Contextualism and Relativism

语境主义和相对主义将研究语言哲学中一种新的、可能打破传统的观点与一种古老的、备受诟病但顽固地坚持真理本质的观点之间的相互作用领域。前者的观点是语义语境主义。某些语言哲学家认为，传统观念认为话语的内容取决于/不依赖于时态和指示词等手段/纯粹取决于其内部的语义构成，这是没有希望的：说话人的字面意思通常取决于言语语境的一系列特征/如说话人和听众的需要、意图和关注点。总而言之，这种观点似乎危及自然语言令人满意的系统语义理论的任何前景，而自然语言的语义理论似乎充其量只能比传统设想的要复杂得多。这种情境主义“转向”的基本论点是简单而有力的--看似如此。它通过例子说明，要知道某人说了什么，你(总是)需要知道这句话的上下文。(想一想这个问题：冰箱里还有牛奶吗？要知道如何回答，你可能需要知道说话者是否打算煮咖啡，或者想知道打破的牛奶瓶是否得到了适当的清理。)通常的反应是试图坚持认为，这种语境敏感不是准确地说是语义的，可能会被传统语义学和复杂的交际语用学所补充。我们将仔细研究语境主义数据的细节和语用解释的稳定性。其他有趣的回应认为，这些数据被以更激进的方式误解了。其中一个可以如下所示。在没有什么利害关系的情况下，我们可能会知道，列车将根据时刻表在雷丁转机，目前为止旅程进展顺利。但如果为紧急行动携带潜在的救命物资，同样的信息可能不足以证明同样的知识主张是合理的。(稍后延误的可能性有多大？这条赛道最近有没有出问题？)语境主义认为，如果“Knows”在语义上是语境敏感的，那么这是意料之中的。但另一种解释是，知识本身应该被视为与利益相关，这在某种程度上类似于爱因斯坦的观点，即运动或同时性相对于参照系，正是我们在两种情景之间不断变化的兴趣解释了相关知识主张的真值变化。事实上，还有一种更为激进的回应。提示语义语境主义的数据与同一句子话语真值的明显差异有关。不同的内容可以解释这一点。但也有一种理论上的可能性，即不是内容，而是真相本身与语境相关：同样的话语，有相同的内容，在一个语境中可能是正确的(当问题是冰箱是否得到适当清理时)，但在另一个语境中可能是错误的(当问题是咖啡馆)。这个特别耐人寻味的建议实际上使这些现代辩论回到了原点，将它们与古老的关于真理和知识的哲学相对主义传统联系在一起，这些传统起源于普罗塔哥拉和柏拉图的Theaettus/上面提到的“被辱骂但顽强抵抗”的思想。我们的项目旨在通过各种主题来定义、提炼和追寻这些思想之间的辩论，包括知识论、语言哲学和理论语言学、关于道德和品味的根本分歧的性质、时间和变化的形而上学，以及模糊表达的语义。

Contextualism and Relativism will study the areas of interaction between a recent, potentially iconoclastic idea in the philosophy of language, and an ancient, much reviled but stubbornly resilient idea about the nature of truth. The former idea is semantic contextualism. Certain philosophers of language have argued influentially that the traditional conception of an utterance's content as depending/apart from devices like tenses and demonstratives/purely on its internal semantic composition is hopeless: that what a speaker literally says typically depends, in addition, on an array of features of the speech context / like the needs, intentions and preoccupations of speaker and audience. Generalised, this view seemingly jeopardises any prospect of a satisfyingly systematic semantic theory for natural language, which, it appears, would have to be at best vastly more elaborate than traditionally envisaged. The basic argument for this contextualist 'turn' is simple and powerful-seeming. It makes a case, by examples, that to know what someone has said, you (always) need to know things about the context of the saying. (Consider the question: Is there still milk in the 'fridge? To know how to answer, you may need to know whether the speaker intends to make a coffee or wants to know whether the broken milk bottle has been cleaned up properly.) A common reaction has been to try to maintain that this kind of context-sensitivity is not, properly speaking, semantic and may be accommodated by traditional semantics supplemented by a sophisticated pragmatics of communication. We shall study carefully both the detail of the contextualist 'data' and the stability of pragmatic explanations of it. Other interesting responses argue that the data have been misunderstood in more radical ways. One may be illustrated as follows. With little at stake, we may take ourselves to know that the train will make the connection at Reading on the basis of the timetable and smooth progress on the journey so far. But if carrying potentially life-saving supplies for an emergency operation, the very same information may be felt insufficient to justify the same knowledge-claim. (What are the chances of delays later? Have there been recent problems with the track?) Contextualism will maintain that this is to be expected if 'knows' is semantically context-sensitive. But an alternative explanation is that knowledge itself should be viewed as interest-relative, somewhat in analogy with the Einsteinian idea that motion, or simultaneity, are relative to frame-of-reference, and that it is our changing interests between the two scenarios that explain the change in truth-value of the relevant knowledge-claim. Indeed, there is a yet more radical response. The data suggestive of semantic contextualism have to do with apparent differences in truth-value of utterances of the same sentence. Different content would explain that. But there is also the theoretical possibility of the view that not content but truth itself is relative to context: that one and the same utterance, with one and the same content, can be true in one context (when the issue is whether the 'fridge has been properly cleaned up) but false in another (when the issue is café au lait.) This particularly intriguing suggestion in effect turns these modern debates back full circle to connect them with the ancient tradition of philosophical relativism concerning truth and knowledge which originated with Protagoras and Plato's Theaetetus / the 'reviled but stubbornly resilient' idea referred to above.Our project will aim to define, refine and pursue the debates between these ideas through a variety of subject matters, including the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, the nature of fundamental disagreements concerning morals and taste, the metaphysics of time and change, and the semantics of vague expressions.