Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The debate surrounding absolute generality has two main contenders. The generality absolutist claims that talking about absolutely everything is as unproblematic as uttering a sentence like ‘Everything fits in the carry-on luggage’. The generality relativist denies this claim, arguing that there is a substantive difference between restricted and unrestricted uses of ‘everything’. This debate is often described as being conclusively decided in favor of the absolutist position (see Lewis [1991], McGee [2000], Williamson [2003], Weir [2006]). The main goal of my talk is to show that this assesment of the debate relies on a misunderstanding of the relativist position. To do this, I draw a parallel between the intuitionistic understanding of quantification over all numbers and the relativist understanding of quantification over all things. I then argue that adoption of an intuitionistic reading of relativism throws a whole new light on the debate in absolute generality.