Semantic Relativism and Information Science: An Exploration of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)

Semantic relativism supplies an underutilized method to analyze the information a statement presents by signaling the context of judgement. This study applies semantic relativism to the Supreme Court of the United States case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) to understand the differing legal opinions released by the Court. While information literacy focuses on bias in sources, semantic relativism allows us to evaluate the information presented. Since it attends to the context of judgement, semantic relativism can be utilized with other information science tools that evaluate the legitimacy of information interpretation.

The Liar Without Relativism

Some in the recent literature have claimed that a connection exists between the Liar paradox and semantic relativism: the view that the truth values of certain occurrences of sentences depend on the contexts at which they are assessed. Sagi (Erkenntnis 82(4):913–928, 2017) argues that contextualist accounts of the Liar paradox are committed to relativism, and Rudnicki and Łukowski (Synthese 1–20, 2019) propose a new account that they classify as relativist. I argue that a full understanding of how relativism is conceived within theories of natural language shows that neither of the purported connections can be maintained. There is no reason why a solution to the Liar paradox needs to accept relativism.

Semantic Relativism and Logical Implication

Semantic relativism is the view that the truth-value of some types of statements can vary depending on factors besides possible worlds and times, without any change in their propositional content. It has grown increasingly popular as a semantic theory of several types of statements, including statements that attribute knowledge of a proposition to a subject (knowledge attributions). The ways of knowing claim is the view that perception logically implies knowledge. In my “Semantic Relativism and Ways of Knowing” (2019) I argued that a relativist semantics for knowledge attributions is incompatible with the ways of knowing claim. I suggested that this incompatibility depends on some basic features of the logic of relativist semantics, and therefore can be shown to generalise beyond the discussion of knowledge attributions to semantic relativism more broadly. Here I make this generalisation. I demonstrate that for any proposition p expressed by a statement that does not have a relativist semantics, and for any proposition q expressed by a statement that does have a relativist semantics, p fails to logically imply q. I explain why this happens, discuss some of its philosophical consequences, and consider a way to modify relativist semantics to avoid it. I conclude that semantic relativism raises interesting philosophical questions that have gone largely unnoticed in discussions of this view until now.

The Competition

Chapter 4 shows why QUD Reasons Contextualism is preferable to its competitors. In particular, it considers Stephen Finlay’s conceptual analysis of reasons locutions, an expressivist view of reasons locutions based on the work of Simon Blackburn, Tim Henning’s information contextualism, and Niko Kolodny’s semantic relativism.