Relativism and Monadic Truth

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles past and present but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late however it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions they argue are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context) the objects of illocutionary acts and unsurprisingly the objects of propositional attitudes.