Some philosophical positions maintain that some aspect of reality depends on human practices, cognitive attitudes or sentiments. This paper presents a framework for understanding such positions in a way that renders them immune to a number of natural but allegedly devastating objections.

Several authors have argued that a range of linguistic data calls for a relativization of propositional truth to contexts of assessment or, more generally, perspectives. This chapter defends the more orthodox view that the truth of a proposition depends only on what the world is like. It develops an account — factual relativism — on which what the world is like depends, in some respects, on a perspective. The resulting model, which allows for a natural account of faultless disagreement and of the evaluation of perspectival representations from different points of view, is applied both to discourse about taste and discourse involving epistemic modals. Finally, it is argued that a plausible propositional relativism is bound to reduce to either indexical or factual relativism.

This paper defends a conceptualist answer to the question how objects come by their modal properties. It isolates the controversial metaphysical assumptions that are needed to get ontological conceptualism off the ground, outlines the conceptualist answer to the question and shows that conceptualism is not in as bad a shape as some critics have maintained.

This paper answer the question how propositions whose truth is relativized to times, places, asserters or assessers can, despite their relativity, be used to represent the world.

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