idea, I address the prospects for a paraconsistent take on the metaphysics of relativism. According to such a take, the proper metaphysics for truth relativism is a unimundialism that allows for truth value gluts. In a more metaphysical key, it allows for the existence of contradictory facts. In the search for an intuitive foundation for this view, I attempt to identify truth with communitary assertive practices.