Relativism and the Metaphysics of Value: A Comment on Daan Evers

Abstract

Daan Evers argues that relativists about aesthetic and other types of evaluative language face some distinctive and largely overlooked metaphysical difficulties concerning the nature of the states of affairs that such statements are intended to be about. These difficulties, as Evers notes, all rest on the assumption that evaluative language is representational. Evers takes it that it is only on this assumption that evaluative relativism is distinguished from expressivism. I argue that this is incorrect and that, without falling into some form of expressivism, relativists can and must drop the representational assumption, but that the resulting position is one in which relativism no longer offers any distinctive dialectical or theoretical advantage.