Document type
ArticleVersion
Accepted versionPublication date
All rights reserved
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/149086
Retractions
Journal Title
Authors
Director/Tutor
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Related resource
Abstract
Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane's prominent relativist proposal, sentences like 'the ice cream might be in the freezer' or 'Pocoyo is funny' are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever the asserted sentence is not true at the context of use and the context of assessment. If retractions were not obligatory in these conditions, there would be no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism. The main goal of this paper is to undermine the claim that retractions reveal this normative difference. To this effect, the paper offers a review of three important objections to the obligatoriness of retractions. Taken together, these objections make a strong case against the alleged support that retractions give to assessment-relativism. The objections are moreover supported by recent experimental results that are also discussed. This will satisfy a further goal, which is to undermine the idea that there is a constitutive retraction rule. The paper also discusses two ways to understand what such a rule would be constitutive of, and concludes with a discussion of how to describe what retractions are.
Subject (English)
Citation
Collections
Citation
MARQUES, Teresa. Retractions. Synthese. 2018. Vol. 195, num. 3335-3359. ISSN 0039-7857. [consulted: 8 of June of 2026]. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/149086