Provides a comprehensive introduction to the major philosophical theories attempting to explain the workings of language.

Part I The Imperative Mood 'Virtue, then, is a disposition governing our choices '. ARISTOTLE, Eth. Nic. 36 Prescriptive Language. ...

In this work, the author has fashioned out of the logical and linguistic theses of his earlier books a full-scale but readily intelligible account of moral argument.

In this important new collection, Gilbert Harman presents a selection of fifteen interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the center of analytic philosophy. The book opens with a group of four essays discussing basic principles of reasoning and rationality. The next three essays argue against the once popular idea that certain claims are true and knowable by virtue of meaning. In the third group of essays Harman presents his own view of meaning and the possibility of thinking in language The (...) final three essays investigate the nature of mind, developing further the themes already set out. Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind offers an integrated presentation of this rich and influential body of work. which Harman has developed over thirty years. (shrink)

What is the Moral Problem? NORMATIVE ETHICS VS. META-ETHICS It is a common fact of everyday life that we appraise each others' behaviour and attitudes from ...

This volume collects some influential essays in which Simon Blackburn, one of our leading philosophers, explores one of the most profound and fertile of philosophical problems: the way in which our judgments relate to the world. This debate has centered on realism, or the view that what we say is validated by the way things stand in the world, and a variety of oppositions to it. Prominent among the latter are expressive and projective theories, but also a relaxed pluralism that (...) discourages the view that there are substantial issues at stake. The figure of the "quasi-realist" dramatizes the difficulty of conducting these debates. Typically philosophers thinking of themselves as realists will believe that they alone can give a proper or literal account of some of our attachments--to truth, to facts, to the independent world, to knowledge and certainty. The quasi-realist challenge, developed by Blackburn in this volume, is that we can have those attachments without any metaphysic that deserves to be called realism, so that the metaphysical picture that goes with our practices is quite idle. The cases treated here include the theories of value and knowledge, modality, probability, causation, intentionality and rule-following, and explanation. A substantial new introduction has been added, drawing together some of the central themes. The essays articulate a fresh alternative to a primitive realist/anti-realist opposition, and their cumulative effect is to yield a new appreciation of the delicacy of the debate in these central areas. (shrink)

Expressivist analyses of evaluative discourse characterize unembedded moral claims as functioning primarily to express noncognitive attitudes. The most thorny problem for this project has been explaining the logical relations between such evaluative judgements and other judgements expressed using evaluative terms in unasserted contexts, such as when moral judgements are embedded in conditionals. One strategy for solving the problem derives logical relations among moral judgements from relations of "consistency" and "inconsistency" which hold between the attitudes they express. This approach has been (...) accused of conflating inconsistency with mere pragmatic incoherence. In reaction such criticisms several recent theorists have attempted to use alternative resources. The most sophisticated noncognitivists have often propounded theories with secondary descriptive components in addition to their primary expressive meanings. Recent independent suggestions by Frank Jackson and Stephen Barker attempt to solve the embedding problem by utilizing such descriptive components of moral utterances. Unfortunately, this strategy fails to handle a certain sort of example using just the descriptive resources available to noncognitivists. For it must rule valid arguments invalid in virtue of equivocation in the secondary descriptive meanings. The present paper explains the problem and suggests a moral for expressivist theories. (shrink)

This paper is about Truth Minimalism, Norm Expressivism, and the relation between them. In particular, it is about whether Truth Minimalism can help to solve a problem thought to plague Norm Expressivism. To start with, let me explain what I mean by 'Truth Minimalism' and 'Norm Expressivism.'.

Expressivism faces four distinct problems when evaluative sentences are embedded in unassertive contexts like: If lying is wrong, getting someone to lie is wrong, Lying is wrong, so Getting someone to lie is wrong. The initial problem is to show that expressivism is compatible with - being valid. The basic problem is for expressivists to explain why evaluative instances of modus ponens are valid. The deeper problem is to explain why a particular argument like - is valid. The deepest problem (...) is to explain the meanings of evaluative conditionals like . Expressivists can solve the initial and basic problems simply by acknowledging that evaluative sentences have minimal truth aptness, but the deeper and deepest problems require more. The deepest problem cannot be solved even with the semantics of Gibbard and Blackburn, as is shown by an extension of Dreier’s hiyo argument. (shrink)

This book examines some of the deepest questions in philosophy: What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational?

First Published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I Imperative Sentences It has often been taken for granted by logicians that there is a class of sentences which is the proper subject-matter of logic, ...

There are three parts. Formulation of a form of non-cognitivism which gives a central role to moral emotions. Defense of the standard arguments for non-cognitivism. Response to standard objections to non-cognitivism. Throughout I give considerable attention to relevant important contributions by earlier writers. ; An emotion is grounded if it is held for a certain reason and the subject does not feel uncomfortable about having it for that reason. My central theses are: Thinking that one ought to do A is (...) being disposed to feel grounded guilt upon doing not-A in hypothetical situations of a certain specified kind. In such situations the speaker has the same information as in the actual situation and sympathizes with all relevant individuals to the maximum extent compatible with his having grounded emotions towards the object judged. ; Opponents contend that the Open Question Argument ignores the existence of synthetic property identities, e.g., that between water and H$\sb2$O. In response, I argue that the analogy between this identity and, say, that between goodness and pleasure is spurious. Unlike the former, there is no way of establishing the latter. I defend the Univocality Argument, in particular by giving numerous examples of fundamental moral disagreements where the apparent univocality of moral predicates cannot plausibly be explained in terms of shared reference, even by employing sophisticated semantic theories. In formulating the Internalism Argument I maintain that the judgement "I ought to do A" is essentially motivating and therefore cannot be cognitive. I advance an original argument against externalism, and then defend internalism against objections. ; I rebut the charge that non-cognitivism cannot account for occurrences of moral words in unasserted contexts, suggesting that non-cognitivists can explain validity in moral modus ponens inferences by appealing to sameness of moral standards applied in the different steps of the inference. I also show how non-cognitivists can handle univocality intuitions as regards moral explanations. Last, I account for some issues concerning moral objectivity. (shrink)