Relativism, metasemantics, and the future
Abstract
Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this temporal externalist view, speaker behaviours such as retraction of previous assertions play a role in making it the case that a past utterance has a given meaning.
Citation
Ball , D 2020 , ' Relativism, metasemantics, and the future ' , Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy , vol. Latest Articles . https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1805710
Publication
Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0020-174XType
Journal article
Rights
Copyright ©2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1805710
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