ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two influential models for framing the arguments for epistemic relativism: the replacement model formulated by Paul Boghossian and further developed by Martin Kusch, and truth-relativism in the epistemic domain, owed to John MacFarlane. Boghossian is no epistemic relativist, but he formulates the rendition of epistemic relativism before moving on to criticizing it. The move from the unrelativized to the relativized predicate is not only empirically controversial, but it is also, and more importantly, philosophically contentious. MacFarlane’s formulation of epistemic relativism, in contrast, is found wanting because it inherits the problems already discussed in connection with his account of alethic relativism. A further objection to contextualism as a philosophical doctrine capable of countering skepticism about the external world, to some extent, comes from the following observation, according to MacFarlane. MacFarlane’s proposal has to be distinguished also from what he calls “nonindexical contextualism”.
