Switch to: References

Citations of:

Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language

New York, US: Oup Usa (2014)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Reasons for Non-Agents.Eliot Watkins - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    According to a standard picture, normative reasons do not extend beyond the boundaries of agency. If something isn’t an agent, then there can’t be normative reasons for it to do one thing rather than another. This paper argues that the standard picture is false. There are reasons for smoke detectors to alarm when exposed to smoke, and for Venus Flytraps to close around their prey when stimulated. I argue that the collapse of the standard picture has important implications for philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Promotionalism, Orthogonality, and Instrumental Convergence.Nathaniel Sharadin - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    Suppose there are no in-principle restrictions on the contents of arbitrarily intelligent agents’ goals. According to “instrumental convergence” arguments, potentially scary things follow. I do two things in this paper. First, focusing on the influential version of the instrumental convergence argument due to Nick Bostrom, I explain why such arguments require an account of “promotion,” i.e., an account of what it is to “promote” a goal. Then, I consider whether extant accounts of promotion in the literature -- in particular, probabilistic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Feasibility and Normative Penetration.Matthew Lindauer & Nicholas Southwood - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy.
    An important theme in recent experimental philosophy is that certain judgements (e.g. our judgements involving intentional action and causation) exhibit a kind of normative penetration whereby, in spite of a not-obviously-normative subject matter, they turn out to be sensitive to, and co-vary with, our normative attitudes in interesting and surprising ways. We present the results of several new experimental studies that suggest that our judgements about feasibility also appear to exhibit this kind of normative penetration in at least some cases; (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The pragmatics of all-purpose pejoratives.Víctor Carranza-Pinedo - 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Context.
    This paper argues that all-purpose pejoratives such as ‘jerk’ or ‘bastard’ are just plain vanilla descriptions of personality traits that are generally seen as impairing for the self and for interpersonal relationships across different contexts. Thus, all-purpose pejoratives derogate their referents through generalized conversational implicatures: it is common knowledge that those who use these terms accept certain kind of (negative) evaluations and that uses of those terms express such evaluations. One of the main advantages of this approach is that it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Normative Reference as a Normative Question.Camil Golub - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-22.
    Normative naturalism holds that normative properties are identical with, or reducible to, natural properties. Various challenges to naturalism focus on whether it can make good on the idea that normative concepts can be used in systematically different ways and yet have the same reference in all contexts of use. In response to such challenges, some naturalists have proposed that questions about the reference of normative terms should be understood, at least in part, as normative questions that can be settled through (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • On the Agent-Relativity of 'Ought'.Junhyo Lee - forthcoming - Analysis.
    In the standard theory of deontic modals, ‘ought’ is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern’s puzzle about deontic ‘ought’, according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern’s challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The balance and weight of reasons.Nicholas Makins - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):592-606.
    The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterisation of some ways in which our preferences reflect our reasons. I will argue that practical reasons can be characterised along two dimensions that influence our preferences: their balance and their weight. This is analogous to a similar characterisation of the way in which probabilities reflect the balance and weight of evidence in epistemology. In this paper, I will illustrate the distinction between the balance and weight of reasons, and show (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Axiology of Pain and Pleasure.Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco & Paul Bloomfield - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-24.
    There is little more common in ethics than to think pain is intrinsically bad and pleasure is intrinsically good. A Humean-style error theory of the axiology of pain and pleasure is developed against these commonsense claims. We defend the thesis that the value of pain and pleasure is always contingent and only instrumental. We survey prominent theories of both intrinsic value and pain/pleasure, all of which assume that pain and pleasure are intrinsically valuable. We base our error theory on counterexamples (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Moral Relativism, Metalinguistic Negotiation, and the Epistemic Significance of Disagreement.Katharina Anna Sodoma - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1621-1641.
    Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • A Plea for Prudence.James L. D. Brown - 2023 - Analysis 83 (2):394-404.
    Critical notice of Guy Fletcher's 'Dear Prudence: The Nature and Normativity of Prudential Discourse' and Dale Dorsey's 'A Theory of Prudence'.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Pleasure is goodness; morality is universal.Neil Sinhababu - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-17.
    This paper presents the Universality Argument that pleasure is goodness. The first premise defines goodness as what should please all. The second premise reduces 'should' to perceptual accuracy. The third premise invokes a universal standard of accuracy: qualitative identity. Since the pleasure of all is accurate solely about pleasure, pleasure is goodness, or universal moral value. The argument proceeds from a moral sense theory that analyzes moral concepts as concerned with what all should hope for, feel guilty about, and admire. (...)
    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  
  • Fittingness first?: Reasons to withhold belief.Wooram Lee - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3565-3581.
    Recent years have seen the rise of fittingness-first views, which take fittingness to be the most basic normative feature, in terms of which other normative features can be explained. This paper poses a serious difficulty for the fittingness-first approach by showing that existing fittingness-first accounts cannot plausibly accommodate an important class of reasons: reasons not to believe a proposition. There are two kinds of reasons not to believe a proposition: considerations that are counterevidence; and considerations that count against believing the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Metalinguistic negotiations in moral disagreement.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (3):352-380.
    The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Conceptual Ethics and The Methodology of Normative Inquiry.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 274-303.
    This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (such as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Robust Normativity, Morality, and Legal Positivism.David Plunkett - 2019 - In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 105-136.
    This chapter discusses two different issues about the relationship between legal positivism and robust normativity (understood as the most authoritative kind of normativity to which we appeal). First, the chapter argues that, in many contexts when discussing “legal positivism” and “legal antipositivism”, the discussion should be shifted from whether legal facts are ultimately partly grounded in moral facts to whether they are ultimately partly grounded in robustly normative facts. Second, the chapter explores an important difference within the kinds of arguments (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Rules of Use.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):566-583.
    In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the ideas (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • 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  
  • Linguistic Mistakes.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2191-2206.
    Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Explaining Normative Reasons.Daniel Fogal & Olle Risberg - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):51-80.
    In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Consequences of Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):70-98.
    We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Representation, Deflationism, and the Question of Realism.Camil Golub - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7.
    How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse.Pekka Vayrynen - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (2).
    Many normative judgments play a practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is natural to wonder whether the phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic. The standard assumption in moral philosophy is that at least terms which can be used to express “thin” normative concepts – such as 'good', 'right', and 'ought' – are associated with certain practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But this view is rarely given explicit defense (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Distinctively Political Normativity in Political Realism: Unattractive or Redundant.Eva Erman & Niklas Möller - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (3):433-447.
    Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Naturalizing the contributory.Philip Fox - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6275-6298.
    This paper has two aims. First, I critically discuss Daniel Whiting’s :2191–2208, 2018) recent proposal that a reason to ϕ is evidence of a respect in which it is right to ϕ. I raise two objections against this view: it is subject to a modified version of Eva Schmidt’s :708–718, 2018) counterexample against the influential account of reasons in terms of evidence and ‘ought’, and—setting aside judgments about specific cases—, it is also in an important sense uninformative. Interestingly, it turns (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • De Dicto Cognitive Reason Contextualism.Saleh Afroogh - unknown
    What does it mean to say that an agent has a reason to do a certain action? Does it mean that she would desire to do the action, or that there is some external consideration, which she ought to follow? Or is there a third alternative? The debate between Humean affective (i.e., desire-based) and classical Kantian cognitive theories has seemingly ended up in a theoretical standoff, and so most of the contributors have recently focused on the conative attitude of motivation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Ambidextrous Reasons (or Why Reasons First's Reasons Aren't Facts).Nathan Robert Howard - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (30):1-16.
    The wrong kind of reason (WKR) problem is a problem for attempts to analyze normative properties using only facts about the balance of normative reasons, a style of analysis on which the ‘Reasons First’ programme depends. I argue that this problem cannot be solved if the orthodox view of reasons is true --- that is, if each normative reason is numerically identical with some fact, proposition, or state-of-affairs. That’s because solving the WKR problem requires completely distinguishing between the right- and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Ought-contextualism and reasoning.Darren Bradley - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2977-2999.
    What does logic tells us how about we ought to reason? If P entails Q, and I believe P, should I believe Q? I will argue that we should embed the issue in an independently motivated contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, with parameters for a standard and set of propositions. With the contextualist machinery in hand, we can defend a strong principle expressing how agents ought to reason while accommodating conflicting intuitions. I then show how our judgments about blame and guidance (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Which Reasons? Which Rationality?Daniel Fogal & Alex Worsnip - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    The slogan that rationality is about responding to reasons has a turbulent history: once taken for granted; then widely rejected; now enjoying a resurgence. The slogan is made harder to assess by an ever-increasing plethora of distinctions pertaining to reasons and rationality. Here we are occupied with two such distinctions: that between subjective and objective reasons, and that between structural rationality (a.k.a. coherence) and substantive rationality (a.k.a. reasonableness). Our paper has two main aims. The first is to defend dualism about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Indeterminacy and Normativity.Giulia Pravato - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (5):2119-2141.
    This paper develops and defends the view that substantively normative uses of words like “good”, “right” and “ought” are irresolvably indeterminate: any single case of application is like a borderline case for a vague or indeterminate term, in that the meaning-fixing facts, together with the non-linguistic facts, fail to determine a truth-value for the target sentence in context. Normative claims, like vague or indeterminate borderline claims, are not meaningless, though. By making them, the speaker communicates information about the precisifications that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Goals of Moral Worth.Nathan Robert Howard - 2021 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
    While it is tempting to suppose that an act has moral worth just when and because it is motivated by sufficient moral reasons, philosophers have, largely, come to doubt this analysis. Doubt is rooted in two claims. The first is that some facts can motivate a given act in multiple ways, not all of which are consistent with moral worth. The second is the orthodox view that normative reasons are facts. I defend the tempting analysis by proposing and defending a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Are There Moral Truths?Bart Streumer - manuscript
    A brief overview of metaethics, written for students.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Protest and Speech Act Theory.Matthew Chrisman & Graham Hubbs - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge. pp. 179-192.
    This paper attempts to explain what a protest is by using the resources of speech-act theory. First, we distinguish the object, redress, and means of a protest. This provided a way to think of atomic acts of protest as having dual communicative aspects, viz., a negative evaluation of the object and a connected prescription of redress. Second, we use Austin’s notion of a felicity condition to further characterize the dual communicative aspects of protest. This allows us to distinguish protest from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • A “Good” Explanation of Five Puzzles about Reasons.Stephen Finlay - 2019 - Philosophical Perspectives 33 (1):62-104.
    This paper champions the view (REG) that the concept of a normative reason for an agent S to perform an action A is that of an explanation why it would be good (in some way, to some degree) for S to do A. REG has numerous virtues, but faces some significant challenges which prompt many philosophers to be skeptical that it can correctly account for all our reasons. I demonstrate how five different puzzles about normative reasons can be solved by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Socratic reductionism in ethics.Nicholas Smyth - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):970-985.
    In this paper, I clarify and defend a provocative hypothesis offered by Bernard Williams, namely, that modern people are much more likely to speak in terms of master-concepts like “good” or “right,” and correspondingly less likely to think and speak in the pluralistic terms favored by certain Ancient societies. By conducting a close reading of the Platonic dialogues Charmides and Laches, I show that the figure of Socrates plays a key historical role in this conceptual shift. Once we understand that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Naturalism and normative cognition.Matthew S. Bedke - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (1):147-167.
    Normative cognition seems rather important, even ineliminable. Communities that lack normative concepts like SHOULD, IS A REASON TO, JUSTIFIES, etc. seem cognitively handicapped and communicatively muzzled. And yet a popular metaethic, normative naturalism, has a hard time accommodating this felt ineliminability. Here, I press the argument against normative naturalism, consider some replies on behalf of normative naturalists, and suggest that a version of sophisticated subjectivism does the best job preserving the importance and ineliminability of the special, normative way of thinking.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Desiring Under the Proper Guise.Michael Milona & Mark Schroeder - 2019 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 14. Oxford University Press. pp. 121-143.
    According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sentimental perceptualism and the challenge from cognitive bases.Michael Milona & Hichem Naar - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (10):3071-3096.
    According to a historically popular view, emotions are normative experiences that ground moral knowledge much as perceptual experiences ground empirical knowledge. Given the analogy it draws between emotion and perception, sentimental perceptualism constitutes a promising, naturalist-friendly alternative to classical rationalist accounts of moral knowledge. In this paper, we consider an important but underappreciated objection to the view, namely that in contrast with perception, emotions depend for their occurrence on prior representational states, with the result that emotions cannot give perceptual-like access (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Resisting Reductive Realism.N. G. Laskowski - 2020 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 15. Oxford University Press. pp. 96 - 117.
    Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. They also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. Understanding why provides further evidence for a kind of hybrid view of normative concept use.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Expansion View of Thick Concepts.Brent G. Kyle - 2019 - Noûs 54 (4):914-944.
    This paper proposes a new Separabilist account of thick concepts, called the Expansion View (or EV). According to EV, thick concepts are expanded contents of thin terms. An expanded content is, roughly, the semantic content of a predicate along with modifiers. Although EV is a form of Separabilism, it is distinct from the only kind of Separabilism discussed in the literature, and it has many features that Inseparabilists want from an account of thick concepts. EV can also give non-cognitivists a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Ideal Theory and "Ought Implies Can".Amy Berg - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):869-890.
    When we can’t live up to the ultimate standards of morality, how can moral theory give us guidance? We can distinguish between ideal and non-ideal theory to see that there are different versions of the voluntarist constraint, ‘ought implies can.’ Ideal moral theory identifies the best standard, so its demands are constrained by one version. Non-ideal theory tells us what to do given our psychological and motivational shortcomings and so is constrained by others. Moral theory can now both provide an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Streumer on Non-Cognitivism and Reductivism About Normative Judgement.Daan Evers - 2019 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (6):707-724.
    Bart Streumer believes that the following principle is true of all normative judgements: When two people make conflicting normative judgements, at most one of them is correct. Streumer argues that noncognitivists are unable to explain why is true, or our acceptance of it. I argue that his arguments are inconclusive. I also argue that our acceptance of is limited in the case of instrumental and epistemic normative judgements, and that the extent to which we do accept for such judgements can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A User’s Guide to Hybrid Tools.Caleb Perl - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):129-158.
    Hybrid metaethical theories have significant promise; they would have important upshots if they were true. But they also face severe problems. The problems are severe enough to make many philosophers doubt that they could be true. My ambition is to show that the problems are just instances of a highly general problem: a problem about what are sometimes called ‘intensional anaphora'. I'll also show that any adequate explanation of intensional anaphora immediately solves all the problems for the hybrid theorist. We (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The Unity of Normativity.Ralph Wedgwood - 2018 - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press. pp. 23-45.
    What is normativity? It is argued here that normativity is best understood as a property of certain concepts: normative thoughts are those involving these normative concepts; normative statements are statements that express normative thoughts; and normative facts are the facts (if such there be) that make such normative thoughts true. Many philosophers propose that there is a single basic normative concept—perhaps the concept of a reason for an action or attitude—in terms of which all other normative concepts can be defined. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Sentimentalism about Moral Understanding.Nathan Robert Howard - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (5):1065-1078.
    Some have attempted to explain why it appears that action based on deferential moral belief lacks moral worth by appealing to claims about an attitude that is difficult to acquire through testimony, which theorists have called “moral understanding”. I argue that this state is at least partly non-cognitive. I begin by employing case-driven judgments to undermine the assumption that I argue is responsible for the strangeness of deferential moral belief: the assumption that if an agent knows that some fact gives (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Normativity in Language and Law.Alex Silk - 2019 - In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 287-313.
    This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Reductivism, Nonreductivism and Incredulity About Streumer’s Error Theory.N. G. Laskowski - 2018 - Analysis 78 (4):766-776.
    In Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer argues via elimination for a global error theory, according to which all normative judgments ascribe properties that do not exist. Streumer also argues that it is not possible to believe his view, which is a claim he uses in defending his view against several objections. I argue that reductivists and nonreductivists have compelling responses to Streumer's elimination argument – responses constituting strong reason to reject Streumer’s diagnosis of any alleged incredulity about his error theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Hybrid Dispositionalism and the Law.Teresa Marques - 2019 - In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement- based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claims that the theory the author advocates can extend (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • ‘Ought’-contextualism beyond the parochial.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):3099-3119.
    Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • In Defense of an End-Relational Account of Goodness.Brian Coffey - 2014 - Dissertation, University of California, Davis
    What is it exactly that we are attributing to a thing when we judge it to be good? According to the orthodox answer, at least in some cases when we judge that something is good we are attributing to it a monadic property. That is, good things are “just plain good.” I reject the orthodox view. In arguing against it, I begin with the idea that a plausible account of goodness must take seriously the intuitive claim that there is something (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark