Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Epistemic Modals in Context 294
certainly shouldn’t restate the norms of assertion in terms of it, because that will
lead to the appropriateness of assertion being oddly relativised. Whether it was appropriate
for Vinny to say “Rotting flesh tastes great,” is independent of the context
of evaluation, even if the truth of what he uttered is context-relative. (It would not
at all be appropriate for him to have said “Rotting flesh tastes terrible” even though
we should think he would have said something true by that remark, and something
false by what he actually said.) And the same thing seems to hold for generalisations
about truth as the end of belief. It is entirely appropriate for Myles to believe that
Granger might be in Prague, because it’s true B relative to his context. Relatedly, if
knowledge is tied to truth T rather than truth B , knowledge can’t be the norm of assertion
or end of belief. 38 On the other hand, using truth T we can say that TRUTH IN
REPORTING is true in the truth relativist theory without reinterpreting it in terms
of relative truth concepts. Moreover, we can invoke truth T to explain why we got
confused when thinking about the original puzzle: It is arguable that, even if we
should distinguish truth T from truth B in our semantic theorizing, we aren’t unreflectively
as clear about that distinction as we might be. No wonder then that we get
a little confused as we think about the Granger case. We want to say Myles doesn’t
make a mistake. And we also want to say “That’s wrong” speaking of the object of
his assertion and belief, and what’s more, when we say that, we don’t seem to be
making a binary claim about the relation between ourselves and what is believes.
Once we clearly distinguish truth T from truth B things become clearly. Using the disquotational
notion, we can say ‘That is false T ‘, which is a monadic claim, and not a
binary one. The binary truth B explains why that claim is assertable (it is assertable
because ‘That is false T ‘ is truth B at my context), but doesn’t figure in the proposition
believed. Meanwhile, the relevant notion of mistake – that of an agent believing a
proposition that is not true B at her context, can only be properly articulated once the
distinction between the more explanatory truth T is carefully distinguished from the
(arguably) conceptually more basic truth B.
One final expository point. In general, truth relativism makes for irresolvable disputes.
Let us say that two conversational partners are in deadlock concerning a claim
when the following situation arises: There is a pair of conversational participants, x
and y, and a sentence S, under dispute, such that each express the same proposition
(in the sense explained) by S but that S is true B at each of the contexts x is in during
the conversation, and false B at each of the contexts y is in during the conversation.
Neither speaks past one another in alternately asserting and denying the same sentence,
since each expresses the same proposition by it. And each asserts what they
should be asserting when each says: What I say is truth T and what the other says is
false T., since each makes a speech that is true T at the respective contexts. In general,
truth relativism about a term will lead one to predict deadlock for certain conversations,
traceable to the truth relativity of the term. But in the case of ‘might’, it is
38 Arguably, then, one will have to distinguish (and posit an ordinary conflation between) knowledgeT
from knowledge B, the latter being needed to make good on the normative importance of knowledge, the
former being need to make sense of the validity of the inference from knowing that p to p. Is trouble
lurking here for the truth relativist, especially given link between the truth B of ‘might’ claims and facts
about knowledge? We shall not pursue the matter further here.