The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 11, 2007

Contemporary Philosophy

Pluralistic Kantianism and Understanding the "Other"

In this paper I present Pluralistic Kantianism as a viable alternative to other prominent accounts of the determination of the truth conditions of our ordinary empirical statements. I further claim that this sort of Kantianism is capable of handling certain theoretical difficulties faced by any scheme-based semantics. Moreover, Pluralistic Kantianism can shed some light on such crucial issues as cross-cultural communication and understanding. As a result, if the account offered here is on the right track, we may get a palatable alternative to both restrictive monism and apathetic relativism, both of which ultimately fail to explicate or enlighten the successful and unsuccessful instances of cross-cultural understanding.