What I can't fathom is how that happens, even in principle. Isn't the assessor, and the assessor's epistemic standards, part of the context of the utterance?
So imagine you read an ancient text in which the claim "the voice of Zeus follows upon his blows" appears as a description of the relation between thunder and lightening. THe assessor and facts about the assessor are nowhere part of the context of the utterance, because the utterance was made thousands of years before you were born.
An invariantist would say 'that's false, there's no such thing as Zeus'.
A relativist would say 'That's false to me (no Zeus), but it might have been true for the person who wrote it if they had different standards for truth."
A contextualist would say 'So Zeus doesn't exist, but the voice and blows of Zeus are just terms for lightening and thunder. If someone made this comment knowing what we know about stoms, it would be false. But I assess this statement as true, because I take the utterer to be talking about lightening and thunder.'
Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Glossary
analytic-synthetic distinction, A-theory and B-theory, atheism, compatibilism, consequentialism, contextualism, correspondence theory of truth, deontology, egalitarianism, empiricism, Humeanism, libertarianism, mental content externalism, moral realism, moral motivation internalism and externalism, naturalism, nominalism, Newcomb's problem, physicalism, Platonism, rationalism, relativism, scientific realism, trolley problem, theism, virtue ethics
Note
Thanks pragmatist, for attaching short (mostly accurate) descriptions of the philosophical positions under the poll comments.
Post Script
The polls stopped rendering correctly after the migration to LW 2.0, but the raw data can be found in this repo.