Conventionalism about necessity was deemed hopeless for a long time. The philosophical landscape, however, is shifting now with recent work in modal metaphysics locating the source of necessity in some kind of convention, albeit non-linguistic. Modal neo-conventionalists claim that a proposition is necessary just when it is true and is classified as such as a matter of convention. But what is the function of adopting a convention about necessity? And what are these conventions that distinguish what is possible from what (...) is impossible, anyway? In this paper, I first offer an elucidation of the two accounts of neo-conventionalism, which I call ‘worlds-based neo-conventionalism’ and ‘axiom-based neo-conventionalism’. Then, I discuss a number of pressing questions that modal neo-conventionalism faces. The moral is that neo-conventionalists have some work to do in order for the account to be explanatorily satisfactory. (shrink)

Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, noncognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense. Roughly put, noncognitivists think that moral statements have no truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people (...) utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes more similar to desires, approval or disapproval. Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus it holds that moral statements do express beliefs and that they are apt for truth and falsity. But cognitivism need not be a species of realism since a cognitivist can be an error theorist and think all moral statements false. Still, moral realists are cognitivists insofar as they think moral statements are apt for truth and falsity and that many of them are in fact true. (shrink)