Abstract: Challenges the deeply held assumption that many of the most central philosophical problems admit of deterministic, objective solutions. The position argued for here, philosophical relativism, is the view that the conclusions we arrive at are, in many cases, relative functions of arbitrary assumptions made at the outset of our inquiry, and that the opposing conclusions could have been reached via distinct but equally arbitrary assumptions. Philosophical relativity is a consequence of semantic relativity, the view that there obtains no objective answer to the question of what semantic content our terms bear, being applied to central terms within particular philosophical problems. The contrast between invariantism (that a term's semantic content is an absolute matter, fixed by its literal meaning) and contextualism (that a term's semantic content is a nonabsolute matter, a function of the speaker's intentions), is appealed to in order to establish the hypothesis of semantic relativity itself, as either position may be adopted as a consequence of there being no objective criteria via which one of the two positions may be established on a firmer foundation than the other. The philosophical problems appealed to are “epistemic skepticism,” “freewill and determinism,” “causation,” and “explanation.” In direct contrast to usual philosophical method, the goal throughout is not to demonstrate that one position on such issues (and many others) is better than another. Rather, philosophical relativism turns on demonstrating that, with regards to several competing positions, neither is any better off than its rivals in so far as its being a reflection of deterministic, absolute, objective fact is concerned.

Keywords: causation, contextualism, epistemic skepticism, explanation, freewill and determinism, indeterminate, invariantism, philosophical relativity, semantic relativity