Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

In this article I explore the hypothesis of normative authority by epistemic authority. This is the idea that scientifically warranted claims in psychology, in being claims about human needs, interests, and concerns, can acquire authority on which values do or do not merit endorsement. The hypothesis is applied to attachment research: it seems that on the basis of what is now known about attachment, specific normative conclusions seem warranted. I argue that although attachment research and theory are value-laden, they are (...) empirically quite solid, hence entitled to epistemic authority. Having established this, I explain how such epistemic authority carries over into normative authority. (shrink)

New nursing researchers are faced with a smorgasbord of competing methodologies. Sometimes, they are encouraged to adopt the research paradigms beloved of their senior colleagues. This is a problem if those paradigms are no longer of contemporary methodological relevance. The aim of this paper was to provide clarity about current research paradigms. It seeks to interrogate the continuing viability of positivism as a guiding paradigm for nursing research. It does this by critically analysing the methodological literature. Five major paradigms are (...) addressed: the positivist; the interpretivist/constructivist; the transformative; the realist; and the postpositivist. Acceptance of interpretivist, transformative or realist approaches necessarily entails wholesale rejection of positivism, while acceptance of postpositivism involves its partial rejection. Postpositivism has superseded positivism as the guiding paradigm of the scientific method. The incorporation in randomized controlled trials of postpositivist assumptions indicates that even on the methodological territory that it once claimed as its own, positivism has been rendered redundant as an appropriate paradigm for contemporary nursing research. (shrink)

This paper examines key aspects of Allan Gibbard's psychological account of moral activity. Inspired by evolutionary theory, Gibbard paints a naturalistic picture of morality mainly based on two specific types of emotion: guilt and anger. His sentimentalist and expressivist analysis is also based on a particular conception of rationality. I begin by introducing Gibbard's theory before testing some key assumptions underlying his system against recent empirical data and theories. The results cast doubt on some crucial aspects of Gibbard's philosophical theory, (...) namely his reduction of morality to anger and guilt, and his theory of “normative governance.” Gibbard's particular version of expressivism may be undermined by these doubts. (shrink)

Huw Price has sketched a program for a globalized expressivism in support of which he has repeatedly invoked Rudolf Carnap. This paper argues that this is entirely appropriate, as Carnap had something quite similar in mind. However, it also argues that Price’s recent attempts to integrate Robert Brandom’s inferentialism to this program are less successful, and that a more empirically-oriented descriptive pragmatics along Carnapian lines would be a better fit with his original program than Brandom’s explicitly hermeneutical agenda.

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

In considering the Cambridge School of intellectual history, we should distinguish Skinner's conventionalism from Pocock's contextualism whilst recognising that both of them argue that the study of a text's linguistic context is at least necessary and perhaps sufficient to ensure understanding. This paper suggests that although "study the linguistic context of an utterance" is a valuable heuristic maxim, it is not a prerequisite of understanding that one does so. Hence, we might shift our attention from the role of linguistic contexts (...) in understanding a text, to the role of ideational contexts in our explanations of meanings or beliefs. The explanatory role of contexts can be unpacked in terms of traditions and dilemmas. Here the paper also considers how this approach differs from that of the Cambridge School. (shrink)

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to the study of folk metaethical beliefs. We report the results of a cross-cultural study using Chinese, Polish and Ecuadorian participants that seeks to advance this line of investigation. Individuals in all three demographic groups were observed to attribute objectivity to ethical statements in very similar patterns. Differences in participants’ strength of opinion about an issue, the level of societal agreement or disagreement about an issue, and participants’ age were found to significantly affect (...) their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact. Implications for theorizing about folk morality are discussed. (shrink)

This essay concerns the question of how we make genuine epistemic progress through conceptual analysis. Our way into this issue will be through consideration of the paradox of analysis. The paradox challenges us to explain how a given statement can make a substantive contribution to our knowledge, even while it purports merely to make explicit what one’s grasp of the concept under scrutiny consists in. The paradox is often treated primarily as a semantic puzzle. However, in “Sect. 1” I argue (...) that the paradox raises a more fundamental epistemic problem, and in “Sects.1 and 2” I argue that semantic proposals—even ones designed to capture the Fregean link between meaning and epistemic significance—fail to resolve that problem. Seeing our way towards a real solution to the paradox requires more than semantics; we also need to understand how the process of analysis can yield justification for accepting a candidate conceptual analysis. I present an account of this process, and explain how it resolves the paradox, in “Sect. 3”. I conclude in “Sect. 4” by considering the implications for the present account concerning the goal of conceptual analysis, and by arguing that the apparent scarcity of short and finite illuminating analyses in philosophically interesting cases provides no grounds for pessimism concerning the possibility of philosophical progress through conceptual analysis. (shrink)

Expressivists famously have important and difficult problems with semantics and logic. Their difficulties providing an adequate account of the semantics of material conditionals involving moral terms, and explaining why they have the right semantic and logical properties – for example, why they validate modus ponens – have received a great deal of attention. Cian Dorr [2002] points out that their problems do not stop here, but also extend to epistemology. The problem he poses for expressivists is the problem of wishful (...) thinking. David Enoch [2003] has claimed that expressivists can avoid wishful thinking, and offered a fairly detailed account of how. In this paper I explain the details of Enoch’s account, and why his reasoning fails in several different places. (shrink)

The prevailing theoretical framework for theorising about representation construes all representation as involving objective representational contents. This classic framework has tended to drive philosophers either to claim that evaluative judgements are representations and therefore objective, or else to claim that evaluative judgements are not really representations, because they are not objective. However, a more general, already well-explored framework is available, which will allow theorists to treat evaluative judgements as full-fledged representations while leaving open whether they are objective. Such a more (...) general conception of representational content is exemplified, e.g. by Lewis's ‘centred contents’ and Gibbard's framework of ‘contents of judgement’, thus it is not new. I shall start in §1 by introducing the more general framework of perspectival contents and then illustrate in §2 how awareness of it can help expose the fallaciousness of certain widely used forms of argumentation in metaethics. (shrink)

Suppose that one is at least a minimal realist about a given domain, in that one thinks that that domain contains truths that are not in any interesting sense of our own making. Given such an understanding, what can be said for and against the method of reflective equilibrium as a procedure for investigating the domain? One fact that lends this question some interest is that many philosophers do combine commitments to minimal realism and a reflective equilibrium methodology. Here, for (...) example, is David Lewis on philosophy: Our “intuitions” are simply opinions: our philosophical theories are the same. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular; some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions, and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium. Our common task it to find out what equilibria there are that can withstand examination, but it remains for each of us to come to rest at one or another of them… Once the menu of well-worked out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion. Is that to say that there is no truth to be had? Or that the truth is of our own making, and different ones of us can make it differently? Not at all! If you say flatly that there is no god, and I say that there are countless gods but none of them are our worldmates, then it may be that neither of us is making any mistake of method. We may each be bringing our opinions to equilibrium in the most careful possible way, taking account of all the arguments, distinctions, and counterexamples. But one of us, at least, is making a mistake of fact. Which one is wrong depends on what there is (1983: x-xi). In addition to philosophy in general, the method of reflective equilibrium has also been endorsed as the appropriate procedure for investigating various other subject.. (shrink)

This paper elaborates and defends an expressivist account of the claims of mind-independence embedded in ordinary moral thought. In response to objections from Zangwill and Jenkins it is argued that the expressivist 'internal reading' of such claims is compatible with their conceptual status and that the only 'external reading' available doesn't commit expressivisists to any sort of subjectivism. In the process a 'commitment-theoretic' account of the semantics of conditionals and negations is defended.

E. F. Carritt (1876-1964) was educated at and taught in Oxford University. He made substantial contributions both to aesthetics and to moral philosophy. The focus of this entry is his work in moral philosophy. His most notable works in this field are The Theory of Morals (1928) and Ethical and Political Thinking (1947). Carritt developed views in metaethics and in normative ethics. In meta-ethics he defends a cognitivist, non-naturalist moral realism and was among the first to respond to A. J. (...) Ayer’s emotivist challenge to this view. In normative ethics he advocates a deontological view in which there is a plurality of obligations and of non-instrumental goods. In the context of defending this view he raised some penetrating and novel criticisms of ideal utilitarianism. He held that it is not acceptable to revise our reflective common-sense moral attitudes in the face of philosophical moral theories, and that moral philosophy is only indirectly practical. (shrink)

Semantics is the investigation of meaning, and semantic theories, including semantic theories about moral language, come in two very different kinds. Descriptive semantic theories are theories about what words mean. So descriptive moral semantic theories are theories about what moral words mean: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘right’, ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘reason’, and ‘rational’. In contrast, foundational semantic theories are theories about why words mean what they do, or more specifically, about what makes it the case that words mean what they do. (...) So foundational moral semantic theories are theories about what makes it the case that moral words mean what they do: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, and so on. Since both kinds of theory are sometimes referred to as varieties of ‘moral semantics’, this article will cover both. Just as semantic theories themselves come in two kinds, descriptive semantics raises two very different kinds of issues. Some issues in descriptive semantics turn on the question of what kind of theory is required, in order to be able to account for the meanings of words – including of moral words, in particular. Such questions are questions about the nature of semantic theorizing. So, for example, according to truth-conditional theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory needs to provide a recursive and compositional characterization of values for sentences which determine the truth conditions of each sentence. Whereas according to expressivist theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory does not need to determine truth conditions at all, but does need to recursively and compositionally associate each sentence ‘P’ with a mental state – intuitively, with the state which constitutes what it is to think that P. Truth-conditional and expressivist theories involve very different conceptions of the nature of linguistic meaning, but their contrast is one of the most important issues in moral semantics, and they are not even the only live competitors. In contrast, other issues in descriptive semantics, rather than turning on what kind of theory is required, raise questions about specific properties of the meanings of particular words.. (shrink)

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. (...) Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached), while giving them a uniform type of analysis. The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice. (shrink)

What is the relation between desire and action? According to a traditional, widespread and influential view I call ‘The Motivational Necessity of Desire’ (MN), having a desire that p entails being disposed to act in ways that you believe will bring about p. But what about desires like a desire that the committee chooses you without your needing to do anything, or a desire that your child passes her exams on her own? Such ‘self-passive’ desires are often given as a (...) counter-example to MN. If MN is true then self-passive desires seem absurd: if someone has a self-passive desire she will be disposed to act, thereby preventing her from getting what she desires. But it seems that we can reasonably, and often do, have such desires. However, I argue that self-passive desires are not, in fact, counter-examples to MN: close consideration of the content of these desires, the contexts in which we ascribe them, and what is claimed by MN show that they are not a problem for that view. I also argue that strengthened versions of the examples are unsuccessful, and I offer a diagnosis of why these kinds of case are commonly thought to raise a challenge to MN. (shrink)

Os tópicos e problemas filosóficos discutidos no volume são de natureza bastante variada: a natureza da complexidade computacional no processamento de uma língua natural; a relação entre o significado linguístico e o sentido Fregeano; as conexões entre a a agência e o poder; o conteúdo semântico da ficção; a explicação dos impasses éticos; a natureza dos argumentos cépticos; as conexões entre as dissociações cognitivas e o carácter modular da mente; a relação entre a referência e o significado. Estes tópicos deixam-se (...) subsumir num tema mais geral, o tema das ligações múltiplas entre a cognição e o conteúdo, mental ou linguístico. O tópico do conteúdo, a questão de determinar como é que muitas das nossas elocuções e muitos dos nossos estados mentais são dotados de conteúdo, representam algo (correcta ou incorrectamente), e o tópico da cognição, a investigação da natureza e dos mecanismos envolvidos na cognição humana, no processamento de informação tipicamente proveniente do exterior, são inegavelmente tópicos centrais da investigação filosófica, presente ou passada.Dado o carácter inclusivo e pluridisciplinar dos tópicos cobertos, não é surpreendente que os ramos da Filosofia representados no presente volume sejam igualmente diversificados: a Filosofia Moral, a Filosofia da Linguagem, a Teoria do Conhecimento, a Filosofia da Mente, os Fundamentos da Ciência Cognitiva. E também não é surpreendente que nele também estejam representados outros ramos do conhecimento cuja relevância para o estudo do conteúdo e da cognição é conspícua: a Psicologia Cognitiva; a Linguística Computacional e a Inteligência Artificial. Os autores dos ensaios são de proveniências diversas. De um lado, há um conjunto de especialistas nacionais a trabalhar na tradição analítica em Filosofia, como João Branquinho, ou a trabalhar em algumas áreas filosoficamente importantes da Ciência Cognitiva, como António Branco (Processamento da Língua Natural), José Frederico Marques (Psicologia Cognitiva) e Helder Coelho (Inteligência Artificial). Do outro lado, há um conjunto de especialistas estrangeiros de elevada reputação internacional: Allan Gibbard, da Universidade de Michigan, autor de livros influentes na área da Ética e Filosofia Moral; Stephen Schiffer, da New York University, uma das principais figuras actuais da Filosofia da Linguagem e da Semântica Geral; Paolo Leonardi, da Universidade de Bolonha, um especialista nas áreas da Filosofia da Linguagem e Filosofia da Comunicação; e Manuel García-Carpintero, da Universidade de Barcelona, um dos grandes vultos da Filosofia Analítica praticada em Espanha e na Europa Continental. (shrink)

In a narrow sense of ‘disagreement,’ you and I disagree iff we believe inconsistent propositions. But there are numerous cases not covered by this definition that seem to constitute disagreements in a wider sense: disagreements about what to do, disagreements in attitude, disagreements in credence, etc. This wider sense of disagreement plays an important role in metaethics and epistemology. But what is it to disagree in the wider sense? On the view I’ll defend, roughly, you and I disagree in the (...) wide sense iff we hold attitudes that it would be incoherent for a single individual to hold. I’ll argue that this captures the relevant cases, and explore the consequences for metaethical debates between expressivists and contextualists. My view has two broader upshots: that coherence is a theoretically important property, and that an apparently descriptive question—are two subjects disagreeing?—turns on a normative one—are their attitudes jointly incoherent? (shrink)

Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this article is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognitivism, including disjunctions. The resulting proposal preserves some of the key insights from (...) recent work on the semantics of expressivism while highlighting the widely neglected early noncognitivists' sympathies to the kind of dynamic story I intend to tell here. A comparison between the advertised dynamic semantic story and current proposals that treat expressivism as a pragmatic rather than semantic theory about moral language is provided. (shrink)

ABSTRACTContemporary theology appears to be in a transitional phase that brings with it a search for forms of thought that can support theology’s ongoing work. As a result in part of the institutio...

Quine ha promovido una forma de escepticismo sobre los juicios de modalidad de re que cuestiona su función y sugiere, en consecuencia, su eliminación. Wiggins, por su parte, ha argumentado que nuestros juicios ordinarios de individuación de objetos nos comprometen con un cierto esencialismo, con la aceptación de ciertos juicios de modalidad de re. Si Wiggins tuviera razón, tendríamos una respuesta potencial al escepticismo quineano de la función. Sin embargo, en este trabajo argumento que la propuesta de Wiggins es incapaz (...) de proporcionar una respuesta satisfactoria al escepticismo quineano, pues presupone aquello mismo que está en cuestión: los compromisos esencialistas se siguen sólo de la adopción previa de otros juicios de modalidad de re cuya función está precisamente en entredicho. Asimismo, argumento que esta misma conclusión puede extraerse de la consideración de algunas otras teorías contemporáneas de la individuación, similares a la de Wiggins. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Arne Naess once called himself ?a kind of metaphysician?: did or did he not therewith turn his back on his philosophical mentors in the Vienna Circle? To try to determine the meaning of this self-ascription, this paper first considers in detail two works in which his disagreements with the philosophers of the Vienna Circle found their clearest and most detailed expression. Concentrating on Carnap it will be argued that while some of Naess's criticisms cannot be taken as authoritative, he (...) did indicate a clear dividing line between himself and Carnap. Turning then to Naess's valediction to philosophy of science from 1972, Naess's appreciation of the role of metaphysics for science will be discussed and compared with his appreciation for the role of metaphysics for personal and political life as expressed in his still later ecophilosophy. Once allowance is made for the different needs addressed by his writings for the deep ecology movement and a certain 1960s' rhetoric is discounted as no longer appropriate, it can be seen that Naess's theoretical philosophy exhibited a remarkable continuity throughout. (shrink)

On the basis of what I call physico-formalist philosophy of mathematics, I will develop an amended account of the Kantian–Reichenbachian conception of constitutive a priori. It will be shown that the features attributed to a real object are not possessed by the object as a “thing-in-itself”; they require a physical theory by means of which these features are constituted. It will be seen that the existence of such a physical theory implies that a physical object can possess a property only (...) if other contingently existing physical objects exist; therefore, the intrinsic–extrinsic distinction is flawed. (shrink)

In recent work on a priori justification, one thing about which there is considerable agreement is that the notion of truth in virtue of meaning is bankrupt and infertile. (For the sake of more readable prose, I will use ‘TVM’ as an abbreviation for ‘the notion of truth in virtue of meaning’.) Arguments against the worth of TVM can be found across the entire spectrum of views on the a priori, in the work of uncompromising rationalists (such as BonJour (1998)), (...) of centrist moderates (such as Boghossian (1997)), and of uncompromising empiricists (such as Devitt (2004)). My aim is to dispute this widespread opinion. The outline is as follows: First, §§2-3 consist of preliminary stage-setting. Then, in §4 I will argue that some of the most prevalent arguments against the worth of TVM – in particular, one which is given clear expression by Quine (1970), and is recently reinforced by Boghossian (1997) – do not engage with the core idea motivating TVM. After deflecting this charge of incoherence, the aim of §§5-8 is to work toward developing a useful conception of TVM. (shrink)

This paper begins with the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and literature, which, with the subsequent splitting of logos into word and reason, comes to mark philosophy's self-conception and much other thinking besides—compartmentalising, in the process, what is understood by ‘literature’. Philosophy, thus separated becomes atemporal and abstract, preoccupied with propositions rather than statements or sentences, and, in some of its incarnations, aligning itself with science. Language, thus separated, becomes ‘literary’—that is, it comes to be epitomised by self-consciousness about literary form (...) and style; and a casualty of this is the ‘poetic’, a term whose origins in poiesis (production of meaning) are forgotten. But the relationship has never been as settled as it may have seemed, and a series of examples from classical and contemporary philosophy and literature helps to demonstrate this. At stake in these examples are the ways in which reason requires that one means what one says. A classic expression of commitment to this view is provided in Hamlet, by the much-quoted words of Polonius to his son, who is about to travel to Germany to study philosophy: ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’. The implications of this in relation to the claims of reason are developed with reference to moral education and the development of judgement for learners and teachers. (shrink)

As the editor noted in the last number Freddie Ayer, or Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, played a considerable part in launching the vast enterprise of the Bentham edition. It is fitting, therefore, that something be said in Utilitas about his achievement as a philosopher and the extent to which he falls within the same broad empiricist and utilitarian tradition to which Bentham and J. S. Mill belonged.

In this paper, I introduce and defend a notion of analyticity for formal languages. I first uncover a crucial flaw in Timothy Williamson’s famous argument template against analyticity, when it is applied to sentences of formal mathematical languages. Williamson’s argument targets the popular idea that a necessary condition for analyticity is that whoever understands an analytic sentence assents to it. Williamson argues that for any given candidate analytic sentence, there can be people who understand that sentence and yet who fail (...) to assent to it. I argue that, on the most natural understanding of the notion of assent when it is applied to sentences of formal mathematical languages, Williamson’s argument fails. Formal analyticity is the notion of analyticity that is based on this natural understanding of assent. I go on to develop the notion of formal analyticity and defend the claim that there are formally analytic sentences and rules of inference. I conclude by showing the potential payoffs of recognizing formal analyticity. (shrink)

In ‘Sidgwick’s Epistemology’, John Deigh argues that Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics ‘was not perceived during his lifetime as a major and lasting contribution to British moral philosophy’ and that interest in it declined considerably after Sidgwick’s death because the epistemology on which it relied ‘increasingly became suspect in analytic philosophy and eventually [it was] discarded as obsolete’. In this article I dispute these claims.

Many philosophers argue that the face-value of moral practice provides presumptive support to moral realism. This paper analyses such arguments into three steps. (1) Moral practice has a certain face-value, (2) only realism can vindicate this face value, and (3) the face-value needs vindicating. Two potential problems with such arguments are discussed. The first is taking the relevant face-value to involve explicitly realist commitments; the second is underestimating the power of non-realist strategies to vindicate that face-value. Case studies of each (...) of these errors are presented, drawn from the writings of Shafer-Landau, Brink and McNaughton, and from recent work in experimental metaethics. The paper then considers weak presumptive arguments, according to which both realist and non-realist vindications of moral practice are possible, but the realist vindications are more natural. It is argued that there is no sense of ‘natural’ available that can make these arguments work. The conclusion is that all extant presumptive arguments for moral realism fail. (shrink)

Global expressivism is the radical view that we should never think of any of our language and thought as representing the world. While interesting, global expressivism has not yet been clearly formulated, and its defenders often use unexplained terms of art to characterise their view. I fix this problem by carefully and clearly exploring the different ways in which we can interpret globalism. I reject almost all of them either because they are implausible or because they are bad interpretations of (...) actual globalist views. I then argue that the most promising version of globalism, which we can find in the work of Huw Price, turns out to be completely compatible with the view of so-called ‘local’ expressivists. The debate between globalists and localists is therefore empty: the real interest in this topic lies not in this debate but in whether globalism is true and if so what follows from it. (shrink)

This paper offers a noncognitivist characterization of moral attitudes, according to which moral attitudes count as such because of their inclusion of moral concepts. Moral concepts are distinguished by their contribution to the functional roles of some of the attitudes in which they can occur. They have no particular functional role in other attitudes, and should instead be viewed as evolutionary spandrels. In order to make the counter-intuitive implications of the view more palatable, the paper ends with an account of (...) the evolution of normative judgments as exaptations of the cognitive structures that underlie beliefs. (shrink)

Expressivism’s central idea is that normative sentences bear the same relation to non-cognitive attitudes that ordinary descriptive sentences bear to beliefs: the expression relation. Allan Gibbard teIls us that “that words express judgments will be accepted by almost everyone” - the distinctive contribution of expressivism, his claim goes, is only a view about what kind of judgments words express. But not every account of the expression relation is equally suitable for the expressivist’s purposes. In fact, what I argue in this (...) paper, considering four possible accounts of expression, is that how suitable each account is for the expressivist’s purpose varies in proportion to how controversial it is. So Gibbard is wrong - if expression is to get expressivism off the ground, then it will be enormously controversial whether words do express judgments. And thus expressivism is committed to strong claims about the semantics of non-normative language. (shrink)

When is an artwork complete? Most hold that the correct answer to this question is psychological in nature. A work is said to be complete just in case the artist regards it as complete or is appropriately disposed to act as if he or she did. Even though this view seems strongly supported by metaphysical, epistemological, and normative considerations, this article argues that such psychologism about completeness is mistaken, fundamentally, because it cannot make sense of the artist's own perspective on (...) his or her work. For the artist, the question is not about his or her own psychology, but about the character of the work and the context in which he or she works. A nonpsychological account of completeness, on which completeness is a question of whether the work satisfies the conditions implicit in the artist's plan, avoids this problem and is equally or better able to explain the metaphysical, epistemic, and normative phenomena which appeared to support psychologism. (shrink)

del's appeal to mathematical intuition to ground our grasp of the axioms of set theory, is notorious. I extract from his writings an account of this form of intuition which distinguishes it from the metaphorical platonism of which Gödel is sometimes accused and brings out the similarities between Gödel's views and Dummett's.

In recent years an increasing number of psychologists have begun to explore the prevalence, causes and effects of ordinary people’s intuitions about moral realism. Many of these studies have lacked in construct validity, i.e., they have failed to measure moral realism. My aim in this paper accordingly is to motivate and guide methodological improvements. In analysis of prominent existing measures, I develop general recommendations for overcoming ten prima facie serious worries about research on folk moral realism. G1 and G2 require (...) studies’ answer choices to be as metaethically comprehensive as methodologically feasible. G3 and G4 prevent fallacious inferences from intuitions about related debates. G5 and G6 limit first-order moral and epistemic influences. G7 address studies’ instructions. And G8 and G9 suggest tests of important psychological presuppositions. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars argue that moral judgements are adaptations, i.e., that they have been shaped by natural selection. Is this hypothesis true? In this paper I shall not attempt to answer this important question. Rather, I pursue the more modest aim of pointing out three difficulties that anybody who sets out to determine the adaptedness of moral judgments should be aware of (though some so far have not been aware of). First, the hypothesis that moral judgements are adaptations (...) has been advocated in various different specificities and scopes, and on various different levels. Second, the three kinds of evidence that have most often been appealed to by discussants of this hypothesis require additional arguments. And third, there is significant reasonable disagreement about what moral judgements essentially are. (shrink)

We all learn about the mistake of treating ‘nothing’ as if it were a term standing for something; but is it a mistake to treat it as an empty term, denoting nothing? We argue not, and we introduce ‘zilch’, defined as ‘the non-self-identical thing’, as a term which is empty as a matter of logical necessity. We contrast its behaviour with that of the quantifier ‘nothing’, and illustrate its uses. We use the same idea to vindicate Locke’s, Descartes’ and Hume’s (...) handling of ‘nothing’, and we show how Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts nichtet’ comes out as logically true. (shrink)

The financial crash of 2008 following the selling of fictitious derivatives was a crisis of both rationality and values whose aftermath has thrown the legitimation of deregulated markets, and governments, into question. This paper critiques the Becker metaphor of human capital and submits that human value is central to and the fulcrum of both economic and social values. It illustrates that Hume and Adam Smith directly countered the Hobbesian hypothesis that human nature is based only on self-interest, distinguishes market values (...) from social values, explicit from implicit values and parallels Sen in adopting an ordinal ranking of what people value rather than a search for cardinality. It draws on cognitive psychology, neural research, revealed preference theory and a principle of implicit verification. It also outlines implications for what Adam Smith centrally valued as concern for the welfare of the whole of society. (shrink)

This paper deals with the possibility of faultless disagreement in law. It does this by looking to other spheres in which faultless disagreement appears to be possible, mainly in matters of taste and ethics. Three possible accounts are explored: the realist account, the relativist account, and the expressivist account. The paper tries to show that in the case of legal disagreements, there is a place for an approach that can take into account our intuitions in the sense that legal disagreements (...) are genuine and at times faultless. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, just as the problem of unconceived alternatives provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Science to the effect that a realist view of science is unwarranted, the problem of unconceived objections provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Philosophy to the effect that a realist view of philosophy is unwarranted. I raise this problem not only for skepticism’s sake but also for the sake of making a (...) point about philosophical argumentation, namely, that anticipating objections to one’s claim is not the same as supporting one’s claim. In other words, defending p from objections does not amount to support or evidence for p. This, in turn, presents dialectical and pragma-dialectical approaches to argumentation with the following question: does proper argumentation require that arguers anticipate and respond to unconceived objections? (shrink)

Walter Dubislav (1895–1937) was a leading member of the Berlin Group for scientific philosophy. This “sister group” of the more famous Vienna Circle emerged around Hans Reichenbach’s seminars at the University of Berlin in 1927 and 1928. Dubislav was to collaborate with Reichenbach, an association that eventuated in their conjointly conducting university colloquia. Dubislav produced original work in philosophy of mathematics, logic, and science, consequently following David Hilbert’s axiomatic method. This brought him to defend formalism in these disciplines as well (...) as to explore the problems of substantiating (Begründung) human knowledge. Dubislav also developed elements of general philosophy of science. Sadly, the political changes in Germany in 1933 proved ruinous to Dubislav. He published scarcely anything after Hitler came to power and in 1937 committed suicide under tragic circumstances. The intent here is to pass in review Dubislav’s philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science and so to shed light on some seminal yet hitherto largely neglected currents in the history of philosophy of science. (shrink)

This article presents a novel argument against a common principle of parsimony in philosophy. First, it identifies a widely employed principle of positive ontological parsimony, according to which we should, ceteris paribus, prefer smaller ontologies to larger ontologies. Next, it shows how this principle is used as part of a strategy by which to argue for antirealist positions in many subfields of philosophy: the ockhamistic antirealist strategy. Third, it argues that this principle commits its adherents to an implausible epistemological thesis—the (...) Eroding Ontology Thesis—according to which evidence for the existence of some entity is at least prima facie evidence against the existence of all other entities. Antirealists might decide to adopt a related position, ontological conservatism, according to which we should simply resist changing our ontology, but the article shows that it is independently unjustified. Therefore, it concludes, philosophers have good reason to cease employing one very common antirealist strategy. (shrink)