​SEMANTIC RELATIVISM ABOUT PERPSECTIVAL EXPRESSIONS: A REASSESSMENT AND DEFENSE
(OPUS 17 project no. 2019/33/B/HS1/01269)


Description

Natural languages are replete with expressions for the interpretation of which appeal to perspectives is needed, such as “tasty”, “beautiful”, “good”, “might” or “knows”. Such perspectival expressions play a crucial role in our lives: they describe how parts of reality are experienced or judged from our own perspective, as well as give us insight into how they are experienced or judged from other people’s perspectives.

Two broad views are the main contenders in current literature on perspectival expressions: contextualism and relativism. There are essentially two types of arguments found in the debate between these views. One concerns judgments of truth-value (“intuitions”) in or about various scenarios such as disagreement, retraction, eavesdropping, etc. Among these, disagreement has been discussed extensively in the literature and the focus of my previous research project (click here for details). Another important argument concerns retraction - the phenomenon whereby a speaker “takes back” a previous assertion involving a perspectival expression. Recently, both conceptual and empirical challenges have been raised that undermine the dialectical efficacy of retraction. A less discussed but highly significant phenomenon that has recently surfaced in the literature is perspectival plurality. Simply put, perspectival plurality is the existence of readings of sentences containing two or more perspectival expressions that appeal to two or more perspectives. This phenomenon has been deemed problematic both for contextualism and relativism. The second type of arguments found in literature are syntactic, attending to linguistic phenomena like licensing, control, binding, sluicing, floating, ellipsis, anaphora, crossover, embedding under speech and attitude verbs etc. Each of the two views has been shown to have problems with at least some of these phenomena.

​The project has two main aims. The first is to provide a thorough exploration and systematization of the various arguments found in the literature, of both types mentioned above. The second, arguably more important, aim of the project is to defend, by both taking up old arguments and providing new ones, a version of relativism about most perspectival expressions. In order to achieve these aims I will focus on the following three research questions:
1: What is the dialectical power of the argument from retraction, after the recent conceptual and empirical challenges?
2: What is the best way for the relativist to account for perspectival plurality, in all its manifestations?
3: How successful are the syntactic arguments both against and in favor of relativism?
The result of the project will be a comprehensive picture of the moves available to relativism vis-à-vis the phenomena described and, ultimately, a well-defended and fully developed relativist view of perspectival expressions.


Publications

The following works are a direct result of the project:

Dan Zeman & Mihai Hîncu (Editors), Retraction Matters. New Developments in the Philosophy of Language (Synthese Library 488)
Springer, 2024

Dan Zeman, Relativism and Retraction: The Case Is Not Yet Lost
In D. Zeman & M. Hîncu (Editors), Retraction Matters. New Developments in the Philosophy of Language, Springer, 2024

Mihai Hîncu & Dan Zeman, Introduction to Retraction Matters
In D. Zeman & M. Hîncu (Editors), Retraction Matters. New Developments in the Philosophy of Language, Springer, 2024

Dan Zeman, Parity, Faultlessness, and Relativism: A Response to Wright and Ferrari
Analysis (advance article), 2024

Dan Zeman, The Semantics of Knowledge Attributions, by Michael Blome-Tillmann, Oxford University Press, 2022
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2023

Several other articles are currently under review.

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Activities

The project's activities comprise regular seminars, workshops and occasional talks or lectures by invited speakers.

SEMINARS
In the first year of the project I ran an online biweekly seminar on retraction, in the second year one on perspectival plurality, and in the third year one on syntactic arguments in the contextualism/relativism debate.

WORKSHOPS
Theoretical and Empirical Challenges to Retraction
June 23-24, 2021
University of Warsaw (online)
Perspectival Plurality
May 27-28, 2022
University of Warsaw (hybrid)
Syntactic Arguments in the Contextualism/Relativism Debate
May 17, 2023
University of Warsaw (online)

LECTURES
Lectures on Switcher Semantics
Kathrin Glüer-Pagin & Peter Pagin (Stockholm University)
​24-28.03.2023
University of Warsaw