Modelling the ‘Ordinary View’
This chapter responds to the attempt in Chapter 2 to model ‘the ordinary view’ of ‘disputes of inclination’. It discusses two other ways to understand or model the three seemingly incompatible elements of the ordinary view of disputes of inclination. First, rather than making ‘is true’ relative, one can semantically descend and underwrite the ordinary view by adopting a relativism about the non-semantic predicates involved in the dispute in question, such as ‘is delicious’. It then argues that other philosophers have overlooked the possibility that one could be a relativist and a correspondence theorist of truth at once, by adopting a so-called ‘polarity’ view of facts or states of affairs. The core thought is that a statement is true in virtue of the way the world is, but how the world is happens to be relative to a person's attitudes. While stopping well short of endorsing the position, the chapter suggests that its very possibility illustrates that the philosophical terrain is more complicated than previously thought.
Keywords: relativism, truth, ordinary view, disputes of inclination
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