Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Conditionals and Indexical Relativism 339
of the one utterance. But from the indexical relativist perspective, the contextualist
theory that values for variables are set by contexts of utterance is an overly hasty
generalisation from the behaviour of a few simple indexicals. (It isn’t clear even clear
that the contextualist theory can account for simple pronouns, like ‘you’ or ‘now’
as they appear in sentences like the one you are now reading, so this generalisation
might have been very poorly motivated in the first place.)
Third, it is conservative about the motivation for relativism. I haven’t relied on
intuitions about faultless disagreement, which is an inherently controversial topic.
Rather, I’ve argued that we can motivate relativism well enough by just looking at
the grounds on which people agree with earlier utterances. I think there is a general
methodological point here; most of the time when theorists try to motivate
relativism using cases of disagreement, they could derive most of their conclusions
from careful studies of cases of agreement. This method won’t always work; I don’t
think you can replicate the disagreement-based arguments for moral relativism with
arguments from agreement for example. But I think that is a weakness with moral
relativism, rather than a weakness with the methodology of focussing on agreement
rather than disagreement with arguing for relativism.
Now one shouldn’t fetishise epistemic conservativeness. But a relativism that
requires less of a revision of our worldview should be more plausible to a wider range
of people than a more radical relativist view. And that’s what I’ve provided with the
indexical relativist theory defended here.