Assessment-relativity?

Abstract

In the last decades there have been attempts at building relativist logical frameworks. These might prove helpful in the context of the present discussion about relativism. Their philosophical presuppositions, however, should be questioned. In this context, John MacFarlane's construction is particularly interesting. Using a formalism borrowed from temporal logic, it introduces an assessment index on which the truth-value of the proposition would depend. This picture helps make sense of the situations of conflicts or of retractions: the content is the same, but it seems that depending on who judges, truth-value varies. The author of this article feels uneasy about this relativization of truth to the assessor. By making the assessor a mere factor to be taken into account it seems to ignore assessment as an epistemic activity essentially involving responsibility. Drawing upon MacFarlane's interesting way to distinguish between contextualism and relativism, the article shows how in contextualism as such another sense of subjectivity is involved, as sensitivity to context.