Abstract
Recently, theorists have pointed to the role of improvisation in practical reasoning and in gaining new moral knowledge. Laura and François Schroeter have gone even further by suggesting an account of competence with evaluative terms based on holistic improvisation. I argue, however, that they fail in their task. Through a challenge of their key claim against Allan Gibbard’s alternative account, I demonstrate that Schroeter and Schroeter provide only partial constraints on competence, and thus that their account lacks the content to provide an alternative to substantive accounts in metaethics such as minimalism and neo-descriptivism.
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Notes
Schroeter and Schroeter (2009). If not otherwise stated, page references in the main text refer to this paper.
Velleman (2009).
Herman (2007).
Sturgeon (1986).
Unlike for the traditional descriptivist, this is only an indirect reference-fixer. Knowing the meaning of the term ‘water’, for example, entails knowing a set of platitudes such that it is the stuff in our rivers and lakes, but need not include knowing that it is H2O.
We can safely make these assumptions since our aim is to demonstrate that even so, JAZZ has no resources to reject the hand-clasper. The latter assumption is however questionable, as will be discussed in the main text.
Schroeter and Schroeter mention two further objections, viz. that the hand-clasper does not fulfill the basic coordinating and cooperating function of moral talk when he does not value any normal human goals such as health and shelter, and that he may not even need to possess deliberative capacities (pp. 3–4). Both of these seem hard to get off the ground, however. On the former, Gibbard would indeed agree that for most of us, ‘normal human goals’ are an integral part of morality. Indeed, its basic social function is coordination and cooperation. That explains why we have it, what we can make with it. But this is compatible with individual persons failing to cooperate or coordinate their action, and failing to value normal human goals, just as a badly functioning or even malfunctioning heart is still a heart. As to the latter objection, Gibbard would simply deny that the hand-clasper would lack deliberate capacities. The hand-clasper is a planner that uses a term to capture what he plans to do, commend etc., and this premise entails that he is a linguistic creature—i.e. his utterances cannot merely be ‘parrot-talk’.
If he is not, that is, the result from a strike of lightning in a swamp transforming a tree into an exact replica of a human being (cf. Davidson 1987).
Gibbard (2003, p. 28).
The de dicto version would be to use scare quotes (‘right-making’) or in other ways refer to the hand-clasper’s linguistic use rather than the features in question (e.g. “the hand-clasper uses the term ‘right’ when talking about hand-clasping”).
Note that we must avoid the temptation to conflate conscious intention with coordinating intention. We are free to imagine that the hand-clasper rejects the idea that he is coordinating his plans in any sense. But as Schroeter & Schroeter themselves explicitly note, “like communicative intentions, coordinating intentions are not explicit, conceptually articulated plans which a subject would readily avow” (fn. 29). The coordinating intention is expressed via the practice with a term, and so there is no getting around interpreting that practice.
That is how Schroeter & Schroeter argue that also a religious fanatic who believes that it is right to kill people – because sending them to the after-life is better – is competent with an evaluative term (p. 8).
Schroeter & Schroeter sometimes conflate ‘moral practice’ and ‘linguistic practice’. In the quote in the previous section above, they stated that “the reformer is committed to her views making better sense of the communal moral practice as a whole”. Later in their paper, however, they explicitly talk of linguistic practices (pp. 17, 19, 22).
The society may of course have an incoherent moral practice. But even if, say, the stoning practice is entirely coherent with the other moral commitments undertaken by the speakers in this society, it is not this particular moral practice as such that the competent speaker is obliged to make best sense of, but the more fundamental, linguistic practice of evaluative terms that grounds it.
As long as they speak the same language, that is, but the conceptual point remains across languages as well.
Which is what Gibbard points out when he says that thick, as opposed to thin, evaluative terms “carry presuppositions about how to live” (Gibbard 2003, p. 139).
These are, in other words, exactly the terms that have been brought forward in conceptual role (as opposed to reference) theories of meaning.
This suggests that Schroeter & Schroeter’s characterisation above of the puzzlement of same-meaning-while-different-substantial-commitment as ‘metaethical’ is misleading. Rather, it seems to be a difference between thick terms and thin terms, whether they are evaluative or not.
Gibbard in fact discusses this possibility. He does not deny that many actual moral terms may have ‘natural constraints’ (Gibbard 2003, pp. 28, 150). His hypothesis is that the basic thin evaluative predicates we use do not have such constraints, but if he is wrong and ‘right’ has natural constraints, the hand-clasper must admit that it “is not one of my words” (Gibbard 2003, p. 150). Gibbard’s central claim is that as long as the hand-clasper is coherently using a term for expressing what he plans to do, etc., we should grant him competence with an evaluative concept, regardless of what we choose to call it.
Note that it would be of no help to Schroeter & Schroeter were we to accept that the very presence of a specific analysis of evaluative terms is to count as a ‘commitment to analyticities’. As is now familiar, JAZZ puts forward two conditions for competence – coordination intention and congruence. So if the very specification of a condition for meaning or competence were to count as an analytical claim, JAZZ itself would of course also be ‘guilty’ of analyticities.
Cf. Speaks (2010).
Schroeter and Schroeter are ambivalent here. In their critique of neo-descriptivism (pp. 7–10) they seem to be committed to the stronger claim, whereas later claims clearly are weaker (p. 23).
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Acknowledgments
For comments on earlier drafts, I am very grateful to Hallvard Lillehammer, Simon Blackburn, Jane Heal, John Cantwell, Tor Sandqvist, Frans Svensson, Johan Gustafsson, and Eva Erman. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, and from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 237590.
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Möller, N. All that jazz: linguistic competence and improvisation. Philos Stud 167, 237–250 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0084-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0084-4