According to a naïve view sometimes apparent in the writings of moral philosophers, ‘ought’ often expresses a relation between agents and actions – the relation that obtains between an agent and an action when that action is what that agent ought to do. It is not part of this naïve view that ‘ought’ always expresses this relation – on the contrary, adherents of the naïve view are happy to allow that ‘ought’ also has an epistemic sense, on which it means, (...) roughly, that some proposition is likely to be the case, and adherents of the naïve view are also typically happy to allow that ‘ought’ also has an evaluative sense, on which it means, roughly, that were things ideal, some proposition would be the case.1 What is important to the naïve view is not that these other senses of ‘ought’ do not exist, but rather that they are not exhaustive – for what they leave out, is the important deliberative sense of ‘ought’, which is the central subject of moral inquiry about what we ought to do and why – and it is this deliberative sense of ‘ought’ which the naïve view understands to express a relation between agents and actions.2 In contrast, logically and linguistically sophisticated philosophers – with a few notable exceptions3 – have rejected this naïve view. According to a dominant perspective in the interpretation of deontic logic and in linguistic semantics, for example, articulated by Roderick Chisholm (1964) and Bernard Williams (1981) in philosophy and in the dominant paradigm in linguistic semantics as articulated in particular by.. (shrink)

Mit den "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie" von 1913, von ihm selbst nur als eine "Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie" angezeigt, zog Edmund Husserl die Konsequenz aus seinen Logischen Untersuchungen (PhB 601), die ihn 1900/01 berühmt gemacht hatten: Ausgehend von der dort entwickelten Phänomenologie der intentionalen Erlebnisse sieht er jetzt in der Aufdeckung der Leistungen des "reinen Bewußtseins", dem die uns bekannte natürliche Welt nur als "Bewußtseinskorrelat" gegeben ist, den eigentlichen Gegenstand philosophischer Erkenntnis und in den (...) von ihm eingeführten methodologischen Begriffen der "Reduk tion" und der "Epoché" den Weg, sich über die Beschaffenheit dieses "reinen Bewußtseins", aus dem alle Erkenntnis entspringt, Klarheit zu verschaffen. Die Ausgabe bietet Husserls Schrift text- und seitengleich nach Band III/1 der Husserliana, herausgegeben von Karl Schuhmann; beigegeben sind Husserls Nachwort zu den Ideen von 1930 aus Band V der Husserliana, herausgegeben von Marly Biemel, sowie ein umfangreiches Namen- und Sachregister von Elisabeth Ströker. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A belief is correct if and only if the believed proposition is true. Some philosophers argued that from this standard of correctness it is possible to derive the statement of a norm, a claim about what a subject ought to do. Many formulations of the standard in terms of an ‘ought’-claim have been suggested, but all resulted affected by some problem. My aim in this article is to suggest a new formulation of the standard in ‘ought’-terms based on an (...) analysis of the relations occurring between the notions of correctness and ‘ought’. My suggested formulation is that, for any subject S and proposition p, according to the standard of correctness, given that S believes that p, it ought to be that p. (shrink)

Can there be rules of language which serve both to determine meaning and to guide speakers in ordinary linguistic usage, i.e., in the production of speech acts? We argue that the answer is no. We take the guiding function of rules to be the function of serving as reasons for actions, and the question of guidance is then considered within the framework of practical reasoning. It turns out that those rules that can serve as reasons for linguistic utterances cannot be (...) considered as normative or meaning determining. Acceptance of such a rule is simply equivalent to a belief about meaning, and does not even presuppose that meaning is determined by rules. Rules that can determine meaning, on the other hand, i.e., rules that can be regarded as constitutive of meaning, are not capable of guiding speakers in the ordinary performance of speech acts. (shrink)

After some introductory remarks on constitutive rules I proceed to one problem still insufficiently handled in the constitutive rules research: that of how coordinate the definitional exigence that constitutive rules should define new activities and, on the other hand, the claim that constitutive rules should be a disjoint class with that of regulative or prescriptive rules. I analyse briefly several examples, such as promises or interest-charging, or ‘sprezzatura’, and set out a number of problems and complexities inherent in these examples. (...) Yet I also indicate commonalities shared by all of them.Short of offering a solution, I put forward the hypothesis that constitutive rules may in some cases be in rerum natura bound up with prescriptive norms and can be divided from them only in virtue of a theoretical analysis. (shrink)

I argue that, if belief is subject to a norm of truth, then that norm is evaluative rather than prescriptive in character. No prescriptive norm of truth is both plausible as a norm that we are subject to, and also capable of explaining what the truth norm of belief is supposed to explain. Candidate prescriptive norms also have implausible consequences for the normative status of withholding belief. An evaluative norm fares better in all of these respects. I propose an evaluative (...) account according to which the goodness of true belief is, in Geach's sense, attributive rather than predicative. (shrink)

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology which he characterized as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced phenomena aims at least at material-apriori laws of a special kind, namely eidetic descriptive laws built up from pure descriptive concepts. The paper explicates Husserl’s notion of essence in the broad sense as a state-of-affairs-function (Sachverhaltsfunktion); this noematic function is the objective „correlate“ of the propositional function which we call a „concept“ and which is part of the proposition, i.e. the state-of-affairs-meaning (Sachverhaltsmeinung), in which a state of (...) affairs is projected. Essences in the narrow or pregnant sense are pure essences which Husserl named „Eidé“. The concept of pure essence relevant for the phenomenological descriptive eidetics is elucidated through the explication of Husserl’s notion of a pure descriptive concept, so as to show how these concepts, which are pure type concepts, differ from impure descriptive concepts, especially from concepts denoting natural kinds. Grounded exclusively in pure descriptive concepts, the eidetic descriptive laws (Wesensgesetze) have special truth conditions and a need for special ways of examination. The proper place of the method called „eidetic variation“ is the examination, falsification or justification of presumed eidetic descriptive laws. Starting from familiar exemplary cases of states of affairs which confirm the presumed law, the free variation, which operates in pure fantasy, has the task of constructing possible counterexamples to falsify the presumed eidetic law. The property of being falsifiable by counterexamples constructed in pure fantasy allows for a distinction between empirical laws and the eidetic descriptive laws of Husserlian eidetics. The falsifiability by fictional and factual counterexamples shows that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a scientific enterprise open to intersubjective examination precisely due to its eidetic character. (shrink)