The evidence for relativism

The aim of this paper is to examine the kind of evidence that might be adduced in support of relativist semantics of a kind that have recently been proposed for predicates of personal taste, for epistemic modals, for knowledge attributions and for other cases. I shall concentrate on the case of taste predicates, but what I have to say is easily transposed to the other cases just mentioned. I shall begin by considering in general the question of what kind of evidence can be offered in favour of some semantic theory or framework of semantic theorizing. In other words, I shall begin with the difficult question of the empirical significance of semantic theorizing. In Sect. 2, I outline a relativist semantic theory, and in Sect. 3, I review four types of evidence that might be offered in favour of a relativistic framework. I show that the evidence is not conclusive because a sophisticated form of contextualism (or indexical relativism) can stand up to the evidence. However, the evidence can be taken to support the view that either relativism or the sophisticated form of contextualism is correct.     

A Modal Sortal Logic

An intensional semantic system for languages containing, in their logical syntax, sortal quantifiers, sortal identities, (second-order) quantifiers over sortals and the necessity operator is constructed. This semantics provides non-standard assignments to predicate expressions, which diverge in kind from the entities assigned to sortal terms by the same semantic system. The nature of the entities assigned to predicate expressions shows, at the same time, that there is an internal semantic connection between those expressions and sortal terms. A formal logical system is formulated that is proved to be absolutely consistent, sound and complete with respect to the intensional semantic system.