Perspectives on possibilities: Contextualism, Relativism, or what? KENT BACH San Francisco State University kbach@sfsu.edu http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/ ABSTRACT Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention the relevant perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to perspectives suggests that these bare EP sentences fall short of fully expressing propositions, contrary to what both Contextualists and Relativists implicitly assume. They reject Propositional Invariantism (it implausibly implies that any EP proposition is false whose core proposition is known by anyone to be false) and maintain that changes in perspective shift either these sentences’ propositional contents or their truth-values. Radical Invariantism, which I defend, denies that the semantic contents of bare EP sentences shift. It claims, however, that these contents lack truth-values. They are not full-fledged propositions but merely propositional radicals. Only explicitly relativized EP sentences manage to express propositions, and these are the only EP propositions there are. Nevertheless, bare EP sentences are perfectly capable of being used to assert EP propositions, because utterances of them implicitly allude to the relevant perspective. Various problem cases challenge Radical Invariantism to explain pragmatically which perspective is read into the utterance of a given bare EP sentence. It can handle them without resorting, as Contextualism and Relativism do, to semantic bells and whistles.