According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, (...) and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as counterconventionals. Existing semantics for counterconventionals, 459–482 ) and, 1–27 ) allow counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of predicates and relations. We extend these theories to counterlogicals by allowing counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of logical vocabulary. This yields an elegant semantics for counterlogicals that avoids problems with the usual impossible worlds semantics. We conclude by showing how this approach (...) can be extended to counterpossibles more generally. (shrink)

We investigate a hitherto under-considered avenue of response for the logical pluralist to collapse worries. In particular, we note that standard forms of the collapse arguments seem to require significant order-theoretic assumptions, namely that the collection of admissible logics for the pluralist should be closed under meets and joins. We consider some reasons for rejecting this assumption, noting some prima facie plausible constraints on the class of admissible logics which would lead a pluralist admitting those logics to resist such closure (...) conditions. (shrink)

How many correct logics are there? Monists endorse that there is one, pluralists argue for many, and nihilists claim that there are none. Reasoning about these views requires a logic. That is the meta-logic. It turns out that there are some meta-logical challenges specifically for the pluralists. I will argue that these depend on an implicitly assumed absoluteness of correct logic. Pluralists can solve the challenges by giving up on this absoluteness and instead adopt contextualism about correct logic. This contextualism (...) is naturalistically appealing. (shrink)

Paradigmatic cases of ontological disputes are taken to concern whether or not certain objects exist. Some theorists, however, prefer to view ontologists as really debating about what we should mean with the term “exist” (or other cognate terms). This implies interpreting ontological disputes as metalinguistic negotiations, in keeping with a recent trend to interpret other philosophical disputes along these lines (Plunkett and Sundell. Philosopher's Imprint; 2013;13:1–37). A number of issues arise from such proposal. The first is what counts as evidence (...) that an object‐level dispute is actually a metalinguistic negotiation. The second regards the dialectical relevance of considering metalinguistic negotiation as even just a possible interpretative option. The third issue concerns whether, and why, certain object‐level disputes (and especially ontological ones) should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)