Steve Watson

Another Pointless Dialogue on Relativism About Truth

The fourth effort

A: All truths are relative
B: Do you mean that all statements of fact are true for some and false for others?
A: Yes, that’s what I mean.
B: So a statement like ‘There is a hippopotamus in this room’ is true for some false for others?
A: That follows, of course.
B: But when I say that there’s a hippo in the room I’m describing some fact about the world so that what I mean is that there really is a hippo in the room. If it is true-for-me then if I try to walk across the room I will fail because my path will be blocked by this hippo.
A: And you would annoy the hippo.
B: But for someone for whom the statement ‘There is a hippo in this room’ is false, there is no such fact as the hippo in the room and their path would not be blocked.
A: Do you think there’s a hippo in the room, B?
B: If I said I did, would you be inclined to contradict me, A?
A: Not a bit of it!
B: Then under what circumstances would you feel justified in challenging any factual statement any other person made?
A: I’m not sure. Perhaps only when I think they’ve reached their understanding of the facts of the matter according to unreliable or incorrect processes, or when their claims are contradicted by others of their claims?
B: I’m not sure how you can even talk about reliable and unreliable or correct and incorrect processes of knowledge generation, unless you think that there is some way that the world actually is. Do you think that the world is a certain way?
A: Of course I do. There’s a world and I’m in it – and you may be too.
B: Well thanks for the grudging acceptance of my coexistence with yourself.
A: De nada
B: But if you think that the world is a certain way, then surely language can be used to describe how the world is, and that language can describe it correctly or incorrectly, and so it may describe it truly – for everyone – or falsely – for everyone. Indeed, that is just what true and false mean for people who speak the language.
A: Aren’t you assuming that everyone has the same understanding of any statement of fact? That can’t be assumed – indeed it’s highly unlikely! So a statement that may be understood by one person as describing a certain fact about the world may be understood by another person as describing a quite different fact about the world. One understanding may make the statement true and the other may make it false.
B: Well, this is very sneaky. I suppose it’s possible to argue that it’s impossible to state anything so clearly that there can be no misunderstanding, and that there are always possible misunderstandings that will make a true statement into a false one (I abbreviate, hoping for charity;) but this seems less than relevant to the original claim which I understood to be referring to the variable truth-value of a certain statement for different persons given its constant propositional understanding.
A: I don’t believe that was ever stipulated.
B: Yes, and I suppose it’s a good example of the very claim that you were making.
A: I meant to do that.
B: Uh huh. But suppose we had two people who really did have exactly the same understanding of a particular statement – by which, let me clarify, I mean that they both have exactly the same idea of what facts in the world would make that statement true or false. Could the statement yet be true for one and false for the other?
A: I doubt that any such persons exist.
B: And I doubt that anyone could be raised entirely in a black and white room or could memorise a Chinese-speaking AI program, yet we talk about them quite happily.
A: I doubt that any such persons could exist.
B: And I doubt that you could justify that as an in-principle claim; but set that aside, because your hesitation suggests that you think they couldn’t really disagree, in which case your earlier claim about subjectivism is reduced to a claim about mere misunderstandings. It remains true that statements describing the world that are close enough to identically understood by all parties will be either true or false for all parties.