Abstract
In Relativism and Monadic Truth Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne set out to defend a monadic theory of truth that takes all propositions to have truth-values simpliciter. The core of their argument is that most of the evidence in favor of a relativistic semantics can be handled by a version of flexible contextualism that takes the candidate expressions to be associated with a hidden variable that can take on values other than the speaker. For example, ‘this chili is tasty’ has the underlying form ‘this chili is tasty to X’, where the value of ‘X’ can be the speaker, the hearer or a third party. I begin with a brief presentation of Cappelen and Hawthorne’s arguments against non-indexical contextualism, temporalism and relativism. I then offer a general argument against the monadic truth package and their rejection of non-indexical contextualism. Finally, I provide a self-standing argument for temporalism.