Relativism and Superassertibility

Manfred Harth (LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (19 June, 2013) titled "Relativism and Superassertibility". Abstract: Relativism about truth is in vogue these days. More and more areas of thought and language are considered as promising candidates for a relativistic semantics in recent years: future contingents, epistemic modals, taste-judgements, knowledge ascriptions, moral judgements etc. However, current truth-relativism is a highly contested position facing some serious problems, and given these problems a look for an alternative shape of relativism seems to be advisable for those of us who are also sceptical about contextualism for the areas in question but have relativistic inclinations all the same. In my talk, I shall explore the prospects of such an alternative for moral judgements, which is based on an epistemic account of truth as stable or superassertibility, i.e. the property of being assertible in some state of information and remaining so no matter what improvements are made to it. The straightforward road to relativism within this framework, which is proposed by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright, is to admit that two contradictory propositions may be both stably assertible relative to divergent starting points of states of information. Yet, not too surprisingly, this requires a corresponding relativization of the truth predicate – which was to be avoided from the outset. I’ll discuss the following response to this problem: abandoning truth-relativism and limiting relativism to epistemic relativism conjoint with a restriction to intuitionistic logic. I’ll conclude that this response, which I call anti-realist epistemic relativism, may yield a promising approach to relativism in ethics that presents an alternative to truth-relativism and contextualism.