This is an impressive book. It presents a bold and original theory with clarity and precision and applies that theory to a number of topics of philosophical interest. The level of discussion is consistently high.
The book defends a version of relativism about truth. Although relativism has had a long history in philosophy, it has not—at least not until recently—received sustained attention from analytic philosophers. But in the last decade or so, philosophers and linguists have been debating the merits of a new brand of relativism, one couched in formalisms familiar from formal semantics. John MacFarlane has been one of the most prominent and able defenders of this approach, and Assessment Sensitivity represents the most recent and most comprehensive presentation of his distinctive brand of relativism.1
The first part of Assessment Sensitivity (“Foundations”) is largely devoted to explaining what relativism is and to setting out what sort of evidence...
