I heard an argument the other day which has me considering Platonism (see paper at http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~thorgan/papers/Conceptual.Relativity.htm). The argument itself, as I heard it, goes somewhat like this: there are times when two people are arguing, and there is both a sense in which they disagree (they aren't just talking past each other), and yet regarded within their own conceptual schemes, they are both right. A couple examples are in order. The first example, given in the paper I read, would be that of Carnap and the Polish logician. There are three books on the table, and so Carnap says that there are three objects while the Polish logician says that there are seven (the three books, plus all mereological sums; every set of two books, and the set of all three). There is a sense in which "object" in context dependent, but at the same time they are disagreeing. Another example given to me by the friend who is currently championing this view is that of a libertarian and a compatibilist regarding the good. Given the different accounts of the will, what it is to be good is different on the two accounts (if nothing else, the libertarian charges the compatibilist with reducing morality to aesthetics, and the compatibilist charges the libertarian with grounding morality on randomness). But if libertarian L and compatibilist C both say "x is good", then they could both be correct even though their theoretical notions of the good are contrary.
That's mainly as far as the paper itself goes, arguing that there is this weak inconsistency in thought which can be explained through an indirect correspondence theory of truth. I personally like to think of it as thinking about what we're talking about more than what words we are saying; metaphysics is not merely formal logic. At any rate, however, here are my thoughts on the issue. The inconsistency only comes up if we are descriptivists; that is, we say that the meaning of a word is settled through a description of it. But, if we set that aside, then the inconsistencies in arguement disappear. In particular, what I am thinking about is a reference theory of language; "good" can be used truthfully by L and C because it is primarily a reference, with theoretical descriptions coming afterward. Now, the question is, what is it referencing? I wonder to what extent it can be purely phenomena, given the different phenomena that different people would use. Even if we all have given moral role models, L & C could be referencing the behavior and so on of different role models. Zagzebski in some essay somewhere writes that in the Christian case, Jesus could be the referent of sorts; while I find this idea compelling, I would like to see some more done on how even a non-Christian and a Christian could both be right in calling something "good." Similarity between referents, maybe, with Jesus as the supreme referent which most accurately describes the notion? But then we need something to adjudicate between the referents to tell which ones are more the given attribute, and we couldn't do this without some sort of notion of the attribute in question in the first place. There are other options available, but I (on an intuitive, not logical level) think that they all come down to the matter of providing some sort of unity behind diverse concepts. It is leading me to rethink something along the lines of Platonic Ideas. For the moment, at any rate.
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