Fitting-Attitudes, Secondary Qualities, and Values
Philosophical Topics 38 (1):87-105 (2010)
| Abstract | Response-dispositional accounts of value defend a biconditional in which the possession of an evaluative property is said to covary with the disposition to cause a certain response. In contrast, a fitting-attitude account of the same property would claim that it is such as to merit or make fitting that same response. This paper argues that even for secondary qualities, response-dispositional accounts are inadequate; we need to import a normative notion such as appropriateness even into accounts of such descriptive properties as redness. A preliminary conclusion is that the normativity that appears in fitting-attitude accounts of evaluative properties need not have anything to do with the evaluative nature of those properties. It may appear there because evaluative properties—or at least thosefor which fitting-attitude accounts are plausible—really are so much like secondary qualities that it might well be appropriate to think of them as a subclass of secondary qualities. In the second half of the paper I discuss the views of three of the philosophers who have been most influential in discussions of response-featuring accounts of evaluative notions and who explicitly distinguish response-dispositional accounts of value from fittingattitude accounts: John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, and Crispin Wright. I highlight some of the theoretical temptations that can be associated with the assumption that the response-dispositional/fitting-attitude distinction parallels the secondary quality/evaluative property distinction | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesDan López de Sa (2006). Values Vs Secondary Qualities. Teorema 25:197-210.
K. Bykvist (2009). No Good Fit: Why the Fitting Attitude Analysis of Value Fails. Mind 118 (469):1-30.
Jonathan Way (forthcoming). Value and Reasons to Favour. In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 8. Oxford University Press.
Robert Pasnau (2006). A Theory of Secondary Qualities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (3):568-591.
Nenad Miscevic (1997). Secondary and Tertiary Qualities: Semantics and Response--Dependence. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (4):363-379.
Joshua Gert (2006). Problems for Moral Twin Earth Arguments. Synthese 150 (2):171 - 183.
Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen (2013). Fitting-Attitude Analyses: The Dual-Reason Analysis Revisited. Acta Analytica 28 (1):1-17.
Robert A. Wilson (forthcoming). Primary and Secondary Qualities. In Matthew Stuart (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Locke. Blackwell.
Joshua Gert (2010). Color Constancy and the Color/Value Analogy. Ethics 121 (1).
Chris Heathwood (2008). Fitting Attitudes and Welfare. Oxford Studies in Metaethics 3:47-73.
Lisa Downing (2011). Sensible Qualities and Material Bodies in Descartes and Boyle. In Lawrence Nolan (ed.), Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate. Oxford University Press.
Elizabeth Tropman (2010). Intuitionism and the Secondary-Quality Analogy in Ethics. Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (1).
Douglas Lewis (1970). Some Problems of Perceptions. Philosophy of Science 37 (March):100-113.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2012-09-18Total downloads0Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
