O programa semântico do expressivismo surgiu como uma tentativa de fundamentar a visão não-cognitivista do discurso ético, mas logo foi generalizado de forma a cobrir a linguagem normativa em geral. Ele promete desenvolver uma alternativa global à abordagem clássica da semântica das condições de verdade: uma teoria não factualista, baseada na pragmática, do significado linguístico. Os expressivistas veem o conteúdo das sentenças normativas como determinado por seu uso primário, que é não-descritivo. As versões tradicionais da semântica expressivista procedem associando sistematicamente (...) às sentenças normativas as atitudes mentais que elas convencionalmente expressam. Elas assumem que, se as sentenças simples expressam atitudes, a aplicação a essas sentenças dos conectivos da lógica proposicional ou da ligação de variáveis resulta em sentenças complexas que também expressam atitudes. O núcleo do presente trabalho avalia algumas tentativas influentes de desenvolvimento do programa expressivista, focando em um problema discutido com veemência na literatura: o “problema da negação para o expressivismo.” Algumas abordagens propostas nos últimos anos, baseadas na rejeição da assunção central do expressivismo tradicional, são consideradas em detalhes. Embora uma avaliação definitiva dessas abordagens inovadoras como explicações satisfatórias do funcionamento da linguagem normativa não possa ainda ser alcançada, o trabalho afirma que há razões para otimismo. (shrink)

There is a recent and growing trend in philosophy that involves deferring to the claims of certain disciplines outside of philosophy, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, and linguistics. According to this trend— deferentialism , as we will call it—certain disciplines outside of philosophy make claims that have a decisive bearing on philosophical disputes, where those claims are more epistemically justified than any philosophical considerations just because those claims are made by those disciplines. Deferentialists believe that certain longstanding philosophical problems (...) can be swiftly and decisively dispatched by appeal to disciplines other than philosophy. In this paper we will argue that such an attitude of uncritical deference to any non-philosophical discipline is badly misguided. With reference to the work of John Burgess and David Lewis, we consider deference to mathematics. We show that deference to mathematics is implausible and that main arguments for it fail. With reference to the work of Michael Blome-Tillmann, we consider deference to linguistics. We show that his arguments appealing to deference to linguistics are unsuccessful. We then show that naturalism does not entail deferentialism and that naturalistic considerations even motivate some anti-deferentialist views. Finally, we set out deferentialism’s failings and present our own anti-deferentialist approach to philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The dominant route to nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative language is through the expressivist idea that normative terms have distinctive expressive roles in conveying our attitudes. This paper explores an alternative route based on two ideas. First, a core normative term ‘ought’ is a modal operator; and second, modal operators play a distinctive nonrepresentational role in generating meanings for the statements in which they figure. I argue that this provides for an attractive alternative to expressivist forms of nondescriptivism about (...) normative language. In the final section of the paper, I explore ways it might be extended to evaluative language. (shrink)

Are there such things as moral truths? How do we know what we should do? And does it matter? Constructivism states that moral truths are neither invented nor discovered, but rather are constructed by rational agents in order to solve practical problems. While constructivism has become the focus of many philosophical debates in normative ethics, meta-ethics and action theory, its importance is still to be fully appreciated. These new essays written by leading scholars define and assess this new approach in (...) ethics, addressing such questions as the nature of constructivism, how constructivism improves our understanding of moral obligations, how it accounts for the development of normative practices, whether moral truths change over time, and many other topics. The volume will be valuable for advanced students and scholars of ethics and all who are interested in questions about the foundation of morality. (shrink)