Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put (...) forth for and against them. (shrink)

Two readings of Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox dominate the literature: either his arguments lead to skepticism, and thus to the view that only a deflated account of meaning is available, or they lead to quietism, and thus to the view that no philosophical account of meaning is called for. I argue, against both these positions, that a proper diagnosis of the paradox points the way towards a constructive, non-sceptical account of meaning.

‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution is devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II will be (...) about recent answers to the skeptical paradox and Boghossian’s and Wright’s new puzzles. (shrink)

This paper deals with Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, focussing on the infinite rule-regress as featured in Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I argue that one of the most salient and popular proposed solutions (championed by John McDowell), which argues that rule-following is grounded in “custom,” “practice” or “form of life, remains unsatisfactory because part of this proposal is the rejection of further “theory” (commonly attributed to Wittgenstein) which seemingly makes it impossible to substantiate the claim of how customs, practices (...) or forms of life ground rule-following. I argue that this conundrum can be solved by introducing Wilhelm Dilthey’s overlooked notion of objective spirit as the objectivated sediment of historical human communality. This proposal allows us to substantiate Wittgenstein’s hints at the connection between rule-following and customs, practices, and forms of life without introducing “problematic theories.” Combining Wittgenstein’s views with Dilthey’s notion of objective spirit results in a solution that is neither skeptical nor straight, but therapeutic. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses Claudine Verheggen's account of what she takes to be Donald Davidson's response to the sceptical paradox about rule-following and meaning developed in Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's ‘rule-following considerations.’ It focusses on questions about the normativity of meaning, the social character of meaning, and the role of triangulation in Davidson's account of the determination of meaning, and invites Verheggen to compare the non-reductionism she finds in Davidson with that developed in Crispin Wright's judgement-dependent account of meaning.RÉSUMÉCet article (...) examine ce que Claudine Verheggen considère comme étant la réponse de Donald Davidson au paradoxe sceptique développé dans l'interprétation qu'offre Saul Kripke des remarques de Wittgenstein sur la possibilité de suivre une règle. Je me concentre en particulier sur des questions concernant la normativité de la signification, le caractère social de la signification et le rôle que la notion de triangulation joue dans la position de Davidson sur la détermination de la signification. J'invite aussi Verheggen à comparer le non-réductionnisme davidsonien avec celui défendu par Crispin Wright dans sa conception de la signification en tant que dépendante du jugement. (shrink)

Content-externalism is the view that a subject’s relations to a context can play a role in individuating the content of her mental states. According to social content-externalists, relations to a socio-linguistic context can play a fundamental individuating role. Åsa Wikforss has suggested that ‘social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts’ (Wikforss 2004, p. 287). In this paper, I show that this isn’t so. I develop and defend an argument for social content-externalism (...) which does not depend on this assumption. The argument is animated by strands of thought in the later work of Wittgenstein. In addition to demonstrating that social externalists are not necessarily committed to thinking that a subject can have thoughts involving concepts which she incompletely understands, this argument is important insofar as it: (1) supports a form of content-externalism with extended scope; (2) avoids the controversy surrounding the claim that subjects can think with concepts which they incompletely understand; and (3) situates Wittgenstein’s later work with respect to contemporary debates about content-externalism. (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

In this essay, I seek to demonstrate the interplay of philosophical voices – particularly, that of a platonist voice and a community-agreement-view voice – that drives Wittgenstein’s rule-following dialectic forward; and I argue that each voice succumbs to a particular form of dialectical oscillation that renders its response to the problem of rule-following philosophically inadequate. Finally, I suggest that, by seeing and taking stock of the dilemma in which these responses to the skeptical problem are caught, we can come to (...) appreciate Wittgenstein’s own view of what might constitute a proper a response to the so-called problem of rule-following. This view can be preliminarily characterized by saying that Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissolve the temptation to philosophically rebut the skeptical challenge posed by the rule-following dialectic, an aim he achieves by revealing the semantic emptiness of the apparent sentences that raise the skeptical problem. (shrink)

In the present article, I attempt to relate Saul Kripke's “sceptical paradox” to some issues about the self; specifically, the relation between the self and its mental states and episodes. I start with a brief reconstruction of the paradox, and venture to argue that it relies crucially on a Cartesian model of the self: the sceptic regards the Wittgensteinian “infinite regress of interpretation” as the foundation of his challenge, and this is where he commits the crucial mistake. After the diagnosis, (...) I attempt to sketch my own model of the self and its mental states and episodes. This tentative picture binds meaning and the self together, stressing the subjective aspect of meaning without committing the same fallacy. The solution ventured here is relatively independent of the secondary literatures on the sceptical paradox of following rules, for it aims to provide a new angle to understand and meet the challenge presented by the sceptic. (shrink)

Paul Roth claims that “interpretivists” in the philosophy of social sciences like Charles Taylor assume a positivist caricature of natural science to motivate their arguments against naturalism in the social sciences. Roth argues that not only is adopting the view of meaning relied upon by those he sometimes refers to as the “friends of understanding” unmotivated once the critique of positivism has been taken on board, he argues further that Quine has shown why this “meaning realism” is unavailable in principle. (...) Roth bolsters his use of Quine against interpretivists by referring to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. But McDowell has shown how Kripke overlooks an alternative reading of those remarks, which provides “interpretivists” with arguments against mainstream naturalism and which makes no use of anything resembling “meaning realism.” This opening for interpretivists is actually already present in Roth’s discussion of the distinction between “thin” and “thick” description. This suggests how mainstream naturalism itself might be rethought to accommodate interpretivism. (shrink)

Contra an expanding number of deflationary commentators onWittgenstein, I argue that philosophical questions about meaningare meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason tobelieve so. Deflationists are right in claiming that Wittgensteinrejected the sceptical problem about meaning allegedly to befound in his later writings and also right in stressing Wittgenstein''s anti-reductionism. But they are wrong in taking these dismissals to entail the end of all constructive philosophizing about meaning. Rather, I argue, the rejection of the sceptical problem requires that we (...) abandon the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers are forthcoming. However, though quietism is not the only alternative to reductionism, the rejection of reductionism does oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what constructive philosophy can achieve. (shrink)

According to colour irrealism, material objects do not have colour; they only appear to have colour. The appeal of this view, prominent among philosophers and scientists alike, stems in large part from the conviction that scientific explanations of colour facts do not ascribe colour to material objects. To explain why objects appear to have colour, for instance, we need only appeal to surface reflectance properties, properties of light, the neurophysiology of observers, etc. Typically attending colour irrealism is the error theory (...) of ordinary colour judgement: ordinary judgements in which colour is ascribed to a material object are, strictly speaking, false. In this paper, I claim that colour irrealists who endorse the error theory cannot explain how we acquire colour concepts (yellow, green, etc.), concepts they must acknowledge we do possess. Our basic colour concepts, I argue, could not be phenomenal concepts that we acquire by attending to the colour properties of our experience. And, I explain, all other plausible explanations render colour concepts such that our ordinary colour judgements involving them are often true. Given the explanatory considerations upon which the irrealist's position is based, this is a severe problem for colour irrealism. (shrink)

John McDowell has suggested recently that there is a route from his favoured solution to Kripke's Wittgenstein's "sceptical paradox" about rule-following to a particular form of cognitive externalism. In this paper, I argue that this is not the case: even granting McDowell his solution to the rule-following paradox, his preferred version of cognitive externalism does not follow.

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke articulates a form of scepticism about meaning. Even though there is considerable disagreement among critics about the reasoning in which the sceptic engages, there is little doubt that he seeks to offer constraints for an adequate account of the facts that constitute the meaningfulness of expressions. Many of the sceptic's remarks concern the nature of the guidance involved in a speaker's meaningful uses of expressions. I propose that we understand those remarks (...) as seeking to give shape to the idea that to use an expression under the guidance of one's understanding is to have a reason for that use, which one's understanding allows one to discern and act on. Any philosophical elucidation of meaning must adequately capture the rational nature of our linguistic acts. (shrink)

This article aims to show that Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief and religious statements can be understood in modest philosophical terms, consistent with the thought that they are neither intended as serving to justify or undermine religious beliefs, nor as the expression of any theorizing about the nature of religious belief or the meaning of religious language. Instead, their philosophical significance is held to consist in their functioning to remind us of what we already know about the latter: such things (...) as in what circumstances one utters religious statements, what the consequences of accepting or rejecting religious beliefs are, and so on. His position is that all attempts to say something more than this are either a mark of philosophical arrogance or a manifestation of one’s own personal commitment to adopting a stance of religious belief or non-belief. As such, they do not furnish us with genuine philosophical insights. I argue that such an interpretation possess two principal merits. Firstly, it demonstrates that there is no tension between Wittgenstein’s remarks on the nature of philosophy and his remarks on religious belief and religious statements. Secondly, it shows that it is possible to philosophize about religion in a manner that does not assume that this has to consist either in presenting an apology for or critique of religion or in formulating philosophical theories regarding the nature of religious belief and the meaning of religious language. (shrink)

It is widely thought that, in §201 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reveals himself to oppose a definite view or theory of rule-following. I argue that, due to the self-undermining character of that section, no such interpretation should be accepted. Then I sketch a reading of Wittgenstein’s method that accounts for the paradoxical nature of §201, and I show how this methodology is realized in his remarks on following a rule.

This paper explores the prospects for using the notion of a primitive normative attitude in responding to the sceptical argument about meaning developed in chapter 2 of Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It takes as its stalking-horse the response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein developed in a recent series of important works by Hannah Ginsborg. The paper concludes that Ginsborg’s attempted solution fails for a number of reasons: it depends on an inadequate response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ‘finitude’ objection to (...) reductive dispositionalism; it erroneously rejects the idea that a speaker’s understanding of an expression guides her use; it threatens to collapse into either full-blown non-reductionism or reductive dispositionalism; and there is no motive for accepting it over forms of non-reductionism such as those developed by Barry Stroud and John McDowell. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of ability theories of practice and, in this process, to defend Pierre Bourdieu’s ability theory against Stephen Turner’s objections. In part I, I outline ability theorists’ conception of practices together with their objections to claims about rule following and rule explanations. In part II, I turn to the question of what ability theorists take to be the alternative to rule following and rule explanations. Ability theorists have offered, and been ascribed, (...) somewhat different answers to this question, just as their replies, or positive accounts, have been heavily criticized by Turner. Due to this state of the debate, I focus on the positive account advanced by a single—and highly famous—ability theorist of practice, Pierre Bourdieu. Moreover, I show that despite Turner’s claims to the contrary, his arguments do not refute Bourdieu’s positive account. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to look at the problem of rule-following—notably discussed by Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language, 1982) and Wittgenstein (Philosophical investigations, 1953)—from the perspective of the study of generics. Generics are sentences that express generalizations that tolerate exceptions. I first suggest that meaning ascriptions be viewed as habitual sentences, which are a sub-set of generics. I then seek a proper semantic analysis for habitually construed meaning sentences. The quantificational approach is rejected, due to its (...) persistent difficulties. Instead, a cognitive approach is adopted, where psychological considerations of meaning attributors play a crucial role. This account is then compared with the picture of meaning offered by Kripke and Wittgenstein, respectively. I show how this fresh way of conceiving of meaning sentences respects some of their insights while avoiding some of the drawbacks, and serves to improve the framework in which the current debate and inquiry about rule-following are conducted. (shrink)

In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing on unreflective expert action. More particularly, I use Wittgenstein’s examples of craftsmen (...) (tailors and architects) absorbed in action to introduce situated normativity. Situated normativity can be understood as the normative aspect of embodied cognition in unreflective skillful action. I develop Wittgenstein’s insight that a peculiar type of affective behaviour, ‘directed discontent’, is essential for getting things right without reflection. Directed discontent is a reaction of appreciation in action and is introduced as a paradigmatic expression of situated normativity. In the second part I discuss Wittgenstein’s ideas on the normativity of what he calls ‘blind’ rule-following and the ‘bedrock’ of immediate action. What matters for understanding the normativity of (even ‘blind’) rule-following, is not that one has the capacity for linguistic articulation or reflection but that one is reliably participating in a communal custom. In the third part I further investigate the complex relationships between unreflective skillful action, perception, emotion, and normativity. Part of this entails an account of the link between normativity at the level of the expert’s socio-cultural practice and the individual’s situated and lived normativity. (shrink)

I examine what I take to be an important consideration for the later Wittgenstein: the understanding of a rule does not exceed or transcend an understanding of explanations or instructions in the rule. I contend that this consideration plays a central role in the later Wittgenstein's views on rule-following. I first show that it serves as a key premiss in a sceptical argument concerning our ability to follow rules. I then argue that this consideration is vital to Wittgenstein's case against (...) what I describe as a realist view of rules. This realist view requires that our understanding of a rule extend beyond what can be understood from any set of instructions or explanation. For Wittgenstein, because this is to transcend publicly available means of conveying understanding, this realist's understanding is a private understanding. He calls this private source of understanding an ‘intuition’ and the main line of argument against intuition in our understanding of a rule draws, appropriately, on what is called his ‘private language argument’. In this paper, I defend a non-verificationist reading of this argument and its use against the realist so-construed. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the most prominent and familiar features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations generate a powerful argument for the thesis that most of our concepts are innate, an argument that echoes a Chomskyan poverty of the stimulus argument. This argument has a significance over and above what it tells us about Wittgenstein’s implicit commitments. For, it puts considerable pressure on widely held contemporary views of concept learning, such as the view that we learn concepts by constructing (...) prototypes. This should lead us to abandon our general default hostility to concept nativism and be much more sceptical of claims made on behalf of learning theories. (shrink)

Explores the central role in Wittgenstein's later work of his opposition to a 'mechanistic' conception of understanding. Offers a diagnosis of Kripke's skeptical paradox on this basis.

The article shows how in Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu relies on a kind of philosophical myth in his attempt to dispel structuralist accounts of action. Section 2 is a summary of Bourdieu’s use of the concept of habitus against intellectualism and structuralism. Schatzki’s criticism of Bourdieu from a purportedly Wittgensteinian perspective is also examined. Section 3 relates Bourdieu’s use of habitus to a debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the role of concepts in action. (...) Section 4 shows how McDowell’s rejection of foundationalist elements in Dreyfus’s account of action also raises problems for Bourdieu’s account of action. Diamond’s recent criticism of Winch is shown to have an interesting connection to this debate. (shrink)

Of course, I do not mean by the title of this paper to deny the existence of something called ‘the mind’. But I do mean to call into question appeals to it in analyzing cognitive notions such as understanding and knowing, where its domain is taken to be independent of what one might find out in cognitive science. In this respect, I am expressing the skepticism of Sellars in “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind” [1956], where he explodes, not only (...) the ‘Myth of the Given’, but also, as part of that myth, theorizing about thoughts, intentions and the like, where such theorizing is regarded as something more than a nascent cognitive science, in which such entities enter as theoretical entities, in aid of accounting for our cognitive abilities. The myth is that these entities present themselves in consciousness, available to us by introspection—and, perhaps, a priori reasoning. But, even among authors who claim to embrace Sellars ’ critique of the Myth of the Given, his message about the mind is ignored.1 As an example, I want to consider and disarm an influential line of thought, by John McDowell, which implicates the mind in the analysis of knowing and understanding, not in the legitimate sense of suggesting causal accounts of our cognitive abilities in terms of mental or physiological structures, but in the sense of claiming that these abilities are mental or essentially involve the mental in a way that escapes the net of cognitive science. The ground on which I stand in this discussion is one which I attribute to Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Basically, the position. (shrink)

In its most general form, the issue of intentionality takes the following shape: How can something be about something else? In basic cases, this relation is one between a subjective occurrence and a state of affairs, allowing the problem of intentionality to be articulated in this manner: What makes it the case that a subjective occurrence has the capacity to be about something external to it? The views of John McDowell on intentionality form the focus of this article. They are (...) examined through the notion of content and via the later Wittgenstein's standpoint on content and intentionality. The main objective is to reach a conspicuous perspective of McDowell's stance on intentionality in order to uncover its presuppositions. This leads to the identification of a pivotal point of tension in McDowell's philosophical commitments, in particular the extent to which he can legitimately claim to be a quietist. (shrink)

In a recent article, John McDowell has criticised Warren Goldfarb for attributing an anti-realist conception of linguistic understanding to Wittgenstein. 1 I argue that McDowell is right to reject Goldfarb's anti- realism, but does so for the wrong reasons. I show that both Goldfarb's and McDowell's interpretations are vitiated by the fact that they do not pay attention to Wittgenstein's positive claims about understanding, in particular his claim that understanding is a kind of ability. The cause of this oversight lies (...) in their endorsement of an excessively anti-systematic or “therapeutic” reading of Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The work of Hubert Dreyfus interweaves productively ideas from, among others, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. A central element in Dreyfus' hugely influential interpretation of the former is the proposal that, if we are to—in some sense—'make sense' of intentionality, then we must recognize what Dreyfus calls the 'background'. Though Dreyfus has, over the years, put the notion of the 'background' to a variety of philosophical uses,1 considerations familiar from the literature inspired by Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following have played an important role (...) in motivating the case for believing that we need to recognize the 'background' and thus also in identifying precisely what it is about the intentional that supposedly needs to be 'made sense of'. Dreyfus argues that what he calls 'representationalism' will land us with an unstoppable 'regress of rules'. In this paper, I first argue that there are actually two different arguments that Dreyfus invokes; I then go on to evaluate quite how, in the light of the problems that those arguments reveal, our position might be thought to be improved by our recognizing the 'background'. Given that various philosophical positions designed to deal with these problems have emerged within the Wittgensteinian literature, an obvious question to ask is whether the position that Dreyfus would have us adopt is essentially one of those positions. If it isn't, then how does it differ? There is surely a variety of ways in which such a comparison might be carried out and what I offer is only one. I argue that if, through a recognition of the 'background', we are thought to have acquired solutions to those problems, then it's not at all clear that the supposed solutions that emerge work. So I explore instead the possibility that that recognition forms part of an attempt to 'dissolve' those problems. In order to bring some clarity to that possibility I consider a number of different ways in which Dreyfus' proposals might be interpreted by drawing on ideas set out by John McDowell (and I suggest that his view of one of the 'regress' arguments is anticipated by Heidegger himself). I then identify and assess some of the consequences of adopting such McDowellian readings. My sense is that Dreyfus is on the side of the angels, so to speak. But if what is right in his proposals is to become clear, and if he is to be spared some obvious objections that those proposals may elicit, we need to be clear about just what kind of contribution those proposals are meant to make. In pursuing that clarity, I am attempting to follow through on the comparison of Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian ideas that Dreyfus and his supporters have initiated: what has yet to be clarified is how and why recognizing the 'background' will allow us to 'cope better' with the puzzles in the rule-following literature that they have cited in making a case for the need to recognize the 'background'. Ultimately, I will argue that assessing this matter may require a yet broader comparison of Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian themes, one which raises questions about what we take 'doing ontology' and 'doing phenomenology' to be. (shrink)

This work is an investigation into philosophical method and rational argument in moral philosophy. It makes an original contribution to human understanding, by taking some of the tools and techniques that Gordon Baker identifies in the later work of Wittgenstein, and using them as a way of fending for oneself in an area of philosophy that neither Baker, nor Wittgenstein, wrote on. More specifically, a discussion of some different aspects of the contemporary literature on Dancy’s moral particularism is used as (...) a vehicle for illustrating how Baker’s therapeutic conception of philosophy offers alternative possibilities for how we can do philosophy, and what counts as rational argument in moral philosophy. I maintain that, by considering some indicative ways in which Baker’s therapeutic approach to philosophy can dissolve, rather than solve, the kinds of perplexities found in the existing literature on Dancy’s moral particularism, we can liberate ourselves from the traditional/theoretical view of how we ought to do philosophy, and an understanding of rational argument in moral philosophy, to which we need not be committed. (shrink)

This paper addresses what I call ‘the constitutive question’ concerning the rules we follow: namely, what determines the standard for a rule's correct application. John McDowell has offered a putative ‘middle position’ between two extreme, unacceptable answers: empirical idealism, which takes the requirements of a rule in any given situation to be constituted by our reaction to the case; and hard platonism, which takes these requirements to be delivered by unvarnished reality as absolutely the simplest or most natural way to (...) carry on. Tellingly, however, McDowell's position is itself unacceptably idealist in his picture of the way in which we are ‘involved’ on the right-hand side of biconditionals such as, ‘“Diamonds are hard” is true if and only if diamonds are hard’.In response to this stultifying state of affairs, I suggest that McDowell has followed the empirical idealist and hard platonist in assuming that the requirements of a rule must be grounded by something else: something external to the rule, which mediates between the rule and the standard for its correct application. This assumption is false. What is more, one application of a metaphor to which Wittgenstein has a somewhat equivocal relation—that of rules as rails invisibly laid to infinity—can help this point to stick. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider whether the alleged demise of metaphysical realism does actually provide a better way for defending the cognitive status of ethical judgments. I argue that the rejection of a realist ontology and epistemology does not help to establish the claim that ethical knowledge is possible. More specifically, I argue that Hilary Putnam's argument does not succeed in making a case for ethical knowledge. In fact, his account of the procedures by which our valuations are warranted—the criteria (...) of idealized inquiry—ultimately begs the question in a number of crucial ways. Moreover, it prejudices the moral and political discussion in certain ideological respects. Finally, though Putnam has apparently modified to some extent his approach to the issue of realism in recent years, I will point out that these modifications are not fundamental and do not help to advance the case for ethical knowledge. I note also that Martha C. Nussbaum's appeal to Putnam’s argument actually works against her attempt to make a case for an Aristotelian conception of human flourishing. Ultimately, I conclude that metaphysical realism is vital for ethical knowledge. (shrink)