Between Use Sensitive and Assessment Sensitive Truth: A Criticism of Truth Relativism

This thesis compares truth relativism with non-indexical contextualism. These views are compared both as general approaches to account for the use of a linguistic expression in declarative sentences and as proposals about particular expressions such as personal taste, aesthetic and moral predicates, epistemic modals, knowledge ascriptions and future contingents. Four aims are set forth: (i) to show that truth relativism must be understood as an account of the assessment sensitivity of our ordinary monadic truth notion, (ii) to single out a problem this view faces to make sense of its non-monadic truth notion and identify the best strategy to solve it, (iii) to argue that, with the exception of future contingents, this strategy cannot be applied to the cases for which truth relativist accounts have been proposed, and (iv) to argue for non-indexical contextualist treatments of these cases. The thesis has two parts; (i) and (ii) are addressed in the first one, while (iii) and (iv) are addressed in the second one. In addressing (iv), we only question the evidence adduced for truth relativism that non-indexical contextualism is committed to reject. As it happens, this is the evidence that is necessary to challenge in order to accommodate the problem mentioned in point (ii).