ENGLISH

Relativism and Monadic Truth

By Herman Cappelen , John Hawthorne

Book information

Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Year
2009
ISBN
978-0-19-956055-4, 978-0-19-956055-4
LCC
BD221 .C27 2008
Open Library ID
OL22541660M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
982 kB (1005246 bytes)
Pages
170\157
Time added
2010-02-18 13:16:04

Description

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

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