Contextualism and Relativism

Contextualism and Relativism will study the areas of interaction between a recent, potentially iconoclastic idea in the philosophy of language, and an ancient, much reviled but stubbornly resilient idea about the nature of truth.
The former idea is semantic contextualism. Certain philosophers of language have argued influentially that the traditional conception of an utterance's content as depending/apart from devices like tenses and demonstratives/purely on its internal semantic composition is hopeless: that what a speaker literally says typically depends, in addition, on an array of features of the speech context / like the needs, intentions and preoccupations of speaker and audience. Generalised, this view seemingly jeopardises any prospect of a satisfyingly systematic semantic theory for natural language, which, it appears, would have to be at best vastly more elaborate than traditionally envisaged.
The basic argument for this contextualist 'turn' is simple and powerful-seeming. It makes a case, by examples, that to know what someone has said, you (always) need to know things about the context of the saying. (Consider the question: Is there still milk in the 'fridge? To know how to answer, you may need to know whether the speaker intends to make a coffee or wants to know whether the broken milk bottle has been cleaned up properly.) A common reaction has been to try to maintain that this kind of context-sensitivity is not, properly speaking, semantic and may be accommodated by traditional semantics supplemented by a sophisticated pragmatics of communication. We shall study carefully both the detail of the contextualist 'data' and the stability of pragmatic explanations of it.
Other interesting responses argue that the data have been misunderstood in more radical ways. One may be illustrated as follows. With little at stake, we may take ourselves to know that the train will make the connection at Reading on the basis of the timetable and smooth progress on the journey so far. But if carrying potentially life-saving supplies for an emergency operation, the very same information may be felt insufficient to justify the same knowledge-claim. (What are the chances of delays later? Have there been recent problems with the track?) Contextualism will maintain that this is to be expected if 'knows' is semantically context-sensitive. But an alternative explanation is that knowledge itself should be viewed as interest-relative, somewhat in analogy with the Einsteinian idea that motion, or simultaneity, are relative to frame-of-reference, and that it is our changing interests between the two scenarios that explain the change in truth-value of the relevant knowledge-claim.
Indeed, there is a yet more radical response. The data suggestive of semantic contextualism have to do with apparent differences in truth-value of utterances of the same sentence. Different content would explain that. But there is also the theoretical possibility of the view that not content but truth itself is relative to context: that one and the same utterance, with one and the same content, can be true in one context (when the issue is whether the 'fridge has been properly cleaned up) but false in another (when the issue is café au lait.) This particularly intriguing suggestion in effect turns these modern debates back full circle to connect them with the ancient tradition of philosophical relativism concerning truth and knowledge which originated with Protagoras and Plato's Theaetetus / the 'reviled but stubbornly resilient' idea referred to above.
Our project will aim to define, refine and pursue the debates between these ideas through a variety of subject matters, including the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, the nature of fundamental disagreements concerning morals and taste, the metaphysics of time and change, and the semantics of vague expressions.