How Universes Expand

Abstract

Advocates of an expansionist version of relativism face an important explanatory challenge: how might we cause the universe of discourse to expand? To make progress with this question, it’s helpful to begin with another: how might a quantifierless linguistic community come to quantify? On the basis of some standard semantic assumptions and a metasemantic assumption about how use determines meaning, this chapter offers an idealized answer to both questions. It is further argued that natural patterns of use may cause a linguistic community’s universe to repeatedly expand. The chapter closes with a summary of the defence of relativism given in the rest of the book.