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  1. (1 other version)Bayesian Expressivism.Seth Yalcin - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2pt2):123-160.
    I develop a conception of expressivism according to which it is chiefly a pragmatic thesis about some fragment of discourse, one imposing certain constraints on semantics. The first half of the paper uses credal expressivism about the language of probability as a stalking-horse for this purpose. The second half turns to the question of how one might frame an analogous form of expressivism about the language of deontic modality. Here I offer a preliminary comparison of two expressivist lines. The first, (...)
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  • The Normative Requirement of Means-End Rationality and Modest Bootstrapping.Luis Cheng-Guajardo - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3):487-503.
    “Myth theorists” have recently called the normative requirement of means-end rationality into question. I show that we can accept certain lessons from the Myth Theorists and also salvage our intuition that there is a normative requirement of means-end rationality. I argue that any appeal to a requirement to make our attitudes coherent as such is superfluous and unnecessary in order to vindicate the requirement of means-end rationality and also avoid the problematic conclusion that persons ought to take the means to (...)
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  • Is it Better to Love Better Things?Aaron Smuts - 2014 - In Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan & Kamila Pacovská (eds.), Love and Its Objects: What Can We Care For? Palgrave-Macmillan.
    It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory (...)
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  • Deliberative modality under epistemic uncertainty.Fabrizio Cariani, Magdalena Kaufmann & Stefan Kaufmann - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (3):225-259.
    We discuss the semantic significance of a puzzle concerning ‘ought’ and conditionals recently discussed by Kolodny and MacFarlane. We argue that the puzzle is problematic for the standard Kratzer-style analysis of modality. In Kratzer’s semantics, modals are evaluated relative to a pair of conversational backgrounds. We show that there is no sensible way of assigning values to these conversational backgrounds so as to derive all of the intuitions in Kolodny and MacFarlane’s case. We show that the appropriate verdicts can be (...)
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  • Moral Contextualism and the Problem of Triviality.Daan Evers - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (2):285-297.
    Moral contextualism is the view that claims like ‘A ought to X’ are implicitly relative to some (contextually variable) standard. This leads to a problem: what are fundamental moral claims like ‘You ought to maximize happiness’ relative to? If this claim is relative to a utilitarian standard, then its truth conditions are trivial: ‘Relative to utilitarianism, you ought to maximize happiness’. But it certainly doesn’t seem trivial that you ought to maximize happiness (utilitarianism is a highly controversial position). Some people (...)
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  • Pleasurably Regarding the Pain of Fictional Others.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Is it ever bad to take pleasure in the suffering of fictional characters? I think so. I attempt to show when and why. I begin with two powerful objections to my view: (1) engaging with fiction is akin to morally unproblematic autonomous fantasy, and (2) since no one is harmed, it is morally unproblematic. I reply to the objections and defend a Moorean view on the issue: It is intrinsically bad to enjoy evil, actual (past, present, or future) and merely (...)
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  • ‘Ought’ and Resolution Semantics.Fabrizio Cariani - 2011 - Noûs 47 (3):534-558.
    I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a universal quantifier over possibilities. My motivational argument centers on taking at face value some standard challenges to the quantificational semantics, especially to the idea that ‘ought’-sentences satisfy the principle of Inheritance. I argue that standard pragmatic approaches to these puzzles are either not sufficiently detailed or unconvincing.
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  • ‘Ought’ and Control.Matthew Chrisman - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):433-451.
    Ethical theorists often assume that the verb ‘ought’ means roughly ‘has an obligation’; however, this assumption is belied by the diversity of ‘flavours’ of ought-sentences in English. A natural response is that ‘ought’ is ambiguous. However, this response is incompatible with the standard treatment of ‘ought’ by theoretical semanticists, who classify ‘ought’ as a member of the family of modal verbs, which are treated uniformly as operators. To many ethical theorists, however, this popular treatment in linguistics seems to elide an (...)
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  • Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications.John MacFarlane - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.
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  • The Irreducibility of Personal Obligation.Jacob Ross - 2010 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 39 (3):307 - 323.
    It is argued that claims about personal obligation (of the form "s ought to 0") cannot be reduced to claims about impersonal obligation (of the form "it ought to be the case that p"). The most common attempts at such a reduction are shown to have unacceptable implications in cases involving a plurality of agents. It is then argued that similar problems will face any attempt to reduce personal obligation to impersonal obligation.
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  • 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 (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Verbal Disagreement and Semantic Plans.Alexander W. Kocurek - 2023 - Erkenntnis.
    I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of (...)
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  • Structural Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter & Alex Worsnip - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality – including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, synchronic or diachronic, and whether they govern processes (...)
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  • Expressivism and moral independence.Elliot Salinger - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):136-152.
    Metaethical expressivism faces the perennial objection that its commitment to non‐cognitivism about moral judgment renders the view revisionary of our ordinary moral thought. The standard response to this objection is to say that since the expressivist's theoretical commitments about the nature of moral judgment are independent of normative ethics, the view cannot be revisionary of normative ethics. This essay seeks to evaluate the standard response by exploring several senses of independence that expressivism might enjoy from normative ethics. I develop a (...)
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  • The Necessity of 'Need'.Ashley Shaw - 2023 - Ethics 133 (3):329-354.
    Many philosophers have suggested that claims of need play a special normative role in ethical thought and talk. But what do such claims mean? What does this special role amount to? Progress on these questions can be made by attending to a puzzle concerning some linguistic differences between two types of 'need' sentence: one where 'need' occurs as a verb, and where it occurs as a noun. I argue that the resources developed to solve the puzzle advance our understanding of (...)
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  • Ought and agency.Daniel Skibra - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-40.
    A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which traces (...)
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  • The Onus in 'Ought'.Mahrad Almotahari & Brian Rabern - 2023 - Analysis 83 (1):13-21.
    We present a puzzle about deontic modals. An adequate resolution requires abandoning the standard theory. What to replace it with isn’t clear. We consider two possibilities.
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  • The Fundamental Divisions in Ethics.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-24.
    What are the fundamental divisions in ethics? Which divisions capture the most important and basic options in moral theorizing? In this article, I reject the ‘Textbook View’ which takes the tripartite division between consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics to be fundamental. Instead, I suggest that moral theories are fundamentally divided into three independent divisions, which I call the neutral/relative division, the normative priority division, and the maximizing division. I argue that this account of the fundamental divisions of ethics better captures (...)
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  • Thinking and being sure.Jeremy Goodman & Ben Holguín - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):634-654.
    How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...)
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  • Consequentialism and the Agent’s Point of View.Nathan Robert Howard - 2022 - Ethics 132 (4):787-816.
    I propose and defend a novel view called “de se consequentialism,” which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates—contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others—that agent-neutral consequentialism is consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, it clarifies the nature of agent-centered constraints, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated nonconsequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, de se consequentialism enacts constraints through the (...)
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  • On an Alleged Refutation of Ethical Egoism.John J. Tilley - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (3): 533-542.
    In his 1972 paper “A Short Refutation Ethical Egoism,” Richmond Campbell purports to refute ethical egoism via a simple reductio. Although his argument has received critical attention, it has not been satisfactorily answered. In this paper I answer it, for reasons that go well beyond my immediate topic. Campbell’s argument calls for an answer partly because, as I show, if it succeeds against ethical egoism, then variations of it refute many other normative ethical theories, such as act utilitarianism.
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  • Inheritance: Professor Procrastinate and the logic of obligation1.Kyle Blumberg & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):84-106.
    Inheritance is the principle that deontic `ought' is closed under entailment. This paper is about a tension that arises in connection with Inheritance. More specifically, it is about two observations that pull in opposite directions. One of them raises questions about the validity of Inheritance, while the other appears to provide strong support for it. We argue that existing approaches to deontic modals fail to provide us with an adequate resolution of this tension. In response, we develop a positive analysis, (...)
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  • Ethics and the Question of What to Do.Olle Risberg - 2023 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25 (2).
    In this paper I present an account of a distinctive form of ‘practical’ or ‘deliberative’ uncertainty that has been central in debates in both ethics and metaethics. Many writers have assumed that such uncertainty concerns a special normative question, such as what we ought to do ‘all things considered.’ I argue against this assumption and instead endorse an alternative view of such uncertainty, which combines elements of both metaethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism. A notable consequence of this view is that even (...)
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  • Devoting ourselves to the manifestly unattainable.Nicholas Southwood & David Wiens - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):696-716.
    It is tempting to think (1) that we may sometimes have hopelessly utopian duties and yet (2) that “ought” implies “can.” How might we square these apparently conflicting claims? A simple solution is to interpret hopelessly utopian duties as duties to "pursue" the achievement of manifestly unattainable outcomes (as opposed to duties to "achieve" the outcomes), thereby promising to vindicate the possibility of such duties in a way that is compatible with “ought” implies “can.” The main challenge for this simple (...)
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  • The knowledge norm of apt practical reasoning.Andy Mueller - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):5395-5414.
    I will argue for a novel variant of the knowledge norm for practical reasoning. In Sect. 2, I will look at current variations of a knowledge norm for practical reasoning and I will provide reasons to doubt these proposals. In Sects. 3 and 4, I develop my own proposal according to which knowledge is the norm of apt practical reasoning. Section 5 considers objections. Finally, Sect. 6 concerns the normativity of my proposed knowledge norm and its significance.
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  • “Ought” and Intensionality.Junhyo Lee - 2021 - Synthese 199:4621-4643.
    The syntactic structure of the deontic “ought” has been much debated in philosophy and linguistics. Schroeder argues that the deontic “ought” is syntactically ambiguous in the sense that it can be associated with either a control or raising construction. He distinguishes between deliberative and evaluative “ought”s and argues that the deliberative “ought” is control while the evaluative “ought” is raising. However, if there is a control sense of “ought,” it implies that there is a sense of “ought” in which the (...)
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  • The possibility of wildly unrealistic justice and the principle/proposal distinction.Nicholas Southwood - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (7):2403-2423.
    Are institutional principles of justice subject to a minimal realism constraint to the effect that, in order to be valid, they must not make wildly unrealistic demands? Most of us say “yes.” David Estlund says, “no.” However, while Estlund holds that 1) institutional principles of justice are not subject to a minimal realism constraint, he accepts that 2) institutional principles of justice are subject to an *attainability constraint* to the effect that, in order to be valid, they must not make (...)
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  • Explicating the Concept of Epistemic Rationality.Anna-Maria A. Eder - 2021 - Synthese 199:4975–5000.
    A characterization of epistemic rationality, or epistemic justification, is typically taken to require a process of conceptual clarification, and is seen as comprising the core of a theory of (epistemic) rationality. I propose to explicate the concept of rationality. -/- It is essential, I argue, that the normativity of rationality, and the purpose, or goal, for which the particular theory of rationality is being proposed, is taken into account when explicating the concept of rationality. My position thus amounts to an (...)
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  • Editorial.Piotr Stalmaszczyk - 2017 - Studia Semiotyczne 31 (2):5-11.
    John Searle identified in Speech Acts the following questions as forming the subject matter of the philosophy of language: “How do words relate to the world? How do words stand for things? What is the difference between a meaningful string of words and a meaningless one? What is it for something to be true? or false?” [...].
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  • Ought, Agents and Ambiguity that Matters.Joanna Klimczyk - 2017 - Studia Semiotyczne 31 (2):113-138.
    According to a well-homed view in linguistic semantics, deontic logic and logic of agency, some ‘ought’ sentences, like ‘Kate ought to write the report’, are ambiguous between the socalled agentive sense as when Kate is the agent of writing the report, and the non-agentive, or evaluative sense as when, in the light of some norm or things being ideal, the proposition that Kate writes the report would come out true. Within this approach to the semantics of ‘ought’, the ambiguity in (...)
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  • Two puzzles about ability can.Malte Willer - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (3):551-586.
    The received wisdom on ability modals is that they differ from their epistemic and deontic cousins in what inferences they license and better receive a universal or conditional analysis instead of an existential one. The goal of this paper is to sharpen the empirical picture about the semantics of ability modals, and to propose an analysis that explains what makes the can of ability so special but that also preserves the crucial idea that all uses of can share a common (...)
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  • A puzzle about enkratic reasoning.Jonathan Way - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3177-3196.
    Enkratic reasoning—reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing—seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then (...)
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  • Future Orientation on an Event-Relative Semantics for Modals.Daniel Skibra - 2019 - In Maggie Baird (ed.), NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society: Volume 3. GLSA, Dept. of Linguistics. pp. 149-162.
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  • Evidential Probabilities and Credences.Anna-Maria Asunta Eder - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):1 -23.
    Enjoying great popularity in decision theory, epistemology, and philosophy of science, Bayesianism as understood here is fundamentally concerned with epistemically ideal rationality. It assumes a tight connection between evidential probability and ideally rational credence, and usually interprets evidential probability in terms of such credence. Timothy Williamson challenges Bayesianism by arguing that evidential probabilities cannot be adequately interpreted as the credences of an ideal agent. From this and his assumption that evidential probabilities cannot be interpreted as the actual credences of human (...)
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  • Ascribing practical knowledge.Marija Jankovic - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (3):247-275.
    Stanley and Williamson :411–444, 2001) argue for intellectualism—the thesis that knowing how is a type of knowing that—in part by defending a thesis about the semantics of English ascriptions of knowing how. But ascriptions of practical knowledge seem to exhibit significant crosslinguistic variation. This observation has been invoked to argue that S&W’s analysis reflects a quirk of English rather than a general feature of the concept of knowledge. I argue that the type of argument employed by both S&W and their (...)
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  • The Game of Belief.Barry Maguire & Jack Woods - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (2):211-249.
    It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between (...)
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  • The Nature of Desire.Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.) - 2017 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Two Ways to Want?Ethan Jerzak - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (2):65-98.
    I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two (...)
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  • Contractualism for Us As We Are.Nicholas Southwood - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):529-547.
    A difficult problem for contractualists is how to provide an interpretation of the contractual situation that is both subject to appropriately stringent constraints and yet also appropriately sensitive to certain features of us as we actually are. My suggestion is that we should embrace a model of contractualism that is structurally analogous to the “advice model” of the ideal observer theory famously proposed by Michael Smith (1994; 1995). An advice model of contractualism is appealing since it promises to deliver a (...)
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  • Grading Modal Judgement.Nate Charlow - 2020 - Mind 129 (515):769-807.
    This paper proposes a new model of graded modal judgment. It begins by problematizing the phenomenon: given plausible constraints on the logic of epistemic modality, it is impossible to model graded attitudes toward modal claims as judgments of probability targeting epistemically modal propositions. This paper considers two alternative models, on which modal operators are non-proposition-forming: (1) Moss (2015), in which graded attitudes toward modal claims are represented as judgments of probability targeting a “proxy” proposition, belief in which would underwrite belief (...)
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  • Decision-theoretic relativity in deontic modality.Nate Charlow - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (3):251-287.
    This paper explores the idea that a semantics for ‘ought’ should be neutral between different ways of deciding what an agent ought to do in a situation. While the idea is, I argue, well-motivated, taking it seriously leads to surprising, even paradoxical, problems for theorizing about the meaning of ‘ought’. This paper describes and defends one strategy—a form of Expressivism for the modal ‘ought’—for navigating these problems.
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  • Two nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative statements.Matthew Chrisman - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):405-424.
    The dominant route to nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative language is through the expressivist idea that normative terms have distinctive expressive roles in conveying our attitudes. This paper explores an alternative route based on two ideas. First, a core normative term ‘ought’ is a modal operator; and second, modal operators play a distinctive nonrepresentational role in generating meanings for the statements in which they figure. I argue that this provides for an attractive alternative to expressivist forms of nondescriptivism about (...)
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  • The Authority of Formality.Jack Woods - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13.
    Etiquette and other merely formal normative standards like legality, honor, and rules of games are taken less seriously than they should be. While these standards are not intrinsically reason-providing in the way morality is often taken to be, they also play an important role in our practical lives: we collectively treat them as important for assessing the behavior of ourselves and others and as licensing particular forms of sanction for violations. This chapter develops a novel account of the normativity of (...)
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  • Believing the best: on doxastic partiality in friendship.Lindsay Crawford - 2017 - Synthese 196 (4):1575-1593.
    Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On (...)
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  • ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ against epistemic deontologism: beyond doxastic involuntarism.Charles Côté-Bouchard - 2019 - Synthese 196 (4):1641-1656.
    According to epistemic deontologism, attributions of epistemic justification are deontic claims about what we ought to believe. One of the most prominent objections to this conception, due mainly to William P. Alston, is that the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ rules out deontologism because our beliefs are not under our voluntary control. In this paper, I offer a partial defense of Alston’s critique of deontologism. While Alston is right that OIC rules out epistemic deontologism, appealing to doxastic involuntarism is not (...)
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  • The "Guise of the Ought to Be": A Deontic View of the Intentionality of Desire.Federico Lauria - 2017 - In Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.), The Nature of Desire. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 352.
    How are we to understand the intentionality of desire? According to the two classical views, desire is either a positive evaluation or a disposition to act. This essay examines these conceptions of desire and argues for a deontic alternative, namely the view that desiring is representing a state of affairs as what ought to be. Three lines of criticism of the classical pictures of desire are provided. The first concerns desire’s direction of fit, i.e. the intuition that the world should (...)
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  • Categorical Norms and Convention‐Relativism about Epistemic Discourse.Cameron Boult - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (1):85-99.
    Allan Hazlett has recently developed an alternative to the most popular form of anti-realism about epistemic normativity, epistemic expressivism. He calls it “convention-relativism about epistemic discourse”. The view deserves more attention. In this paper, I give it attention in the form of an objection. Specifically, my objection turns on a distinction between inescapable and categorical norms. While I agree with Hazlett that convention-relativism is consistent with inescapable epistemic norms, I argue that it is not consistent with categorical epistemic norms. I (...)
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  • On the agent-relativity of ‘ought’.Junhyo Lee - 2023 - Analysis 84 (3):483-492.
    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 (...)
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