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Notes
I did not emphasize the difference between these two sorts of ‘ought’ in the book, although I believe that it corresponds precisely to the distinction that I drew in Section 5.2 between “two kinds of regulative role that normative concepts can play” (121).
My thinking about dispositions is largely derived from the work of Alexander Bird (1998) and Michael Fara (2005). In a way, the idea is that the disposition ascription is more like a generic statement. (In effect, ‘x is fragile’ is roughly equivalent to ‘Cases in which x is struck are cases in which x shatters’, or ‘Ceteris paribus, cases in which x is struck are cases in which x shatters’.) It is a well-known fact that a generic statement, like ‘Platypuses lay eggs’, does not entail, with respect to every platypus, ‘This platypus lays eggs’ (since male platypuses do not lay eggs).
I owe this point to the important and unjustly neglected proposals of Peacocke (1992, Chap. 5).
In brief, my response to this second criticism is that Lenman has mistaken my defence of one of the premises of my argument against expressivism for the whole of my argument. The argument from Sect. 2.5 of my book that Lenman criticizes was only ever meant to establish that there must be some “point or purpose” to the “standards of justification or warrantedness” that apply to normative statements. This point is then meant to be combined with other, more distinctly logical considerations (in Sect. 2.6), to establish that this “point or purpose” has to be interpreted as getting to the truth, understood in a way that is incompatible with expressivism. Lenman seems to have missed this aspect of the structure of my argument.
For a fascinating statement of the kind of “external individuation” thesis that I have in mind, see Burge (2003).
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Wedgwood, R. The Nature of Normativity: A Reply to Holton, Railton, and Lenman. Philos Stud 151, 479–491 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9554-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9554-8