No matter who: What makes one a relativist?

Resumo

As part of her argument that relativism and contextualism are nothingbut notational variants of each other, Stojanovic holds that contextualism is flexible enough to achieve whatever relativism might do if the matter is what truthvalue is assigned to each pair of sentence and context. In this paper, I reply to thisstatement by arguing that contextualism cannot be made as flexible as relativismwithout in fact turning it into a version of relativism. The key to my response toStojanovic is that, while relativism relativizes utterance truth, contextualism doesnot, so parameters that are not fixed at the context of utterance will be accessiblefor the relativist, but not for the contextualist. Although the relativity of utterancetruth follows as soon as propositional truth is relativized to contexts of assessment, as the relativist does, it is easy to lose sight of this fact if we identify thecontext of assessment with the assessor’s context. Hence, the point of this paperis that the difference between relativism and contextualism is not one as to whoseparameters play a role in determining the sentence’s truth-value. If it were, contextualism could indeed be made just as flexible as relativism.