Professor Twardowski and the Relativist Menace

Abstract

The first part of the argument of this paper is that Prof. Twardowski’s attempt to dispose of relativism once and for all in his short paper does not succeed—for a number of interrelated reasons: (i) Twardowski’s argument that there are no relative truths fails: it is not exhaustive. (ii) Even with respect to the examples on which he focuses, it is inconclusive, relying on an unclear and unexplained concept of judgment, and the unjustified assumption that only judgments are literally true or false. (iii) More fundamentally, Twardowski’s approach relies on a conception of relativism which badly over-simplifies a very complex phenomenon.