Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska

In the paper Evans’s argument concerning indeterminate identity statements is presented and discussed. Evans’s paper in which he formulated his argument is one of the most frequently discussed papers concerning identity. There are serious doubts concerning what Evans wanted to prove by his argument. Theorists have proposed two competing and incompatible interpretations. According to some, Evans purposefully constructed an invalid argument in order to demonstrate that the vague objects view cannot diagnose the fallacy and is therefore untenable. According to others, Evans wanted to formulate a (valid) argument to the effect that there cannot be vague identity statements whose vagueness is due solely to the existence of vague objects. As it has been argued, if it is the former interpretation which is correct, than the argument really is invalid, but it is doubtful whether it achieves its aim. It might be claimed that “the vague objects view” it refutes is not the view that most vague objects theorists hold. The main part of the paper is devoted to the second interpretation and the discussions concerning the validity of the argument on this interpretation. It appears that the vague objects theorist is in a position to object to the validity of every single step of the proof

In the paper I describe John MacFarlane’s version of relativism about truth. I begin by discussing Twardowski’s (1900) and Kokoszynska’s (1948; 1951) arguments against relativism. They think — just as Haack does (see 2011) — that sentences may be relatively true, if they are incomplete, but once they are completed they become true (or false) absolutely. MacFarlane distinguishes between nonindexical contextualism (which was anticipated by Kokoszynska (sic!)) and relativism which requires the introduction of the context of assessment. According to him only the view which postulates double-indexed (to contexts of utterance and to contexts of assessments) truth is able to explain disagreement in subjective domains and contradicting intuitions about the truth-value of future-contingents

The Agreement-Based Tests for Context Sensitivity In my paper, I present and discuss Cappelen and Lepore's context sensitivity tests, which appeal to says-that reports. In Relativism and Monadic Truth Cappelen and Hawthorne criticize those tests and propose agreement-based tests instead. I argue that such tests do not fare much better. The original Cappelen and Lepore's tests presupposed a minimal notion of says-that. One might postulate a parallel notion of "thin" agreement, according to which people agree that p if they all believe the minimal proposition that p. In this sense we might say - as opposed to what Cappelen and Hawthorne say - that A and B agree that Nicola is smart, even though A thinks that she is smart because she stands way back against strong servers, while B thinks that she is smart because she invested all her money in penny stocks. The paper ends with a critical gloss concerning the case in which Joe Coach predicates tall of people who are over six-foot-eight and Joe Normal, who applies tall to anyone over six-foot tall. I conclude that agreement and disagreement tests are poor indicators of context sensitivity, since their result depends on the prior theoretical standpoint one adopts.