Relativity and Polyadicity

Abstract

My dissertation is composed of three chapters. The first chapter is a brief overview. The following two chapters contain more substantive philosophical work. The second chapter is about what it is for one thing to be relative to another. I argue that, at the ontological level, there are two different ways for a property or relation to be relative to a parameter, and that this fact has considerable bearing on certain debates between absolutists and relativists. In the third chapter I consider the debate in semantics between invariantists and contextualists, and suggests that invariantists should adopt a relativistic conception of belief.