• Overview
• Programme

Overview

This is a small informal workshop on contextualism, jointly hosted by the epistemology and ethics research clusters. The talks will take place in room G.06 of the Dugald Stewart Building. For more details about this event, contact Dr. Matthew Chrisman (matthew.chrisman@ed.ac.uk).

Programme

• 3:00-4:45 Steve Finlay (USC) 'Normative Contextualism Defended' (co-authored with Gunnar Bjornsson) (pdf)

ABSTRACT. We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Weatherson, Schroeder and others have raised parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism; we argue for a parallel solution.

• 5:00-6:45 Jonathan Schaffer (ANU) 'Contextualism for Taste Claims and Epistemic Modals'

ABSTRACT. Taste claims and epistemic modals both seem to require perspectival information. With taste claims, one needs to know whose taste is at issue. With epistemic modals, one needs to know whose knowledge is at issue. Contextualists and truth relativists disagree about where this perspectival information comes from. Contextualists regard the perspective as encoded in the proposition expressed, while truth relativists regard the perspective as added through the indices by which propositions are evaluated for truth (and then defaulting to the perspective of the assessor). I will defend the contextualist view, by adducing syntactic evidence for represenation of the perspective in logical form, in both taste claims and epistemic modals. I will conclude with a discussion of the disagreement data that motivates truth relativism. I will argue that the contextualist not only has the best account of where the perspectival information comes from, she also has the best account of disagreement.

 

Last Updated: May 11th, 2009 by Duncan Pritchard.