Online research in philosophy

Expressivists, such as Blackburn, analyse sentences such as 'S thinks that it ought to be the case that p' as S hoorays that p'. A problem is that the former sentence can be negated in three different ways, but the latter in only two. The distinction between refusing to accept a moral judgement and accepting its negation therefore cannot be accounted for. This is shown to undermine Blackburn's solution to the Frege-Geach problem.

A difficulty is exposed in Allan Gibbard's solution to the embedding/Frege-Geach problem, namely that the difference between refusing to accept a normative judgement and accepting its negation is ignored. This is shown to undermine the whole solution.

I offer a new kind of solution to the puzzle of faultless disagreement. The solution is that whether bivalence holds for a given sentence can be a relative matter. It is relative to something I call mode of assertion. The theory of modes of assertion requires an expressivist orientation to assertion, which is cognitivist in that assertions, analyzed in expressivist terms, are genuine assertions manifesting real beliefs. I argue that my mode of assertion approach is a better solution to the (...) puzzle of faultless disagreement than truth-relativity or content-indexicality approaches. (shrink)

Divine law theories of metaethics claim that moral rightness is grounded in God’s commands, wishes and so forth. Expressivist theories, by contrast, claim that to call something morally right is to express our own attitudes, not to report on God’s. Ostensibly, such views are incompatible. However, we shall argue that a rapprochement is possible and beneficial to both sides. Expressivists need to explain the difference between reporting and expressing an attitude, and to address the Frege-Geach problem. Divine law theorists need (...) to get past the Euthyphro dilemma, and to avoid moral externalism. This paper shows how a combined theory helps us to achieve this. (shrink)

This paper will appeal a recent argument for the indeterminacy of translation to show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that assertion cannot be explained in terms of an independent grasp of the concept of truth. In particular, it will argue that if we try to explain assertion in terms of truth rather than vice versa, we ultimately will not be able to make sense of the difference between assertion and denial. This problem with such 'semantic' accounts of assertion (...) then illustrates why we need not worry about the purported argument for indeterminacy. (shrink)

The paper argues that Wittgenstein's criticisms of Frege and Russell's assertion sign are, a bottom, criticisms of a common flaw in these philosophers' early conceptions of the proposition.Each philosopher offers an account of a proposition (or thought) that leaves it seeming as though a sentence cannot get so far as to say something without the addition of the assertion sign. This leads to the confused notion that there is a coherent notion of "logical assertion.".