ReplySimplicity”


Συγγραφέας: Herman Cappelen, John Hawthorne


Herman Cappelen, John Hawthorne: ReplySimplicity” (pdf, 8 pages)
Predictably, John MacFarlane claims that our discussion does not get to the heart of relativism and that his own framework does. We think he both underestimates the resources at work in our approach and overestimates the clarity and cogency of his. In what follows we shall briefly speak to both of these themes. We say that relativists reject the idea of truth as a monadic property. MacFarlane disagrees – he doesn’t think the typical relativist rejects the idea of monadic truth. MacFarlane’s discussion of these issues confuses a monadic property with a monadic predicate. To see what we have in mind, let’s begin with the notion of a monadic property. Our grip on that notion is more or less in line with the tradition. Roughly speaking a monadic property either does or doesn't stand in the instantiation relation to a given object. For many purposes this can be represented as a particular function from worlds to extensions, and in a setting where intensional issues are irrelevant it may serve our purposes well enough to represent it as a set of objects. Abstract objects with a more complex profile are not what we have in mind by 'monadic property'. In particular an abstract object with parameterized instantiation – something that is instantiated by Jones relative to one index on a parameter but not relative to another -- is not what we had in mind by 'monadic property'. In saying this, we are not acting as the terminology police. We are merely alluding to a tradition of thinking and talking about properties that we are immersed in and which is quite familiar. Aware that there might be some flexibility in how authors use 'monadic property', we tried to forestall misinterpretation with remarks such as the following: One final point of clarification: to get our intentions right, think here of ‘instantiates’, as it figures in T1 [T1= There are propositions and they instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter] as a simple binary relation between an object and a property...