Inegalitarian Relativism*

Daniel Drucker

November,

Protagoras figures prominently in two of Plato’s dialogues, the eaetetusand (of course) the Protagoras. e first explores the consequences of Protago-ras’ famous doctrine that “man is the measure of all things”, at least as Platoor Socrates understands it. It’s standard to see that view as father to a tradi-tion in philosophy oen brought under the heading ‘relativism’. It’s not mineto decide how similar his view, or even the view Socrates takes to be his, is tocontemporary relativisms. For my purposes, think of his relativism as sayingthis: for claims of kind K , the truth of K -claims depends on the perspective ofthe person evaluating that claim.

I’m introducing relativism through Protagoras because I think Protagoras’other commitments, the ones Plato depicts in the Protagoras, remain with rel-ativism and continue to make the view seem worse than it actually is. In thatwork, Protagoras is a radical egalitarian. In his Great Discourse, he gives a just-so story whose goal is to explain why just about anyone is qualified to advisethe city on maers of great import. Someone who believes that all perspectivesare equally good as far as K -claims are concerned is an egalitarian (in this spe-cial sense) about K . By that I mean: if φ is a K -claim, then for any person Aand perspective P, if P is A’s perspective and A uers φ, then P is the onlyperspective relevant for evaluating the assertibility of φ.

Supposeφ is a purely perspective-dependent sentence—its assertibility variesonly with the perspective against which it is evaluated. en relativism andegalitarianism about K , together with the plausible suggestion that we havereliable access to our own perspectives, entail infallibilism about K : for all K -claims φ and people A, if A uers φ, then φ is assertible. Protagoras seems

*anks to audiences at MIT and Michigan, and in particular helpful comments fromMaMan-delkern, Kyle Rawlins, Bernhard Salow, Eric Swanson, and Kevin Dorst.

commied to something like this. Contemporary semantic versions of rela-tivism are also in general commied to it, though not without exception. eyoughtn’t to be commied to it, since infallibilism is empirically false for nearlyany kind of claim for which relativists offer their special treatment.

is paper comes in three parts. e first is expository: I will lay downwhat I think makes a linguistic theory relativist, and what desiderata it needsto satisfy. e second is negative, and aims to convince the relativist that theyshould reject most every K -infallibilism. Probably they wish to remain rela-tivists, which means they must reject most every K -egalitarianism. e lastsection is positive. Aer introducing some proposals for how to be an inegal-itarian relativist, I will argue for a simple proposal that accords well with thedata presented in the previous sections and that one, and that comes with goodphilosophical motivation, too. My thesis is this: if we are to be semantic rela-tivists, we ought to be inegalitarian relativists of my specific sort. e view Idefend also has interesting corollaries. If it’s right, we have a new route to thenormativity of meaning.

Relativism and its Motivations

In this section, I’ll first offer a characterization of the kind of relativism I’minterested in—a kind of semantic perspective dependence—and then I’ll offera brisk summary of its leading motivations. I will discuss these motivationsmostly at a very high level of abstraction, and ignore some more specific lin-guistic motivations, since this paper concerns the general shape a relativist viewshould take.

‘Relativism’ is a contested term in philosophy, so what I offer is only stip-ulation. Begin with Kaplan ()’s distinction between context and index. Formy purposes, we only need the sparest conception of a context: it will resolvethe values of indexicals, perhaps set thresholds for adjectives, and so on. Callthe function from an expression e and a context c to e’s content relative to c(i.e., with indexicals and all the rest resolved) e’s character. is has the stillundefined term ‘content’. Here’s all I intend by that word. e extension ofan expression will vary according to various specifications. For example, ‘red”s

See especially Fine (). Interestingly, Fine seems to see relativism as in interpretive com-petition with infallibilism. at’s a mistake, though. ey’re actually contingently connected.

For example, I won’t directly consider Yalcin ()’s data concerning epistemic possibilitymodals in suppositional environments.

extension relative to c, ⟦red⟧c ,I is different depending on whether we are eval-uating it respect to the actual world @, or a world w where nothing has color.e index will consist of those parameters such that, when values for thoseparameters are specified, the extension of some expression of the language isnonconstant (holding the rest of the parameters fixed). e content of e willbe a function from characters and complete specifications of the values of theindex (circumstances of evaluation) to extensions of e.

One of the most fundamental and controversial problems in contemporaryphilosophical semantics concerns the parameters in the index for natural lan-guages such as English. Whether or not relativism is true is one of the balesin this war. According to my use, at least, a relativist about K is someone whothinks that, when accounting for the semantics and pragmatics of sentences in-volving expressions of kind K (where K might be epistemic modals, predicatesof personal taste, etc.), we must posit a parameter in the index correspondingto a perspective or part of a perspective. ese might be information states, stan-dards of taste, and senses of humor, along with many others.

I’ll model this by following Lewis () and MacFarlane () in making adistinction between the semantics and the postsemantics of an expression. esemantics of an expression e is ⟦e⟧c ,<w ,t ,P> , its extension at a point of evalu-ation, where ‘P’ corresponds to a complete perspective, a take on the world aperson can have. I want to be as inclusive as possible as to what can be in P—minimally, I, an information state, but also an agent’s aitudes,A, evaluative,desiderative, gustatory, emotional—any aitude one can think of, dispositionalor otherwise. I’ll discuss how perspectives ought to work in more detail a lilelater. Officially, an expression e is relative iff the true semantics for e assigns itan extension that varies with P:

Def. . An expression e is relative iff there exist perspectives P1 and P2 suchthat ⟦e⟧c ,<w ,t ,P1> , ⟦e⟧c ,<w ,t ,P2> .

Assessment relativity comes in with the postsemantics, i.e., an expression’sextension at a context. If the perspective relevant at c for the determination ofthe extension of e is the assessor’s, then e is assessment relative:

Def. . An expression e is assessment relative iff there exist contexts c1 and c2such that c1 and c2 differ only in who the assessor is and such that e hasextension x in c1, e has extension y in c2, and x , y.

Relativists about K tend to be such because they think the facts about the useof K -terms encourage or require it. eir method is usually abductive, and thatrequires explaining why they reject rival semantic theories. By seeing wherethe relativist sees these others as stumbling, we can get a clear sense of moti-vations any relativist theory must meet.

Objectivism oen serves as a starting point in these discussions, usuallyrapidly dismissed. Relativism shares a lot with it, though, so it’s useful to seewhy the relativist dislikes it. Here’s a not completely satisfactory definition:

Def. . An expression e is objective iff for all contexts c1, c2 and perspectivesP1 and P2, ⟦e⟧c1 ,<w ,t ,P1> = ⟦e⟧c2 ,<w ,t ,P2> .

Relativists oppose objectivism for reasons having to do with warranted assert-ibility. MacFarlane, for example, formulates the following principle concerning‘tasty’:

TP. If you know first-hand how something tastes, call it ‘tasty’ just in caseits flavor is pleasing to you, and ‘not tasty’ just in case its flavor is notpleasing to you.

Other relativists, such as Lasersohn () and Stephenson () make similarclaims. I’ll discuss both of them more later. Here’s a schematic version:

Warrant Principle. Call x F just in case x is F according to your perspective,and call x not-F just in case x is not F according to your perspective.

Objectivists, so the claim goes, cannot make sense of these principles: whyshould we be warranted in these judgments if x might be F somehow apartfrom our perspective? Consider, for example, these uerances:

() Although this tastes good to me, I don’t know if it tastes good.

() I don’t know whether it’s raining, and I don’t know whether it might beraining.

() I find this super gross, but I don’t know if it actually is gross. If the extension of ‘tall’ varies according to context, for example, then ‘tall’ will count as not

objective, even though nothing like a perspective is relevant. is fits philosophical use of the term‘contextualism’, but probably not ‘objective’.

See MacFarlane (, p. ).

It’s supposed to be an embarrassment to objectivism to the extent that it findssuch uerances unproblematic.

Another motivation against objectivism that MacFarlane mentions and isvery much always in the background is the feeling that objective funniness orepistemic mightiness would be metaphysically odd. Objectivism leads to errortheory. But it’s not as though philosophers alone bother themselves about thesubstantivity of maers of taste. Ordinary speakers are well aware, whencethe clichés about its being futile to dispute about such maers. e problemhas to do with accusing speakers of widespread error despite sharing philoso-phers’ worries about the metaphysical strangeness of objective taste properties.If speakers themselves—properly interpreted, of course—think there is no ab-solute fact of the maer regarding facts of kind K , and yet don’t revise the waythey talk about K , then an error theory is even less aractive. We ought verymuch to avoid aributing clear-eyed irrationality. And we ought, if we can, torespect speakers’ intuitions that their words concern “subjective” maers.

It’s instructive in this connection to think about absolute simultaneity. Allof us used to be and many of us still are inclined to speak as though there issuch a thing as an absolute fact of the maer whether two events, E1 and E2,occur at the same time. Special relativity has shown there is no such fact ofthe maer independent of a reference frame. For those of us who do learn thisfact, when we’re careful, we’ll use a three-place relation ‘S(E1 , E2 , F )’. isdifference in the robustness of speech behavior is very telling.

Contextualism, another of relativism’s rivals, claims that extensions areperspective-invariant. It achieves a similar effect to relativism by puing thoseperspectives into the character.

Def. . An expression e is contextual iff there exist contexts c1 and c2 suchthat ⟦e⟧c1 ,<w ,t ,P> , ⟦e⟧c2 ,<w ,t ,P> , but no perspectives P1 and P2 suchthat ⟦e⟧c ,<w ,t ,P1> , ⟦e⟧c ,<w ,t ,P2> .

On such views, when we say, e.g., ⌜x is funny⌝, we are really saying ⌜x isfunny according to standards I (or we) accept⌝. We would satisfy the relevantinstances of the Warrant Principle such as TP were this the case, on one im-portant condition: knowing which standards you, or your group, accept(s) hasto be very easy. (Recall the similar constraint in the introduction.) Another ad-vantage of contextualism is that we wouldn’t have to accept any error theory.

e disadvantages here depend on the contextualism, but there is some com-

plaint common to prey much every form. It superficially concerns agreementand disagreement, but the relevant intuitions ultimately concern what the ut-terances are about. When I say that Rabelais is funny and you deny it, we’renot talking about ourselves but about Rabelais (or his work). If we understandthings in this light, the disagreement and agreement objections make sense.We disagree with each other because we make conflicting claims about thesame things. A person cannot accept both claims about one thing. We agreewith each other when we make relevantly identical statements about the samethings. Anyone who accepts one statement about the thing must accept theother. And we retract (variously reaffirm) what we had previously said whenwe disagree with our past selves about what we said about the same things.Contextualists have many resources, of course, and sometimes they can makedisagreement and agreement plausible by making use of, say, definite descrip-tions that mostly track the communities with which we are likely to agree anddisagree (or want to agree or disagree). When they do this, there is some doubtabout whether they can validate theWarrant Principle. Sometimes, for exam-ple, the speaker doesn’t accept their community’s standards, or knowwhat theircommunity’s standards are. And this still doesn’t help with the basic aboutnessworry. When I say that Rabelais’s work is funny, I never mention or thinkabout my community. Objectivism, claim relativists, is right about this much:my uerances concern not me but what I predicate funniness of.

As for expressivism, I’ll discuss that kind of view later. In outline I thinkit is not determinate enough to count as either objectivism, contextualism, orrelativism, though when made fully determinate it will either be one of those orold-style non-cognitivism, by which I mean the sort of view in Ayer (, ch.). e laer I take to be a non-starter, roughly for reasons that modern-dayexpressivists like Gibbard () reject it: it is linguistically implausible that(say) predicates of personal taste mean what, say, ‘ugh’ means, and impossibleif one accepts the T-schema for these kinds of sentences.

It is sometimes said that a nice feature of contextualism is its ability to givea unified account of modal meanings. at might be so. But I think at least asnice is relativism’s ability to give a unified account of “subjective” meanings.

See, for example, Dowell (, ) and Yanovich (). e most philosophically sensitive such argument I’ve seen is in Johnston (). Expres-

sivists about epistemic vocabulary such as ‘probably’ make similar arguments. ey say that whenwe say ⌜probably φ⌝, we don’t say that we assign a high credence to φ , but we directly express thathigh credence (and thereby, perhaps, recommend such an assignment). See, e.g., Swanson (),Yalcin (), and Rothschild ().

(Perhaps contextualism can do this, too, though I think we have reason to bewary.) is, too, is a motivation for relativism, and probably theoretically itsmost important feature.

Relativism as a view must therefore meet the following desiderata:

i. Make sense of speakers’ warrant in making the relevant claims.

ii. Allow us to not posit an error theory regarding ordinary thought and talk.

iii. Make sense of speakers’ sense that the relevant discourses are “subjec-tive”.

iv. Make sense of agreement and disagreement intuitions.

v. Vindicate speakers’ sense of what their uerances are about.

vi. Give a unified account of “subjective” terms.

Objectivism could not make good on i–iii, while contextualism could; and con-textualism could not make good on iv–v, while objectivism could. vi, I confess,is hard to decide. Objectivism does trivially offer a unified account, by in effectdenying anything is subjective. Contextualism gives a unified account of them,too, but it does so by turning the subjective into the objective.

Apart from meeting these desiderata, there is nothing that is nonnegotiablya part of relativism. It is a semantic thesis whose only aim is to predict andexplain the data, broadly construed. A theory that meets i–vi while retainingperspective dependence is relativistic both in leer (i.e., according to Def. )and spirit. It will do to keep that in mind for assessing whether the proposalI’m about to make is genuinely relativistic.

Problems for Egalitarian Relativism

. Egalitarian Relativism Defined

Relativism as most commonly extended from Def. and Def. into a fullsemantic and postsemantic theory does not leave room for semantically signif-icant differences in the quality of various perspectives. It also leads naturally

An honorable exception is Egan (), whose views I will discuss shortly.

to a pragmatics insensitive to those kinds of differences. To that extent it isdefective, or anyway so I’ll argue in this section.

As I said, my aim is to refute egalitarian relativism. Its worst empirical prob-lem is its commiment to infallibilism. But it has others, somemore theoretical.Aer specifying exactly what my target is, I’ll focus on that problem, and thenI’ll turn to the others.

Def. . A semantic theory T is an egalitarian relativism about K iff T is arelativism about K with the following combination of commitments:

(a) S: perspectives are simply sets of beliefs, credences, oraitudes (dispositional or otherwise) rather than (e.g.) especiallygood, reasonable, etc. beliefs, credences, or aitudes.

(b) P: the perspective P relevant for the determinationof truth in a context about K -claims is determined nonnormatively(e.g., to be the speaker of the context, or the assessor of the context);

(c) P: the norms of assertion governing when it is appro-priate to uer K -claims only concern when the claim is true (orreasonably believed, or known);

MacFarlane and Stephenson are egalitarian relativists. MacFarlane (, ch. )gives the following assertion rule:

Reflexive Truth Rule. An agent is permied to assert φ at context c1 only if φis true as used at c1 and assessed from c1.

eWarrant Principle is a straightforward consequence of this rule. Now, it’sonly a necessary condition on permissibility. It has to be, because sometimesit’s inappropriate to uer even what we know, and so a fortiori what’s true.But the TP, which MacFarlane explicitly endorses egalitarian relativism about‘tasty’, and elsewhere he says that the Reflexive Truth Rule is the constitutivenorm of assertion.

Stephenson () says something very similar. For her, the content of anassertion will be a set of world–time–perspective (really, judge, but the changeis harmless) triples, < w , t ,P >. e norm of assertion she proposes is this:

See, e.g., p. . When he mentions what overrides it, he lists only “norms of politeness,evidence, prudence, and relevance”. None of these are relevant to the examples I give.

Norm of Assertion (Stephenson). In order for a speaker A to use a sentenceS , S must be true at all tuples < w′ , t′ ,P >. (p. )

at is, S must be true at all worlds and times on which we hold fixed the givenperspective P. Once again, and I assume for the same reason as before, this isjust a necessary condition. But later on, she explicitly endorses something liketheWarrant Principle:

While all participants are held responsible, so to speak, to the sameworld and time (whichever one happens to be the actual one), eachone is held responsible to a different judge—namely themselves.is is reflected in the norm of assertion that I have proposed,which says in effect that in order to assert a sentence S , a speakeronly has to believe (justifiably) that S is true with themselves as thejudge… (p. )

. Initial Problem

MacFarlane, Stephenson seem agreed on egalitarianism. ey have reason tobe, since it is one of the relativists’ main reasons for rejecting objectivism. Evenso, we need more distinctions among perspectives and perspective dependencethan egalitarianism allows. To see the problem, we should start where this kindof discussion so oen does, with Hume ():

A man in a fever would not insist on his palate as able to decideconcerning flavours; nor would one, affected with the jaundice,pretend to give a verdict with regard to colours. In each creature,there is a sound and a defective state; and the former alone can besupposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment. (¶)

It’s a lesson from the long debates over subjectivism that not every perspectiveis equally good. Sometimes, for example, we are afflicted with disease, or haverecently eaten something like Synsepalum dulcificum, “distorting” our percep-tions of an object’s taste. It’s crucial to notice that Hume claims that the peoplein these cases would not make the relevant claims. It is not enough that some-thing does or does not taste a certain way, or look a certain way, from theirperspective. If they know they are defective then their speech behavior itselfwill be different. Relativism, as a semantic and pragmatic theory, must takeaccount of facts like these.

Suppose some illness has permanently and drastically changed Chloe’s tastereceptors so that most foods taste to her very different than they once did. She

is told to taste food she’s not especially familiar with, vegemite, say. Considerthen her potential uerance in two contexts:

() It tastes good.

In one context, a doctor is trying to suss out whether she really has the disease(there are fakers for any disease). She might very well respond unproblem-atically with (). But if a newspaper calls her and surveys her opinions on anumber of foods as to whether they taste good, one of which is vegemite, shewould not say (). Instead, she would say:

() I don’t know whether vegemite tastes good.

is despite that she might know that vegemite’s taste pleased me, or everytasting has been pleasing. Notice also that Chloe need not disown this; it mightmake her get more pleasure out of more food. Even this simple fact makestrouble for some of the most detailed proposals concerning the pragmatics ofrelativistic uerances. ough they predict () has two uses, one correspondingroughly to “it tastes good to me”, and the other just the bare statement, theydon’t predict that I wouldn’t or anyway shouldn’t make the claim in the secondcontext. By their lights () would be perfectly appropriate in the second context,and () would be inappropriate.

e egalitarian relativist has two conservative responses. On the first, shecan deny that the speaker really has the perspective according to which veg-emite tastes good. is is on its face implausible, since the disease might havehappened a long time before the uerance—so long, in fact, that she might notremember what it was like to taste things in the normal way. is suggests adifferent line of response. Perhaps in the second context, we hear () as sayingsomething like:

(′) Vegemite is gustatorily pleasing to gustatorily normal humans.

is can’t work, though. First, this won’t secure desideratum iii—it’s a sophisti-cated form of contextualism. Now, the relativist could say that they don’t thinkthe content for such sentences is generally different, but only in these specificcases. at means there is in that context some uerance I could make thatbehaves in the properly relativistic way, but I won’t say it. at means in suchcontexts I resist expressing the contents relativists say I am licensed to express.But then the maneuver has done no good, since we are back where we started.

Norwould this actually be enough to solve the problem. Suppose I knowmypalate is functioning normally but it’s inexpert, as so many palates are. ere’sno mystery in that; I know I’m picky and that I’m too partial to pizza and friedfoods. Were I to go to Noma, the world’s reigning no. restaurant, I wouldn’tbe pleased at all by the monkfish liver. Even so, I can recognize those facts aboutmy palate, in which case I wouldn’t uer ():

() Noma’s monkfish liver doesn’t taste good.

I would simply withhold judgment. is despite the fact that I might even knowI’m in the overwhelming statistical majority of humans worldwide. I don’t needto reject my tastes, since in fact I don’t. I only need suspect that people have abeer take on whether the dish tastes good than I do. ese are people whosepalates are developed, who distinguish flavors I cannot, and who overall cansee an artistry in the food that I cannot. So, even if by my standards—indeed,by normal standards—the monkfish liver tastes bad, and I know that, I still willwithhold my judgment. I won’t uer ().

Notice () is also problematic for another response to () and () that I didn’tlist above: that () somehow expresses a recommendation to eat vegemite, andthat () expresses reluctance to make that recommendation. is might be animplicature, or something more conventionally associated with judgments like(). Either way the reply would then say that I might not want to make a recom-mendation to someone if I have reason to think I find it pleasing but you wouldnot. With (), I can know most interlocutors whom I am likely to meet will findthe monkfish liver’s taste displeasing, and yet I still would not uer ().

Instead of (′), we could try saying that in the second context, Chloe wouldexpress what (′′) makes explicit:

(′′) Vegemite would be gustatorily pleasing to my idealized self.

is is Egan ()’s strategy in response to similar problems. Unfortunately itbrings with it a host of new headaches. First, it runs afoul of desideratum iii injust the way the contextualist does, since it makes the subjective objective (evenwhen put in terms of the de se, there’s an “objectively right” answer). And againsimilar to the contextualist the proposal violates desideratum v. () is not about

At least according to hp://www.theworldsbest.com/. Strictly speaking, for Egan, we should say that Chloe would self-aribute the property

(λx .x ’s idealized self would be disposed to find vegemite gustatorily pleasing). is way the theorywill be able to handle desiderata iv.

Chloe. Even if we decide we could live with that, this solution won’t generalize,since oen we just don’t know what our idealized selves would like. at helpsin this case, but it generalizes very badly because it doesn’t satisfy desideratumi. I have no clue what my idealized self would find fun, for example, and itdoesn’t rate as a consideration when deciding what to call fun. Shall we makea lexical stipulation—‘tastes good’ has to do with idealized perspectives and‘fun’ doesn’t? First, now we’ve violated vi. Second, this theory won’t satisfy ieven for ‘tastes good’, since I won’t know whether I’ll still like pizza when mytastes are idealized, even though I certainly will (do!) now say that pizza tastesgood. Idealization is way too inflexible to work, and the required stipulationscomplicate and ruin the elegance of relativism. Egan’s strategy is unappealing,though not without insight.

Or we might say what Richard (, p. ) says: an application of a pred-icate of personal taste is apt iff “(roughly) one’s considered judgment is that itapplies or one is willing to defer to common opinion and common opinion isthat it applies or one is willing to defer to ‘experts’ and their opinion is thatit applies” (in what follows I’ll ignore the hedge). is cannot be right. With(), it is only assertible in an explicitly relativized way—“tastes bad to me”. euse where I assert simply that it tastes bad, simply because I know it tastesbad according to my perspective, is unavailable. ese disjunctive assertionconditions, which Richard explicitly says correspond to different uses, must bewrong. At the very least a fuller pragmatic story needs to be given explainingwhy that particular “use” of () doesn’t exist. (ough I will argue against ex-plaining that fact pragmatically in the next section.) Not only that, but such aresponse will not be plausible at all with other subjective expressions, such asepistemic modals, in which case Richard violates desideratum vi. My account,on the other hand, remains unified even when including epistemic modals.

Egalitarian relativism is false, at least for ‘tastes good’. e problem is notjust that that kind of theory has a hard time accounting for these sentences. Italso does not easily countenance or explain differences in the degree to whichvarious kinds of expression are subjective. Speaking boldly, the fun is moresubjective than the beautiful, and, more tentatively, the disgusting (it seems tome) is more subjective than the cool. In order to feel really secure in any ofthese particular comparisons, a more specific and detailed inquiry is required.

Another criticism I haven’t made but think is right is that idealization itself is theoreticallyad hoc, especially as descriptive of folk practice. See Enoch () for more.

But I think we ought to be quite sure that there are differences in how subjec-tive these are. e next part of this section will show why, using some simpleconsiderations that also happen to show egalitarian relativism wrong for othersorts of expression besides ‘tastes good’. e examples are easy enough to con-struct for prey much any area—besides, perhaps ‘fun’—that I won’t go into thedetails for too many expressions.

. More Examples of the Initial Problem

Let’s be systematic about our examples. Reconsider these:

() It tastes good.

() Noma’s monkfish liver doesn’t taste good.

() I don’t know whether vegemite tastes good.

() Pulp Fiction is cool.

When you refrain from uering () and () as in the contexts above, call thesecases of . Judgments like () are professions of (supposethere is no relevant factual ignorance, leaving it intuitive what that comes to).And if one is willing to uer () despite having no positive affect toward themovie because one thinks good judges of coolness do, call these judgements. A kind of expression is less subjective than another if it either ex-hibits more of these kinds of phenomena, or exhibits a wider range of them.I am not including an obvious candidate here, namely how much people arewilling to argue about an expression’s aptness. I think such arguments are mis-leading: they are more oen than not evidence that speakers presuppose theirperceptions are relevantly similar.

Another way an expression can be less subjective than another is if theperspective must be like that of “normal” humans, or if sometimes it must belike experts. At the far end, an expression is not at all subjective if there is justone possible acceptable perspective. (More on that later.)

It’s hard to find an instance of deference for ‘tastes good’. Except in specialcases, if you don’t find the taste of something pleasing, and you’re not sufferingfrom any known temporary change in perspective, then you ought not to saythat that thing tastes good. e special cases involve “exocentric” uses, as when

we say some cat food tastes good, thinking of the cat. I invite you to recognizethis as a different use—there’s an unmistakable element of pretense involvedin such uerances. ‘Cool’ is different; parents, admied nerds, and others canrecognize something’s coolness without feeling the pull of it themselves.

‘Fun’ seems to involve no humility, ignorance, or deference. It also seemsirrelevant how normal or “expert” a given perspective is. us, Steve can say() without guilt or hesitation:

() Stamp collecting is fun.

It doesn’t maer that most people find it boring (let’s suppose). So long as helikes it, that’s enough. ‘Fun’ seems to be as subjective as possible, and so oneof the only predicates I’ve seen for which egalitarian relativism has a fightingchance of being correct. (It’s not surprising, then, that it’s received so much ofthe aention.)

‘Disgusting’ might have seemed similar, but in extreme cases it exhibits phe-nomena reminiscent of ‘tastes good’. Take a repentant racist, someone nause-ated by the sight of interracial couples, but who recognizes that their standardsof disgustingness are an unfortunate symptom of racism. Another examplewould be persistent affective homophobia among those who describe them-selves as “tolerant”. Such people can say the following:

() I find the sight of two men kissing disgusting, even though it’s not.

A full investigation of such variation would be interesting, but I won’t dothat. I hope that the variation is nevertheless evident. I will focus on just a cou-ple more especially interesting cases. e first is epistemic modals, includingprobability modals.

According to nearly all accounts of epistemic modals, their truth conditions,if they have them at all, are sensitive to some contextually salient person orgroup’s information state. e relativist will give something like the followingsemantics and postsemantics:

Relativist semantics. ⟦might φ⟧c ,w ,i = 1 iff ∃w′ ∈ i:φ(w′) = 1

Relativist postsemantics. A sentence S is true as used in cu as assessed fromca iff ⟦S⟧<cu ,ca>,<wcu ,ica > = 1 where wcu is the world of cu and ica isthe information state relevant at ca .

It’s been known for a while that sometimes we exhibit ignorance and hu-mility with epistemic modals. If, for example, I’ve recently had some medicaltests and the doctor but not I have the results, I can say:

() I don’t know whether I might have cancer. Only the doctor knows that.

Abandoning egalitarian relativism allows for natural, simple explanations ofthese cases. But consider, too, some other, nearby cases. Suppose I hate beingout in the rain without an umbrella. I try to obey the injunction if it might rain,take an umbrella. I get up in the morning, not knowing what the day’s weatherwill be like. I don’t yet know whether to take an umbrella, since I don’t knowwhether it might rain today (though I do know that for all I know, it might raintoday). I have to check the internet.

Finally, considerMacFarlane’s simplification of a case of “incorrect disagree-ment” from Dietz (). Suppose yesterday I proved eorem X and said:

() So, eorem X must be true.

If I forget whether I proved it or disproved it the day aer, I’ll truly say:

() If yesterday I said “So, eorem X must be true!”, what I said was false.

MacFarlane’s response is to make relativism non-solipsistic, following DeRose(). But it would be nice to know why () seems not to have a true readingat all (even judging from my amnesiac perspective). My proposal will predictrather than stipulate this data.

ere are similar cases with the deontic ‘ought’. In the Miners’ Puzzle, Ican say:

() I wish I knew what we ought to do! I guess we have to block neither,just to be safe.

Here there are no contextually salient authorities, so MacFarlane () tries toexplain away such intuitions, giving us an elaborate and (by his lights) falla-cious argument by which we reach such conclusions. I think his argument isimplausible: this is just something we’d somehow say. I also thismodus ponensis valid, or at least valid in these cases. But these aren’t fights we need to have

See DeRose (). See Kolodny and MacFarlane ().

here. I’ll just note it’d be best if relativism could accommodate these intuitionsrather than explain them away.

While there seem to be no good deference cases with epistemic modals,since that would have to involve some weird kind of epistemic akrasia (at leaston my account), there do seem to be some cases with deontic modals. Suppose,for example, that the expected utility of action A is greater than action B, givenmy utility function U and credence function C. Suppose you know that U ismy utility function and I don’t, and you also know the objective chances O aresuch that you know the expected utility of B given U and O is higher thanthat of A. You then tell me, without telling me what O actually is (you’ve beensworn to secrecy). I can then say:

() I ought to take action B.

is is so despite that my total perspective still determines a higher expectedutility for A than for B! I defer to your judgment as to what I ought to do—my perspective alone isn’t determining it. e case of rigged, in fact, so that itcannot determine it. Since I don’t know whatU is, I can’t figure out what O isand update my credences in line with the Principal Principle. I can’t see whatMacFarlane’s explanation of this kind of case (and others like it) would be.

Again, though I won’t go through them, there are similar examples for ap-pearance properties, other predicates of personal taste, and other information-sensitive expressions. It’s easy to construct the contexts and uerances. Onlya very few predicates, ‘fun’ and maybe a couple others, behave in a way theegalitarian relativist would find congenial. In the next section, I will proposean inegalitarian relativism that aempts to account for them. It will also solvea couple of other problems that I think ought to worry the relativist, too, butinvolve a larger target than just egalitarian relativism. e problems we havealready seen point the way toward a solution to them, too.

HowWe Ought to Repair Relativism

In this section, I’ll outline my positive proposal. First, I will add some desider-ata to i–vi, looking specifically at problems facing more general forms of rel-ativism. en, I’ll show how a pragmatic solution won’t help very much with

e idea for this kind of case comes from discussion with Caspar Hare and Roger White.

these problems. en, in the last subsection, I’ll introducemy own solution, andshow that it is both natural, satisfies all the desiderata laid down in the paper,and can account for the examples in §.

. Problems for Limited Semantic Relativism

Extant relativist theories have specified the perspective dependence of an ex-pression lexically. It turns out that this strategy plays poorly with egalitarianrelativism. Why? Well, egalitarian relativism depends for its plausibility onsome expressions’ (specifically, predicates and operators) being semanticallyrelative, and others not so being. For suppose every predicate were relative toa perspective. en ‘even’ would be relative to a perspective. en, by Def. ,there would exist perspectives P1 and P2 such that, for some number n (sinceit is only numbers that are even), world w , and time t , n ∈ ⟦even⟧c ,<w ,t ,P1>

but n < ⟦even⟧c ,<w ,t ,P2> . (Alternatively, perhaps something besides a numberis even on one perspective but not another. Since this possibility is similarlybad, I ignore it). But then by Def. and/or Def. , there will be two assertiblesentences (though never assertible from the same perspective):

() a. n is even.

b. n is not even.

But no natural language works that way. Rather, if ‘n is even’ is assertible fromP, then for all perspectives P′, ‘n is not even’ is not assertible from P′. So, theegalitarian relativist needs to be a limited semantic relativist:

Def. . A semantic theory T is a limited semantic relativism if there exist twoexpressions e1, e2, and T entails that e1 is relative and that e2 is not.

ere’s reason to think, however, that these sorts of differences ought not to beencoded lexically.

First, philosophers and others argue about whether or not expressions varyin extension across perspectives. Take ‘(morally) good’, for example. Somephilosophers thinkmoral relativism is true, and others false. It hardly seems likethe kind of thing that is seled by the meaning of the term. For philosophersare extremely competent users of most of the relevant terms. Rather, these

is is even true of the most philosophically nuanced account, Richard () (see the formalmodel in ch. ).

seem to be substantive questions. Another example would be ‘similar’. Somephilosophers, notably Lewis (), think there is sense to bemade of “objective”similarity, via the use of “natural” properties. Others, e.g. Taylor (), areskeptical. is is not a fight about the word ‘similar’ or its semantics. Andfinally, it’s possible to be a realist about many predicates of personal taste, e.g.,the funny or the sexy. ese views oughtn’t to be ruled out of court on semanticgrounds. Nor should the warring parties be seen as offering new coinages orsenses of the words.

Some linguists have thought that subjectivity is implemented lexically, basedon the behavior of predicates such as ‘find’. For example, note the contrast in() and ():

() Homer finds donuts tasty.

() # Homer finds Bart gay.

ey have taken these tests to show the wrong thing, though. For example,suppose we all believe that something is tasty if and only if our guru expresseshis preference for it. en I find the following as unacceptable as ():

() # I find chocolate cake tasty.

Or suppose we come to believe that whether or not something is a chair if andonly if it’s comfortable to sit on:

() I find this to be a chair.

None of these suppositions involve changes to the meaning of the terms. I wantyou to imagine we all just come to have these beliefs about the extensions ofthe predicates. ese effects, I think, are related to ‘find”s use of expressingopinions on which we think there is reasonable disagreement (i.e., roughly, it’suse as a hedge):

() I find that the hoest days tend to be in July. See Sæbø (). For the view that ‘find’ indicates only one kind of subjectivity, see Kennedy

(). Much of the fights concerning lexically specified subjectivity concerns syntax; see Collins() for a thorough and compelling syntactic analysis that accords very well with what I say here.

e example is not mine. To interpret properly you have to ignore the colloquial negativeusage of ‘gay’.

If you disagree with me and find that they’re in August, I have lile to argueagainst what you say. at doesn’t mean there’s no fact of the maer aboutwhether the hoest days tend to be in July—they very well might be. It doesmean I either cannot or am unwilling to refute what you say. I tentativelypropose the following presuppositional analysis of ‘find’:

Presupposition of ‘find’. ⌜A finds o F ⌝ presupposes that there is reasonablevariation in thinking that o is F , i.e., no easy way of convincing everyonethat o is F .

Note that this doesn’t mean that there isn’t an “objectively” right answer aboutwhether o really is F or not. On this view, () is unacceptable because we allbelieve there’s an easyway of finding outwhether the cake is tasty, acceptable toall of us: ask the guru. And () is acceptable because you and I can reasonablydisagree about whether something is comfortable. () is unacceptable becauseBart either does or doesn’t find men sexually or romantically appealing (etc.),and so we can just ask him.

e test with ‘find’ is the only diagnostic I’ve seen for whether a predicateis lexically specified as subjective. I think examples () and (), along withmany others we can construct using similar resources, show that whether apredicate is subjective—or equivalently, for this paper, relative—should not bespecified lexically. is has ancillary benefits: we shouldn’t want ‘good’ to belexically ambiguous between a “judge-dependent” reading and one that is notso dependent (if, e.g., we think ‘morally good’ is not perspective dependent inthe relevant sense).

Egalitarian relativism as a view is commied to limited semantic relativism.ey’re both implausible. e following are, therefore, our last desiderata on aplausible relativism, one that my proposal will satisfy:

vii. Avoid lexical implementations of limited semantic relativism.

viii. Make sense of the ignorance, humility, and deference cases.

ix. Make sense of degrees of subjectivity.

is, I think, is the truth in objectivism: subjectivism is not specified lexically.But just because we acknowledge that fact doesn’t mean we have to abandonrelativism.

. Against Purely Pragmatic Solutions

By MacFarlane’s Reflexive Truth Rule, () ought to be acceptable. So perhapswe need to have a different norm of assertion. For example, we might like thefollowing:

No Better Perspective Rule (I). An agent A is permied to assert φ at c1 onlyif () φ is true as used at c1 and assessed from c1, and () there is noperspective that A believes to be beer than A’s own, on which ¬φ istrue.

We have to be careful in how we understand ‘beer’, an issue I’ll turn to insomewhat more detail in the next section. Either way, this seems to take careof many of the examples. More information, for example, is obviously beerwhen it comes to epistemic modals. And I took people who like Noma to have abeer palate. Even so, this isn’t really the rule we would want, since it’s undulyrestrictive. I would still assert that pizza tastes good even were I to learn of aperson who has a beer palate and doesn’t like pizza. We thus need to replacethe rule with this:

No Better Perspective Rule (II). An agent A is permied to assert φ at c1 onlyif () φ is true as used at c1 and assessed from c1, and () there is someperspective A reasonably believes to be sufficiently good and from whichφ is true.

is seems to adequately capture all the examples with which I’m familiar ex-cept deference cases like (). For that, we need to let perspectives sometimes bepartial so that, say, a parent’s perspective doesn’t rule out something’s beingcool. I think we’ll need the following last revision:

No Better Perspective Rule (III). An agent A is permied to assert φ at c1only if () φ is true or undefined as used at c1 and assessed from c1, and() there is some perspective A reasonably believes to be sufficiently goodand from which φ is true.

is rule I think a match for all the examples. Even so, I think it’s wrong totackle this problem pragmatically. e most pressing issue is that I ought not to

MacFarlane considers but doesn’t endorse a knowledge norm, but that wouldn’t help in thissituation.

think (), never mind uer it. But given the semantics and postsemantics we’veseen, this would be puzzling. For φ can be true (for me), and I can know thatφ is true, and I still I wouldn’t be permied to think it. None of the defeatingconditionsMacFarlanementionswould explain this, since they all concernwhatruins conversations or at least makes them worse. My argument is not thatpragmatic principles don’t apply to inner speech. Indeed, I think some do. eissue is that it is hard to motivate any principle that both applies to inner speechand disallows my thinking (). I don’t claim it is impossible to find one, but I dothink any such principle will require a lot of argument.

Another problem with a purely pragmatic solution is that, so long as weretain the rest of egalitarian relativism, we will still be le limited semantic rel-ativism. We will have to change the semantics or postsemantics of expressionsin order to avoid its problems. at’s the task to which I now turn.

. My Proposal

I think there’s a great dealNo Better Perspective Rule (III) gets right. My solu-tion will essentially be to turn it into a plausible postsemantics. Remember alsothat it is meant to satisfy desiderata i–vii and deny limited semantic relativism,as well as make sense of the examples in §. e proposal turns on the idea thatsome perspectives can be beer than others, and this makes a difference to the(post)semantic machinery of natural languages.

Let’s start with a simple countable first-order language LP involving per-spective dependence in order to show how the proposal is to work.

Object-language vocabulary.

• Names: a1 , a2 , a3 , ....

• Variables: v1 ,v2 ,v3 , ....

• Perspective constants: P1, P2, P3, …

• Predicates: F1 , F2 , F3 , ....

• Logical constants: ¬, ∧, ∨, ⊃, ∀, ∃

• Punctuation: (, )

Syntax.

• For all names or variables τ , henceforth terms, and all predicates F , Fτ isa sentence.

• If φ is a sentence, then ¬(φ) is a sentence.

• If φ and ψ are sentences, then (φ ∧ψ ), (φ ∨ψ ), (φ ⊃ ψ ) are sentences.

• If v is a variable and φ a sentence, ∀v(φ) and ∃v(φ) are sentences.

• If φ is a sentence and P a perspective, then P(φ) is a sentence.

Semantics.

• ⟦Fa⟧д ,w ,t ,P = 1 iff a is F at t inw by P.

• ⟦(¬φ)⟧д ,w ,t ,P = 1 iff ⟦φ⟧д ,w ,t ,P = 0.

• ⟦(φ ∧ ψ )⟧д ,w ,t ,P = 1 iff ⟦φ⟧д ,w ,t ,P = ⟦ψ ⟧д ,w ,t ,P = 1 (define ∨ and ⊃in the usual way).

• ⟦∀v(φ)⟧д ,w ,t ,P = 1 iff, for all variable assignments д′ that differ at mostin what they assign to v, ⟦φ⟧д′ ,w ,t ,P = 1 (define ∃ in the usual way).

• ⟦P′(φ)⟧д ,w ,t ,P = iff ⟦φ⟧д ,w ,t ,P ′= 1.

e metalanguage makes use of one technical term I’m introducing, ‘per-spective’. At the highest possible level of abstraction, as well as for the officialstatement of the theory, a perspective will be just like a possible world. Treat-ing the simplest case, it will be a partial function from expressions, contexts,times, and worlds to truth values. In the general case, it will be a function fromexpressions, contexts, time, and worlds to extensions (objects, sets of objects,etc.). is is all the formalism says, but it’s hard to apply it in actual cases. Ialso need each context of assessment to determine a unique perspective. I’mformulating the theory as one involving assessment sensitivity, but this is anoptional feature. Again, remember, this might very well be partial. is is all Iwill say on ‘perspective’ for now.

Def. . Suppose the index is < X1 , X2 , ..., Xn >. A perspective P = <

I ,U ,A > is a function from an expression e, context c, and parametersX1 , X2 , ..., Xn to an extension. In the special case where e is a sentenceφ, P is a function from φ, X1 , X2 , ..., Xn to {0, 1}.

None of this would solve our problems and meet our desiderata if not forthe postsemantics I’m about to give. But before we do that, we need the con-cept of an ordering of perspectives. A context c, expression e, and worldw willdetermine a binary relation ≤c ,w ,e on perspectives. We require only that ≤c ,w ,e

be reflexive and transitive, i.e., that it be a preorder.

Def. . Let P be the set of all possible perspectives. ≤c ,w ,e is a function froma context c, expression e, and worldw to P×P, a (sometimes partial) pre-order.

To simplify things, we might accept the following:

Perspectival Recombination. For any logically contingent sentence φ, con-text c, time t , and world w , there exist perspectives P1 and P2 such that⟦φ⟧c ,<w ,t ,P1> = 1 and ⟦φ⟧c ,<w ,t ,P2> = 0.

I’m not wedded to it, but I would like the semantic theory at this point to allowthat there can be massively crazy perspectives.

Postsemantics.

• A sentenceφ is true as used in cu as assessed fromca iff ⟦φ⟧<cu ,cu>,<wcu ,tcu ,PGa > =

1, where cu is the context of uerance, ca is the context of assessment,wcu is the world of the context of uerance, tcu is the time of the contextof uerance, and is defined as below.

• First, PGa must be ranked sufficiently high by ≤c ,w ,e . A sufficient con-dition is that it have no competitors ranked strictly beer than it. But itis necessary and sufficient (if it is an eligible perspective) to be at leastas good as some threshold perspective(s), PTa . Second, PGa must be theassessor’s perspective or a perspective salient to the assessor. If the laeris the case, the salient perspective replaces the assessor’s on the questionof whether φ is true.

Finally, we can either retain MacFarlane’s Reflexive Truth Rule, or replaceit with a version that appeals to knowledge. And we’ll also want a retraction

You might think: c determines a world, namely wc , so why have both c and w determinethe preorder? Answer: were we to add ‘�’, ‘^’, etc., to LP , we would want the preorder to shibased on the world of evaluation.

rule, to separate relativism from contextualism:

Pragmatics.

• Reflexive Truth Rule. An agent is permied to assert φ at context c1 onlyif φ is true as used at c1 and assessed from c1.

• Retraction Rule. An agent in context c2 is required to retract an (unre-tracted) assertion of φ made at c1 if φ is not true as used at c1 and assessedfrom c2.

at’s my solution, but it’s not at all transparent how it is to work. I’llnow elaborate on and explain some of the details. I’m especially concerned toshow that this is a minimal departure from theories with which we are alreadyfamiliar.

On Lewis ()’s picture, propositions get replaced with properties. Tobelieve that there’s a book to your le is for you to self-ascribe a property: theset of centered worlds where there is a book to the center’s le. More generally,contents are sets of centered worlds < w , t , x >, where x is the individual atthe center. On my proposal, individuals determine a unique perspective, so wecan think of contents for Lewis as sets of tuples < w , t ,P >. is is exactlywhat my theory says. For Lewis, de dicto contents are sets of tuples where onlyw and t don’t necessarily take on every value inW and T (the set of worldsand times, respectively). at is, a de dicto content never varies in truth valueacross changes in individual or perspective. at is where I depart from Lewis,but not severely. e predicates of LP are one-and-all perspective dependent,in the sense there are possible perspectives that change their extension, evenfixing a world, time, and context. Nevertheless we can still define the notion ofobjectivity relative to a world and a context:

Def. . Given contexts cu and ca in a world w , an expression e is objective incontext iff, for all perspectivesP1 ,P2 ≤c ,w ,e PTa , if ⟦e⟧<cu ,ca>,<w ,tcu ,P1> =

x , then ⟦e⟧<cu ,ca>,<w ,tcu ,P2> = x .

at is a comparatively weak notion of objectivity. Context might fix a bar forwhat a “sane” perspective is like. (For example, polka can never be cool, givena certain context.) We can get a stronger one by quantifying over contexts:

Def. . Given a world w , an expression e is absolutely objective iff, for allcontexts of use cu and c′u , contexts of assessment ca and c′a in w , and

all perspectives P1 ,P2 ≤c ,w ,e PTa , if ⟦e⟧<cu ,ca>,<w ,tcu ,P1> = x , then⟦e⟧<c

′u ,c

′a>,<w ,tc ′u ,P2> = x .

is is the kind of objectivity predicates like ‘even’ and ‘quark’ seem to enjoy.at they do is a substantivemaer about contexts andwhat is true by allowableperspectives, rather than the result of a lexical specification. at satisfies vii.

What, though, is a perspective? Abstracting away from times and contexts,we can think of a perspective as a way of looking at each possible world onehappens to turn one’s eyes to. A world in conjunction with a perspective willdeliver the set of truths about that world, by that perspective’s lights. Intu-itively, some perspectives on worlds are more reasonable than others. Naturalquestion: from whose perspective? e answer depends on our metaphysicalproclivities. As a reflexive realist, I would answer that some perspectives areobjectively unreasonable—they are reasonable from no reasonable perspective(etc.). But this won’t be a semantic fact about the word ‘reasonable’, but rather aquestion about how the space of perspectives really is structured. at is, therecould just be no reasonable perspective on which ‘two is not even’ is true. Ithink that’s right. But we should not try to do metaphysics with our semantics.is particular theory does nothing to rule out the option that at least somereasonableness orderings are objective in a prey strong sense, but it also doesnot insist that there are.

At a less abstract level, you can think of a perspective as some view of theworld a person (not necessarily a human, but some thinking being) could have.It will be a triple P = < I ,U ,A >, where I is an information state, U is autility function, andA is a set of aitudes. is is helpful in a lot of ways, sinceit helps us determine when an agent has some perspective. But it’s misleadingin some ways. It might look, for example, like there’s no possible “perspective”on which some dogs are not mammals—those just aren’t the kinds of thingsperspectives have takes on. is is when I retreat to my official formulation:really, they’re functions from expressions, contexts, and times to truth values.at said, the two conceptions should harmonize. I think there can be perverseperspectives on which dogs aren’t mammals, e.g., when an agent connects theextension of ‘mammal’ with ‘furry’, and ‘furry’ with ‘nice’—and there are cer-tainly perspectives on which some dogs aren’t nice. If we think such casesshould be possible, and even weirder ones, then we should find PerspectivalRecombination plausible. For certain “special” terms, such as epistemic modals,the semantics will refer to one or more of the elements of P; in that case, it will

be I. (is is, of course, no concession to limited semantic relativism.)Our postsemantics essentially works like this: given a context, a world, and

an expression, we get a ranked list of perspectives. If the perspective evaluatingthe expression is good enough, then the expression has the extension it has bythat perspective’s lights. is is important because a perspective need not countitself the best, or even good. I can be racist and see my racism as a bad thing thatdistorts my evaluations. Or I can think that my palate is good enough, but yoursis much beer. We have all the required flexibility. So even if the goodness ofa perspective is itself a relative maer, the view will end up making the rightpredictions. at is, it will secure us the right sort of humility, ignorance, anddeference. And in particular cases, we’ll have a very precise scale of goodnessof perspective, as with epistemic modals. From a particular perspective, if Ijudge you know more than I do, then I will count your perspective as beerthan mine. e account does well with desideratum viii.

It satisfies ix because the threshold for reasonableness can be quite high orquite low, relative to speaker use. Usually it’ll be set fairly low, but for pred-icates like ‘fun’, it is clearly usually set incredibly low. For other predicates,perhaps niche ones that require expertise to use (like thick terms describingsubtle features of wine), the threshold might be normally set very high.

Even if assessors’ perspectives can fail to endorse themselves (in my specialsense), most cases aren’t like that. Most of the time, our perspectives are goodenough by our own lights—otherwise we’d try harder than we do to get others.e account satisfies i.

As for ii—the requirement that we avoid an error theory—my account givesthe same sort of answer as the earlier, egalitarian relativisms. Once we positperspective dependence, we don’t need to worry about whatever metaphysicaloddness there would be aending objective coolness. e same thing appliesto v, that we vindicate speakers’ sense of what their uerances are about. Wedo not put perspectives into the content of what’s said or believed, when thoseperspectives aren’t explicitly mentioned in the sentence.

iii required that we make sense of the subjectivity of some of our discourse.On this account, subjectivity amounts not simply to perspective dependence,but to there being possible variation across contexts and perspectives (see Def. and Def. ). e data suggest that there is such variation, and my accountcertainly allows for that, but it’s not really my goal to predict the specific kindsof variation. at just depends on what we feel are reasonable perspectives, or,

perhaps, what are reasonable perspectives. Even so, this account does give aunified account of subjectivity, or at least as unified as we could really ask for.

Whenwe come to iv, we see another areawheremy account gives a differentand hopefully more satisfying answer. e theory here allows for agreementand disagreement in the same way that MacFarlane’s does, by allowing me toaffirm the same content as you do when we agree, and for me to reject thecontent that you affirm (or vice versa) when we disagree. You wouldn’t be alonein wondering, though, whether this is a merely formal disagreement divested ofa point. He has labored mightily to answer this objection, and though I don’tfind his answer compelling, I won’t argue against it here. Rather, my theoryhas ready at hand a very simple answer, actually the one I think we would givepretheoretically.

Suppose you and I disagree, and what I say is true by my perspective andwhat you say is true by yours. If we continue to disagree, one or both of usprobably thinks we have the beer take on things. And because perspectivesneed not be self-endorsing, you can sometimes get me to see that you have thebeer perspective. en I can affirm what you said, even though it’s not trueby my perspective. at will be a case of deference. But then, because I come tobelieve you have the beer perspective, if I care about the subject, I’ll work totry and make my perspective more like yours. If, on the other hand, we cometo believe that whose take is beer is itself perspective dependent, as surelyit must sometimes be, then most of the time if we’re not perverse or peevedwe’ll quit arguing. e same thing applies to cases where we come to believewe have roughly equally good perspectives. e account is able to provide anextremely natural and accurate model for how disputes over maers openlyacknowledged to be subjective actually go. at, I think, is a particularly largebenefit for the relativist, since they tend to motivate their theories in large partwith disagreement data. It was an embarrassment how hard of a time they hadaccounting for the sensible ones.

As for agreement, most of the time when we agree we share part of ourtakes on the world. We see each other as as reasonable as we see ourselves.Sometimes, though, we see ourselves as unreasonable, we agree with the peoplewe do because we see ourselves as unreasonable. is is when we defer, andwhen we defer we agree with the people we defer to. is is sometimes a veryimportant kind of agreement, and one the egalitarian relativist couldn’t make

For an early statement of this objection, see Stojanovic ().

room for. My theory can.As a last corollary, I want to note that this theory validates amuch-discussed

idea: that meaning is normative. For whether an uerance uered and evalu-ated in given contexts is to count as true depends on how good, reasonable, etc.,the perspective from which it is evaluated is. is is interesting but theoreti-cally neutral: for those whowant it, it’s a bit of a bonus, but it’s fairly innocuousoverall. As far as I can see it does nothing to help with meaning skepticism orwhatever else that thesis is put forward to do.

Conclusion

e account I’ve offered here is able to make sense of everything the egalitarianrelativist could, and also everything I’ve argued they couldn’t. I cannot claimthis is the only theory that can do that. I am especially unsure of whether ornot a pragmatic story can ultimately work or not. Nor do I claim to have doneanything like fully fleshed out the view. I haven’t said much helpful about whenone perspective is to count as more reasonable, or how threshold perspectivesare determined (though I suspect the answer to both will be incredibly fuzzy).ere are also many, more data points to look at (quantification, for example). Ialso happen to think that But I do hope to have shown that egalitarian relativismas I defined it is empirically false. Any relativist ought to be an inegalitarian.I’ve offered one sketch of one way to be an inegalitarian relativist, though I’msure there are other directions to take the view. I don’t know if relativism itself isright—indeed, I’m not a relativist, though I find the view philosophically viable.I just want to put the strongest philosophical views in the ring that there canbe. Inegalitarian relativism might be a contender.

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