A third way in metaethics

2021

Metaethical expressivism and constructivism both claim they don’t share the vulnerabilities of moral realism, but nonetheless avoid the objections usually mounted against moral anti-realism. The relationship between the two views has been controversial, with positions ranging from diagnosing a clear opposition to seeing them as two expressions of essentially the same programme to arguing that constructivism might collapse into expressivism. In this thesis, I argue for yet another option: Expressivism and constructivism are expressions of two fundamentally different metaethical projects, and as a result, are neither contradictory nor equivalent, but complementary. While expressivism aims to explain moral judgement from without, constructivism articulates it from within moral discourse. This understanding helps clarify the scope and broaden the horizon of metaethics to become a more critical and relevant enterprise than it has been in the past decades.

2015

Decades ago, it was suggested that epistemology could be naturalized, meaning, roughly, that it could be treated as an empirically-informed psychological inquiry. In more recent years, there has been a concerted effort to naturalize ethics, with a focus on questions in moral psychology, and occasional normative ethics. Less effort has been put into the naturalization of metaethics: the study of what, if anything, makes moral judgments true. The discussion presents a systematic overview of core questions in metaethics, and argues that each of these can be illuminated by psychological research. These include questions about realism, expressivism, error theory, and relativism. Metaethics is beholden to moral psychology, and moral psychology can be studied empirically. The primary goal is to establish empirical tractability, but, in so doing, the paper also takes a provisional stance on core questions, defending a view that is relativist, subjective, and emotionally grounded.

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2013

Mackie drew attention to the distinct semantic and metaphysical claims made by metaethical realists, arguing that although our evaluative discourse is cognitive and objective, there are no objective evaluative facts. This distinction, however, also opens up a reverse possibility: that our evaluative discourse is antirealist, yet objective values do exist. I suggest that this seemingly far-fetched possibility merits serious attention; realism seems committed to its intelligibility, and, despite appearances, it isn’t incoherent, ineffable, inherently implausible or impossible to defend. I argue that reflection on this possibility should lead us to revise our understanding of the debate between realists and antirealists. It is not only that the realist’s semantic claim is insufficient for realism to be true, as Mackie argued; it’s not even necessary. Robust metaethical realism is best understood as making a purely metaphysical claim. It is thus not enough for antirealists to show that our discourse is antirealist. They must directly attack the realist’s metaphysical claim.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (Online), 2016

The essays contained in this collective volume all revolve around the question of whether the function of language is to represent the world. There is more than one interpretation of this question, as Nicholas Tebben rightly observes in the Introduction (p. 6). Still, it seems possible to gather the contributions under three main headings. The first has to do with truth deflationism and the idea that being true is not connected with metaphysically loaded relations like "representing the world" or "corresponding to the facts". The second has to do with semantic expressivism and the thesis that language does not serve to represent the world but rather to express certain mental states, either locally (e.g. in the ethics discourse) or globally. The third has to do with the foundational question of whether meaning-facts can be naturalized or not. The volume presents seventeen essays (including the Introduction), some of them from unquestionably leading authors in the relevant debates (Allan Gibbard, Paul Boghossian, and Paul Horwich, to name but three), and all from highly renowned experts in the field. The book therefore represents a remarkably valuable, up-to-date resource for the specialized reader interested in issues spanning deflationism, pragmatism, and pluralism about truth, global and local forms of expressivism, meaning naturalism, and the Kripkenstein

Logique et Analyse, 2009

In this paper I examine a contemporary debate about the general notion of linguistic rules and the place of context in determining meaning, which has arisen in the wake of a challenge that the conceptual framework of moral particularism has brought to the table. My aim is to show that particularism in the theory of meaning yields an attractive model of linguistic competence that stands as a genuine alternative to other use-oriented but still generalist accounts that allow room for context-sensitivity in deciding how the linguistic rules would apply in concrete cases. I argue that the ideas developed in relation to particularism in meta-ethics illuminate a difficulty with the modest generalist view, one that can be resolved by adopting semantic particularism instead.

In the wake of the global moral condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this chapter picks up on an important intuition at the center of moral thought and discourse: the intuition of objective right and wrong. It starts from the observation that the philosophical reflection on value has fostered a strong sense of suspicion regarding this intuition, as most ethicists remain skeptical of the metaphysical status of such judgments. In developing the idea of “interpretive metaethics,” it is shown how the hermeneutics of value makes a significant contribution to the debate by understanding moral judgments as interpretations of meaning against the background of two basic hermeneutic ideas: the radical normativity of human life and the constitutive force of human language. The argument starts by explaining why questions about moral self-understanding cannot be addressed within the framework of the current realist/antirealist debate. After highlighting the necessity of taking an interpretive turn in metaethics, I continue to elaborate on what is involved in interpretive metaethics by building on the philosophy of Charles Taylor, that is, to show how the themes of normativity and meaning in relation to moral self-understanding run like a red thread through interpretive conceptions of moral semantics, moral epistemology, moral metaphysics, and, in the background of all of these, philosophy of language.

2019

The Kripke-Wittgenstein (KW) sceptical argument, presented in Chapter 2 of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), concludes that there are no meaning facts. While realism has been denied for a great many subject matters, the meaning irrealism motivated by KW’s argument has particularly farreaching consequences. This thesis is an investigation into some of these consequences, in an effort to determine what is at stake in accepting the argument as sound. In Chapter 2, I summarise the argument, assume that it is sound, and consider the consequences for one particular body of talk: discourse about meaning itself. Three models for characterising that discourse are canvassed: error-theory, non-factualism, and mere minimalism. The latter characterisation is made available by adopting the framework for realism debates proposed by Crispin Wright in Truth and Objectivity (1992), of which I give an exposition in Chapter 1. I find in Chapter 2 that the three models of meani...

2011

In the present thesis, a theory of semantic competence is modeled using tools from epistemic logic. The resulting formal model is used to analyze a problem from the philosophy of language, namely Frege's Dilemma. There are two aims of the thesis: to construct a formal theory of semantic competence, and to show that the formal theory can be used as an useful analytical tool in uncovering the informational structure behind problems from the philosophy of language. The first aim is achieved by, first, deciding for which theory of meaning a theory of semantic competence is wanted. Due to its simplicity, Millianism is chosen. Then various non-formal theories of semantic competence are evaluated with respect to finding one which allows for an objective, inter-subjective comparison of competence levels. It is argued that the conceptual theory of (Marconi, 1997) is the best choice: the theory has a clearly defined structure making modeling possible, and is based on empirical studies from cognitive neuropsychology. Following these initial choises, the modeling framework and its philosophical interpretation is presented. The framework used is epistemic logic, and both the propositional and quantified versions are introduced. As a more expressible logical language is required, manysorted quantified epistemic logic is presented, and a novel, general completeness result is shown for many-sorted extensions of quantified modal logic. Having thus set the stage of achieving the first aim, a slightly simplified version of the theory of (Marconi, 1997) is modeled. A suitable model-class is defined and a meaning function is added to capture Millian meaning. Based on the shown completeness result, a sound and complete axiom system is presented, and a logic representing the formal theory is thereby found. The model is then validated. It is shown that both the essential ontological properties as well as the competence types from Marconi's theory are present. It is further shown that the formal counterparts of the competence types from Marconi's theory adhere to the principles dictated by empirical studies. Thereby, the first aim is achieved. To accomplish the second aim, proof of concept is shown. This is done by analyzing an objection to the correctness of the Millian theory of meaning, namely Frege's Dilemma (Frege, 1892). The formal theory is used to analyze both disjuncts of the dilemma, while focusing on the epistemic situation of the agent, i.e. the agent's level of semantic competence. The formal theory of semantic competence allows for multiple notions of semantic competence, each resulting in a unique rendering of the dilemma. Based on these analyses, it it is concluded that once the underlying informational structure of the discussed situations is revealed, neither disjunct proves to be a problem for the Millian theory of meaning. Hereby, the second aim is accomplished. However, I raise an intuitive objection to one of the analyses. It is argued that the objection introduces an un-accounted for parameter, namely contexts. In order to show that this objection is not fatal for the proposed analysis, a chapter is devoted to the construction of a contextual theory of semantic competence. The notion of contexts is incorporated into the models for semantic competence, and the possibilities for finding a complete axiomatic system is discussed, but no completeness result is shown. Therefore, a formal theory, i.e. a logic, for contextual semantic competence is not presented. However, the model-theoretic machinery is used to re-analyze the problematic case. It is shown that when the situation is modeled in a contextual model, the epistemic analysis of the disjunct again showed the Puzzle about Identity is unproblematic for the Millian view. Overall, the constructed formal theory of semantic competence is shown to elucidate informational aspects of the problems posed to the philosophy of language by Frege's Dilemma. In particular, once the informational structure of the problems is clear, it is shown that each argument is far from being as decisive against Millianism as has been the mainstream view in 20th century philosophy of language.

Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, ed. by Kelly James Clark, 2016

This chapter offers an introduction to naturalist views in contemporary metaethics. Such views attempt to find a place for normative properties (such as goodness and rightness) in the concrete physical world as it is understood by both science and common sense. The chapter begins by introducing simple naturalist conceptual analyses of normative terms. It then explains how these analyses were rejected in the beginning of the 20th Century due to G.E. Moore’s influential Open Question Argument. After this, the chapter considers what good general reasons there are for defending naturalism in metaethics. The bulk of the chapter will then survey new semantic and metaphysical forms of naturalism which in different ways attempt to address Moore’s objection to naturalism. These more recent versions of naturalism—using new resources from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science and epistemology—attempt to explain why the Open Question Argument fails.

Philosophy (special issue), 2019

Philosophers are often interested in explaining significant contrasts between ordinary descriptive discourses, on the one hand, and discourses – such as ethics, mathematics, or mentalistic discourse – that are thought to be more problematic in various ways. But certain strategies for ‘saving the differences’ can make it too difficult to preserve notable similarities across discourses. My own preference is for strategies that ‘save the differences’ without sacrificing logico-semantic continuities or committing to deflationism about truth, but also without embracing either truth-pluralism or global expressivism. I motivate my preference by examining, as a test case, mentalistic discourse. I begin by reconstructing three philosophical puzzles that have led philosophers to think of mentalistic discourse as problematic (Section 2). These puzzles concern the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical status of contrasts between first-person present-tense attributions – ‘avowals’ – and all other ordinary contingent attributions. I then briefly present my own, neo-expressivist strategy for addressing the puzzles (Section 3). Unlike traditional ‘simple expressivism’ (which is the analogue in the mentalistic realm of ethical emotivism), neo-expressivism is not committed to avowals’ being non-truth-apt or having non-propositional meanings. And yet it does not require embracing either deflationism about truth or global expressivism. It preserves continuities between mentalistic and other discourses while allowing us to capture discontinuities. Moreover, it is possible to apply the neo-expressivist framework in other areas where the notion of expression is deemed explanatorily useful, as illustrated by considering ethical neo-expressivism (Section 4). In the final section (5), I make more general comments on truth and meaning and tease out some of the commitments of the approach I advocate.