How to Spell Out Genuine Relativism and How to Defend Indexical Relativism

It was the explicit aim of my paper ‘Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism’ to ‘characterize and compare’ (p. 297) two different forms of relativism. One form, exemplified by Harman’s and Dreier’s moral relativism (Harman, 1975 and Dreier, 1990), involves the claim that certain sentences express different propositions in different contexts of utterance, much like indexical sentences–hence the name ‘indexical relativism’. The other form involves the claim that the truth-value of certain contents or propositions depends on certain non-standard parameters, i.e. depends not just on a possible world. The explicit conclusion of the paper was that the two forms differ significantly ¹ .