Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Explanatory Reasoning and Informativeness.Ted Poston & Kevin McCain - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (5):433-443.
    Bas van Fraassen has argued that explanatory reasoning does not provide confirmation for explanatory hypotheses because explanatory reasoning increases information and increasing information does not provide confirmation. We compare this argument with a skeptical argument that one should never add any beliefs because adding beliefs increases information and increasing information does not provide confirmation. We discuss the similarities between these two arguments and identify several problems with van Fraassen’s argument.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Pretence fictionalism about the non-present.Kristie Miller - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1825-1859.
    Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true. This paper presents (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Hume on causation: against the quasi-realist interpretation.Alexander Miller & Saba Ghoroori - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In recent years, a number of philosophers have promoted a quasi-realist (or projectivist) interpretation of Hume's theory of causation. In this paper, we argue against the quasi-realist interpretation of Hume, on the grounds that there is a direct clash between a fundamental element of Hume's system (his empiricist theory of content) and one of the main constraints that governs any form of quasi-realism (and so a fortiori, quasi-realism about causation).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Defending Aesthetic Internalism: Liking, Loving, and Wholeheartedness.James Harold - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Aesthetic internalism claims a link between judgement and motivation: aesthetic judgements bring with them motivations to act in characteristic ways. Critics object that there is a difference between merely liking something and judging it to be aesthetically good, and that it is our likings, not our aesthetic judgements, that motivate us. This paper develops a version of aesthetic internalism that can respond to this criticism. Wholehearted aesthetic judgements are characterized by stability, attention, and motivation. Making such judgements is an important (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Expressing Moral Belief.Sebastian Hengst - 2022 - Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
    It is astonishing that we humans are able to have, act on and express moral beliefs. This dissertation aims to provide a better philosophical understanding of why and how this is possible especially when we assume metaethical expressivism. Metaethical expressivism is the combination of expressivism and noncognitivism. Expressivism is the view that the meaning of a sentence is explained by the mental state it is conventionally used to express. Noncognitivism is the view that the mental state expressed by a moral (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Superspreading the word.Bart Streumer - 2024 - Noûs 58 (4):927-947.
    Quasi‐realists are expressivists who say much of what realists say. To avoid making their view indistinguishable from realism, however, they usually stop short of saying everything realists say. Many realists therefore think that something important is missing from quasi‐realism. I argue that quasi‐realists can undermine this thought by defending a version of quasi‐realism that I call super‐quasi‐realism. This version seems indistinguishable from realism, but I argue that this is a mistaken impression that arises because we cannot believe super‐quasi‐realism.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Prospects for a Quietist Moral Realism.Mark Warren & Amie Thomasson - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 526-53.
    Quietist Moral Realists accept that there are moral facts and properties, while aiming to avoid many of the explanatory burdens thought to fall on traditional moral realists. This chapter examines the forms that Quietist Moral Realism has taken and the challenges it has faced, in order to better assess its prospects. The best hope, this chapter argues, lies in a pragmatist approach that distinguishes the different functions of diverse areas of discourse. This paves the way for a form of Quietism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Five Kinds of Epistemic Arguments Against Robust Moral Realism.Joshua Schechter - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 345-369.
    This chapter discusses epistemic objections to non-naturalist moral realism. The goal of the chapter is to determine which objections are pressing and which objections can safely be dismissed. The chapter examines five families of objections: (i) one involving necessary conditions on knowledge, (ii) one involving the idea that the causal history of our moral beliefs reflects the significant impact of irrelevant influences, (iii) one relying on the idea that moral truths do not play a role in explaining our moral beliefs, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Discursive pluralism: Inferentialist expressivism and the integration challenge.Pietro Salis - 2023 - Metaphilosophy 54 (5):717-733.
    Discursive pluralism, recently fostered by anti-representationalist views, by stating that not all assertions conform to a descriptive model of language, poses an interesting challenge to representationalism. Although in recent years alethic pluralism has become more and more popular as an interesting way out for this issue, the discussion also hosts other interesting minority approaches in the anti-representationalist camp. In particular, the late stage of contemporary expressivism offers a few relevant insights, going from Price's denunciation of “placement problems” to Brandom's inferentialism. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Quine and First-Person Authority.Ali Hossein Khani - 2023 - Logos and Episteme 14 (2):141-161.
    Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Observation and Intuition.Justin Clarke-Doane & Avner Ash - 2023 - In Carolin Antos, Neil Barton & Giorgio Venturi (eds.), The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophy of Set Theory. Palgrave.
    The motivating question of this paper is: ‘How are our beliefs in the theorems of mathematics justified?’ This is distinguished from the question ‘How are our mathematical beliefs reliably true?’ We examine an influential answer, outlined by Russell, championed by Gödel, and developed by those searching for new axioms to settle undecidables, that our mathematical beliefs are justified by ‘intuitions’, as our scientific beliefs are justified by observations. On this view, axioms are analogous to laws of nature. They are postulated (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sidestepping the Frege-Geach Problem.Graham Bex-Priestley & Will Gamester - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Hybrid expressivists claim to solve the Frege-Geach problem by offloading the explanation of the logico-semantic properties of moral sentences onto beliefs that are components of hybrid states they express. We argue that this strategy is undermined by one of hybrid expressivism’s own commitments: that the truth of the belief-component is neither necessary nor sufficient for the truth of the hybrid state it composes. We articulate a new approach. Instead of explaining head-on what it is for, say, a pair of moral (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • "Moral Disagreement".Folke Tersman - 2021 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Proper Function and Ethical Judgment Towards A Biosemantic Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse.Drew Johnson - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):2867-2891.
    This paper employs Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory of representation to develop a proposal about the function of ethical claims and judgments. I propose that ethical claims and judgments (or ethical ‘affirmations’) have the function of simultaneously tracking the morally salient features of social situations and directing behavior that coordinates in a collectively beneficial way around those features. Thus, ethical affirmations count as a species of what Millikan labels ‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ representations that simultaneously have a descriptive and a directive direction of fit. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Irrealism about Grounding.Naomi Thompson - 2018 - In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Metaphysics. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
    In this paper I explore irrealist alternatives to orthodox realism about grounding, and claim that at least some of these alternatives represent fertile areas for future discussion.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Against and for Ethical Naturalism Or: How Not To "Naturalize" Ethics.Berit Brogaard & Michael Slote - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4):327-352.
    Moral realism and ethical naturalism are both highly attractive ethical positions but historically they have often been thought to be irreconcilable. Since the late 1980s defenders of Cornell Realism have argued that the two positions can consistently be combined. They make three constitutive claims: (i) Moral properties are natural kind properties that (ii) are identical to (or supervene) on descriptive functional properties, which (iii) causally regulate our use of moral terms. We offer new arguments against the feasibility of Cornell realism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Expressivism about explanatory relevance.Josh Hunt - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (9):2063-2089.
    Accounts of scientific explanation disagree about what’s required for a cause, law, or other fact to be a reason why an event occurs. In short, they disagree about the conditions for explanatory relevance. Nonetheless, most accounts presuppose that claims about explanatory relevance play a descriptive role in tracking reality. By rejecting the need for this descriptivist assumption, I develop an expressivist account of explanatory relevance and explanation: to judge that an answer is explanatory is to express an attitude of _being (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Handling rejection.Derek Baker & Jack Woods - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):159-190.
    This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • What is Logical Monism?Justin Clarke-Doane - forthcoming - In Christopher Peacocke & Paul Boghossian (eds.), Normative Realism.
    Logical monism is the view that there is ‘One True Logic’. This is the default position, against which pluralists react. If there were not ‘One True Logic’, it is hard to see how there could be one true theory of anything. A theory is closed under a logic! But what is logical monism? In this article, I consider semantic, logical, modal, scientific, and metaphysical proposals. I argue that, on no ‘factualist’ analysis (according to which ‘there is One True Logic’ expresses (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • A defence of the evolutionary debunking argument.Man Him Ip - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    In this thesis, I will explore the epistemological evolutionary debunking arguments in meta-ethics. I will defend these arguments by accomplishing two tasks: I will offer the best way to understand the EDA and I will also respond to two strongest objections to the EDA. Firstly, in Part I of this thesis, I will offer my account of how the EDA should be best formulated. I will start from how evolution has significantly influenced our moral beliefs. I will then explain why, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Leis da Natureza.Eduardo Castro - 2013 - Compêndio Em Linha de Problemas de Filosofia Analítics.
    State of art paper on the topic laws of nature, around the problem of identification what is to be a law of nature. The most prominent theories of contemporary philosophical literature are discussed and analysed, such as: the simple regularity theory, from Hume; the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis best systems theory; the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong theory of laws as relations among universals; Ellis’s essentialist theory; Cartwright’s theory of laws as ceteris paribus laws; the anti-reductionist theories of Lange, Maudlin and Carroll, the anti-realist theories of Mumford, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How to be an aesthetic realist.Elizabeth Tropman - 2021 - Ratio 35 (1):61-70.
    This paper develops a form of realism about aesthetics that is stronger than typical versions of aesthetic realism. As I conceive of it, aesthetic realism is the view that there are some response-independent aesthetic facts. This kind of realism is unpopular in aesthetics and is often viewed as a non-starter. Against this pessimism, I argue that the prospects for this realist approach are more favorable than commonly supposed. I offer some reasons to prefer my brand of aesthetic realism to competing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Famine, Affluence, and Amorality.David Sackris - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):(A1)5-29.
    I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation, may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Grounding, Understanding, and Explanation.Wes Siscoe - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):791-815.
    Starting with the slogan that understanding is a ‘knowledge of causes’, Stephen Grimm and John Greco have argued that understanding comes from a knowledge of dependence relations. Grounding is the trendiest dependence relation on the market, and if Grimm and Greco are correct, then instances of grounding should also give rise to understanding. In this paper, I will show that this prediction is correct – grounding does indeed generate understanding in just the way that Grimm and Greco anticipate. However, grounding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Quasi-Naturalism and the Problem of Alternative Normative Concepts.Camil Golub - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5):474-500.
    The following scenario seems possible: a community uses concepts that play the same role in guiding actions and shaping social life as our normative concepts, and yet refer to something else. As Eklund argues, this apparent possibility poses a problem for any normative realist who aspires to vindicate the thought that reality itself favors our ways of valuing and acting. How can realists make good on this idea, given that anything they might say in support of the privileged status of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Acquaintance, knowledge, and value.Emad H. Atiq - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14035-14062.
    Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of ‘Edenic’ counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Attitudinal Ambivalence: Moral Uncertainty for Non-Cognitivists.Nicholas Makins - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):580-594.
    In many situations, people are unsure in their moral judgements. In much recent philosophical literature, this kind of moral doubt has been analysed in terms of uncertainty in one’s moral beliefs. Non-cognitivists, however, argue that moral judgements express a kind of conative attitude, more akin to a desire than a belief. This paper presents a scientifically informed reconciliation of non-cognitivism and moral doubt. The central claim is that attitudinal ambivalence—the degree to which one holds conflicting attitudes towards the same object—can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Fallibility without Facts.Will Gamester - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    If, as expressivists maintain, the function of normative thought and talk is not to represent or describe the world, then how can normative judgements be correct or incorrect? In particular, how can I make sense of my own normative fallibility, the possibility that my own normative judgements might be mistaken? In this paper, I construct and defend a substantive but non-representational theory of normative (in)correctness for expressivists. Inspired by Blackburn’s (1998: 318) proposal that I make sense of my fallibility in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Naturalised Modal Epistemology and Quasi-Realism.Michael Omoge - 2021 - South African Journal of Philosophy 40 (3):229-241.
    Given quasi-realism, the claim is that any attempt to naturalise modal epistemology would leave out absolute necessity. The reason, according to Simon Blackburn, is that we cannot offer an empirical psychological explanation for why we take any truth to be absolutely necessary, lest we lose any right to regard it as absolutely necessary. In this paper, I argue that not only can we offer such an explanation, but also that the explanation won’t come with a forfeiture of the involved necessity. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Non-factualism and Evaluative Supervenience.Nils Franzén - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (6):1969-1990.
    Supervenience in metaethics is the notion that there can be no moral dif-ference between two acts, persons or events without some non-moral difference underlying it. If St. Francis is a good man, there could not be a man exactly like St. Francis in non-evaluative respects that is not good. The phenomenon was first systematically discussed by R. M. Hare (1952), who argued that realists about evaluative properties struggle to account for it. As is well established, Hare, and following him, Simon (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Metaethics for Neo-Pragmatists: A Pragmatic Account of Linguistic Meaning for Moral Vocabulary.Thomas Wilk - 2019 - Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University
    In this dissertation, I aim to develop and defend a novel, pragmatist approach to foundational questions about meaning, especially the meaning of deontic moral vocabulary. Drawing from expressivists and inferentialists, I argue that meaning is best explained by the various kinds of norms that govern the use of a vocabulary. Along with inferential norms, I argue we must extend our account to discursive norms that govern normative statuses required to felicitously utter certain speech-acts—norms of authority—and the transitions in normative statuses (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • On the Possibility of Wholesale Moral Error.Farbod Akhlaghi - 2021 - Ratio 34 (3):236-247.
    The moral error theory, it seems, could be true. The mere possibility of its truth might also seem inconsequential. But it is not. For, I argue, there is a sense in which the moral error theory is possible that generates an argument against both non‐cognitivism and moral naturalism. I argue that it is an epistemic possibility that morality is subject to some form of wholesale error of the kind that would make the moral error theory true. Denying this possibility has (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Normative Stance.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - Philosophical Forum 52 (1):79-89.
    The Duhem-Quine thesis famously holds that a single hypothesis cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation, but instead only in conjunction with other background hypotheses. This article argues that this has important and underappreciated implications for metaethics. Section 1 argues that if one begins metaethics firmly wedded to a naturalistic worldview—due (e.g.) to methodological/epistemic considerations—then normativity will appear to be reducible to a set of social-psycho-semantic behaviors that I call the ‘normative stance.’ Contra Hume and Bedke (2012), I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Deflating the Many Attitudes Problem.Derek Baker - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1):1-18.
    Attitudinal embeddings, such as ‘I hope that murder is wrong’ or ‘she is glad that eating meat is not wrong’ are a less substantial problem for expressivists than is standardly thought. If expressivists are entitled to talk of normative beliefs, they can explain what it is to for an attitude to be semantically related to a normative content in terms of being functionally related to a belief with a normative content.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Quietist metaethical realism and moral determination.Wouter Floris Kalf - 2021 - Ratio 34 (3):248-256.
    Metaethical realists believe that moral facts exist, but they disagree among themselves about whether moral facts have ontological import. Robust realists think that they do. Quietist realists deny this. I argue that quietist realism faces a new objection; viz., the moral determination objection. This is the objection that general moral facts (or moral principles) must determine specific moral facts (or which actions in the world are right and wrong) but that general moral facts cannot do this if they lack ontological (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Why Metaethics Needs Empirical Moral Psychology.Jeroen Hopster & Michael Klenk - 2020 - Critica 52 (155):27-54.
    What is the significance of empirical moral psychology for metaethics? In this article we take up Michael Ruse’s evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism and reassess it in the context of the empirical state of the art. Ruse’s argument depends on the phenomenological presumption that people generally experience morality as objective. We demonstrate how recent experimental findings challenge this widely-shared armchair presumption and conclude that Ruse’s argument fails. We situate this finding in the recent debate about Carnapian explication and argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (How) Is Ethical Neo-Expressivism a Hybrid View?Dorit Bar-On, Matthew Chrisman & James Sias - 2014 - In Guy Fletcher & Michael R. Ridge (eds.), Having It Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 223-247.
    According to ethical neo-expressivism, all declarative sentences, including those used to make ethical claims, have propositions as their semantic contents, and acts of making an ethical claim are properly said to express mental states, which (if motivational internalism is correct) are intimately connected to motivation. This raises two important questions: (i) The traditional reason for denying that ethical sentences express propositions is that these were thought to determine ways the world could be, so unless we provide an analysis of ethical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Modal and Hyperintensional Cognitivism and Modal and Hyperintensional Expressivism.David Elohim - manuscript
    This paper aims to provide a mathematically tractable background against which to model both modal and hyperintensional cognitivism and modal and hyperintensional expressivism. I argue that epistemic modal algebras, endowed with a hyperintensional, topic-sensitive epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker semantics, comprise a materially adequate fragment of the language of thought. I demonstrate, then, how modal expressivism can be regimented by modal coalgebraic automata, to which the above epistemic modal algebras are categorically dual. I examine five methods for modeling the dynamics of conceptual (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Moral Judgment and Motivation.Xiao Zhang - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    In this thesis, I explore motivational internalism and externalism, which concern the relationship between moral judgments and motivation. I first introduce the basic terms and different forms of internalism and externalism, including the externalist objections to internalism based on the famous counterexamples. I then argue against externalism by defending and developing Michael Smith’s fetishism argument. I not only respond to the externalist objections to the fetishism argument but also further argue against different externalist explanations of moral motivation that intend to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Davidson on Self‐Knowledge: A Transcendental Explanation.Ali Hossein Khani - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2):153-184.
    Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self-knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson’s account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self-ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation”. It has also been claimed that Davidson’s account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation”. I will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Shadows of Syntax: Revitalizing Logical and Mathematical Conventionalism.Jared Warren - 2020 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This book revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. Shadows of Syntax is the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic and mathematics. It (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Qui peut sauver la morale? Essai de métaéthique.François Jaquet & Hichem Naar - 2019 - Paris: Ithaque. Edited by Hichem Naar.
    Vous pensez peut-être que la peine de mort est injuste ? Ou que l’avortement est moralement acceptable ? Se pourrait-il alors que vous vous trompiez ? C’est en tout cas l’avis des théoriciens de l’erreur. D’après ces philosophes, tous les jugements moraux sont faux parce qu’ils présupposent à tort l’existence de faits moraux à la fois objectifs et non naturels. Organisé autour de ce défi nihiliste, le présent ouvrage aborde les principales théories métaéthiques comme autant de tentatives, plus ou moins (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Incoherent but Reasonable: A Defense of Truth-Abstinence in Political Liberalism.Wes Siscoe & Alexander Schaefer - 2020 - Social Theory and Practice 46 (3):573-603.
    A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Davidson’s Phenomenological Argument Against the Cognitive Claims of Metaphor.Richmond Kwesi - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):341-364.
    In this paper, I take a critical look at the Davidsonian argument that metaphorical sentences do not express propositions because of the phenomenological experience—seeing one thing as another thing—involved in understanding them as metaphors. According to Davidson, seeing-as is not seeing-that. This verdict is aimed at dislodging metaphor from the position of being assessed with the semantic notions of propositions, meaning, and truth. I will argue that the phenomenological or perceptual experience associated with metaphors does not determine the propositional contentfulness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Reid on Moral Sentimentalism.Camil Golub - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (4):431-444.
    In the Essays on the Active Powers of Man V. 7, Thomas Reid seeks to show “[t]hat moral approbation implies a real judgment,” contrasting this thesis with the view that moral approbation is no more than a feeling. Unfortunately, his criticism of moral sentimentalism systematically conflates two different metaethical views: non-cognitivism about moral thought and subjectivism about moral properties. However, if we properly disentangle the various parts of Reid's discussion, we can isolate pertinent arguments against each of these views. Some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Making Quasi-Realists Admit of Fundamental Moral Fallibility.Garrett Lam - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2):294-303.
    If the quasi-realist wants to earn the right to talk like a moral realist, he needs to be able to make sense of moral error. A special form of error—fundamental moral error—is often thought to be u...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • An Indexical Theory of Racial Pejoratives.Michael Scott & Graham Stevens - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (4):385-404.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Rational learners and metaethics: Universalism, relativism, and evidence from consensus.Alisabeth Ayars & Shaun Nichols - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (1):67-89.
    Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence-based reasoning. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Moral relativism.Christopher Gowans - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Moral relativism is an important topic in metaethics. It is also widely discussed outside philosophy (for example, by political and religious leaders), and it is controversial among philosophers and nonphilosophers alike. This is perhaps not surprising in view of recent evidence that people's intuitions about moral relativism vary widely. Though many philosophers are quite critical of moral relativism, there are several contemporary philosophers who defend forms of it. These include such prominent figures as Gilbert Harman, Jesse J. Prinz, J. David (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • (1 other version)Aspects of folk morality: Objectivism and relativism.Hagop Sarkissian - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 212-224.
    Most moral philosophers work under the assumption that ordinary folk morality is committed to objectivism—that ordinary folk view morality in absolute terms. This datum serves to constrain and shape philosophical metaethics, since those working in this field feel compelled to make sense of it. In this chapter, I discuss why philosophers take on this commitment. I also outline the relevant experimental research exploring whether, and to what extent, ordinary folk think of morality in absolute terms. Finally, I turn toward a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations