Abstract
Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards (if any) for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view is acceptable. I suggest an original compromise: “ecumenical contextualism”, on which some uses of ‘ought’ are parochial, others aspirational. Ecumenical contextualism is compatible with realism or antirealism, but either combination yields interesting results. And though it’s a cognitivist view, it is strengthened by incorporating an expressivist insight: for robustly normative usages of ‘ought’, the contextually-relevant standards must be endorsed by the speaker.
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Notes
See Wedgwood (2006, 2007: ch. 5, 2016), Brogaard (2008), Björnsson and Finlay (2010), Finlay (2014), Dowell (2012, 2013), Chrisman (2015), Silk (2017), Khoo and Knobe (2018). Contextualism has for some time been the dominant view of ‘ought’, and modals more generally, within linguistics—largely due to the influence of Kratzer (1981, 1991, 2012). For earlier forerunners of contextualism in metaethics see Harman (1975, 1996) and Dreier (1990).
See fns. 23 and 24, respectively, for references.
It’s more complicated, in reality, since there are “deictic” uses of ‘here’, where it refers to a location other than the one in which the speaker is located at the time of utterance, for example, when the speaker is pointing at a map.
Viebahn and Vetter (2016) argue that at least some modals are both polysemous and context-sensitive.
Prominent relativists Kolodny and MacFarlane (2010: 131), for example, make it a feature of their semantics that the “deontic selection function”, i.e. the relevant set of norms that select the deontically ideal possible worlds given an information-state, is “generally supplied by context”.
Silk (2017: 210) thinks that this kind of view shouldn’t count as contextualist at all. Obviously, this is a terminological dispute, but I prefer my terminology. Even non-thoroughgoing contextualism still contrasts with an ambiguity view about the different “flavors” of ‘ought’. Moreover, my way of talking preserves the simple rule that we should call a view of a particular term ‘contextualist’ if it posits context-sensitivity with respect to that term. Later in his paper (Silk 2017: 235–236), Silk appears to slip into my way of talking.
Some contextualist views might deny the reality or significance of these categories entirely, holding that there are simply many different potential ‘ought’s, for many possible sets of norms or standards, and that it is unnecessary or unhelpful for a semantic theory to try to group them into ‘moral’, ‘prudential’, ‘aesthetic’, etc usages. I count these views as thoroughgoing versions of contextualism. If the categories mentioned are not real or significant, that’s a problem for non-throughgoing contextualism, since it’s that view that has to rely on such categories to keep the extent of its contextualism in check.
It’s worth noting that only a thoroughgoing form of ‘ought’-contextualism deserves the name metaethical contextualism, since a non-thoroughgoing form of contextualism holds that there is only one semantic value of the moral ‘ought’.
Silk (2017: 209–210) appears to build standards-sensitivity specifically into his definition of ‘contextualism’. This is surely a mistake (even granting Silk’s exclusion of non-thoroughgoing views from counting as contextualist; cf. fn. 7 above). Whether a view of a term is contextualist is a matter of whether (and, perhaps how thoroughly) it makes the semantic value of that term sensitive to contextual parameters, not of what kind of contextual sensitivity it posits.
Dowell (2013: 175) herself criticizes Björnsson and Finlay’s (2010) view on the grounds that, since they think that all uses of ‘ought’ are information-sensitive, they cannot account for “objective” uses of ‘ought’. However, it appears that Björnsson and Finlay use ‘information-sensitive’ in my sense, rather than Dowell’s. If that is so, her criticism misses its mark.
The possibility of such flexibility is noted even in Harman’s early version of the view: see Harman (1975: 10–11).
To clarify, parochial contextualism doesn’t preclude the standards that happen to be the mind-independent, objective ones from occupying the ordering source parameter: after all, the relevant speaker or group might subscribe to those standards. But this is incidental; what makes them the operative standards are the speakers’ subscribing to them, not their mind-independent truth.
Cf., e.g., MacFarlane (2014: 284–285), who presses the disagreement problem for contextualism with reference only to information-sensitivity. However, it’s possible that the disagreement problem is easier to solve with respect to information-sensitivity than with respect to the sort of standards-sensitivity envisaged by the parochial contextualist, since it’s more clear (in my view) that there is a deep disagreement between those who have different normative standards than that there’s a deep disagreement between those who have different background information.
Of course, we have to finesse the objection a bit to apply to views that don’t mechanically make the relevant standards always depend on the individual speaker—but it doesn’t take much.
Could the points made to defend contextualism against the disagreement objection be generalized to deal with this one too? I think not. The best candidate is Khoo and Knobe (2018), who use experimental data to show that in at least some moral exchanges between two speakers where the two speakers express apparently contrary moral claims, subjects are less inclined to say that one of the speakers must be “incorrect” than they are to say that the two parties disagree. However, two points limit the upshot of this in the present context. First, though subjects are less inclined to say that one of the parties are incorrect than they are to say that the two parties disagree, their responses to the former question are still around the midpoint of the scale used. Thus, though the results show some capacity for judgments about disagreement and judgments about incorrectness to come apart, they don’t suggest that subjects are strongly inclined, in absolute terms, to deny that one of the speakers has to be incorrect. Secondly, even for those subjects who do deny that one of the speakers has to be incorrect, this denial does not entail the claim, endorsed by parochial contextualism, that both subjects speak truly. Some of these subjects might instead be operating on a folk theory whereby the notions of truth and falsity (and correctness and incorrectness) are out of place in (some) normative disputes.
No doubt it’s partly a desire not to want to foot-stomp about how Hitler’s normative utterances were false that leads to the framing of the objection in terms of disagreement rather than in terms of any one particular party speaking falsely. But even if it’s less elegant, I don’t think we should ultimately be reticent about foot-stomping about how Hitler’s normative utterances were false.
It should be readily conceded to the parochial contextualist that we don’t make any underlying proposition true by subscribing to a standard; the underlying proposition has the form “given standard S, one ought to Φ”, and one doesn’t make that proposition true by subscribing to standard S. Instead, one affects the truth of one’s utterances by affecting which propositions those utterance express. Still, we can still object to the claim that one can make all of one’s normative utterances true by subscribing to the relevant standards. If it seems like our utterances sometimes don’t get to be true this cheaply, something is wrong with a theory that says they do.
E.g. Harman (1975, 1996), Dreier (1990), Brogaard (2008), Björnsson and Finlay (2010), Khoo and Knobe (2018); also Finlay (2014), modulo his relativization to ends rather than standards. Silk (2017) is officially neutral between parochialism and aspirationalism (2017: 207–208, 236), but many aspects of his presentation and positive view reveal parochialist assumptions (ibid.: 207, 209–210, 212, 218, 226).
As clarified in Sect. 2, however, this doesn’t mean that their thoroughgoing contextualism will take effect only on the modal base parameter, since information-sensitivity can also take effect on the ordering source.
The name may call to mind Ridge’s (2014) “ecumenical expressivism”, but there’s no particular similarity between the views. Ridge’s view is ecumenical in that it’s a hybrid (of descriptivism and expressivism), holding that all usages of the normative ‘ought’ have both descriptive and expressive content. My view is not exactly a hybrid (of parochialism and aspirationalism), but rather a view that allows for some usages of ‘ought’ that are (purely) parochial and some usages that are (purely) aspirational; it’s ecumenical in the sense of acknowledging and accommodating both usages, and not trying to assimilate one to the other.
This may be a respect in which ecumenical contextualism is “flexible” (cf. Dowell 2013). But I am not completely clear on what it means for a particular form of contextualism to be “flexible” rather than “inflexible”. A first pass at the distinction would be this: inflexible forms of contextualism say that while the particular value of a contextual parameter changes across contexts, there’s a more general level of description at which the parameter is always the same, or always filled the same way. For example, saying that the ordering source parameter is always filled by the speaker’s standards would be a kind of inflexible contextualism. However, it’s not obvious that many views will count as “flexible” on this characterization. Even ecumenical contextualism might be parsed as saying that the ordering source parameter is always filled by the standards that the speaker intends to talk with reference to. Does that make it inflexible?
The focus on speaker intention is shared with, among others, Dowell (2013). But Dowell is not herself an ecumenical contextualist; she is an aspirational contextualist (see Dowell 2012: 283). Her discussion of speaker intention concerns its production of information-sensitivity in uses of ‘ought’, not standards-sensitivity (in my sense; see Sect. 2).
Error theory is often associated with the former view, but the latter is also a possible development of it; see Joyce (2001: 6–9). See also Perl and Schroeder (forthcoming) for a detailed discussion of what error theorists should think about the sense in which claims with false presuppositions are faulty.
The exception would be claims of the form ‘you ought to Φ’ where Φ-ing is something that one does in every possible world left live by the modal base. It’s a bit odd that the error-theoretic view would have to say that such utterances are true, but this is actually a more general problem for the Kratzerian theory: even non-error-theoretic views seem to have the result that what one does in all the (live) possible worlds is a fortiori something that one does in all the top-ranked possible worlds and thus, on the orthodox semantics, something that, given any standards that fill the ordering source parameter, one “ought” to do. So perhaps the error-theorist can borrow whatever more general solution is in the offing to finesse this problem.
But not all; see fn. 29 above.
Cf. the usage in, e.g., Finlay (2014).
Indeed, Knobe and Szabó (2013) plausibly argue that there are “impure” usages of ‘ought’ where there’s no sharp line between a set of standards and a set of expectations, with the worlds being ordered by this standards-expectations hybrid.
Cf. Fogal (2016: 283).
The idea here, and its development over the next couple of pages, is similar in a number of respects to that of Silk (2017: 210, 227, 232–233), though see fn. 41 below. Similar ideas are also pursued in forthcoming work by Laskowski (2017) and Finlay (forthcoming). The latter builds on Finlay’s more general idea—defended in his (2014: ch. 5) and elesewhere—of combining contextualism with “quasi-expressivism”, whereby (some) normative utterances, in addition to semantically expressing a descriptive content, also pragmatically express endorsement of a norm.
For that way of thinking of expressivism, see Schroeder (2008: 3).
See e.g., Gibbard (1990). Could the relevant attitude instead be a cognitive one, a belief to the effect that the relevant standards are authoritative? I worry that this overintellectualizes things, and requires too much sophistication in order to count as making a normative judgment. A conative attitude of endorsing as authoritative, by contrast, involves affective and motivational dispositions to treat the standards as authoritative in certain ways, without requiring the same cognitive sophistication that a belief would.
Proto-contextualists Harman (1975: 8) and Dreier (1990) saw their theories as ways of accounting for the datum of motivational internalism, without going expressivist. This reflects a time when motivational internalism was more widely accepted. Additionally, though, it only makes sense for a simple version of contextualism that is both parochial and focused narrowly on moral language. On such a view, the thought goes, the operative moral standards in play tend to be the speaker’s standards, and so of course they are standards she endorses. The picture is complicated greatly when we allow standards that the speaker does not herself endorse to occupy the ordering source, and when we focus on a wider range of deontic language than the moral, including whole categories of norms (such as those of etiquette) that a speaker might reject the authority of.
Hare (1952: 164–165).
Compare Dreier (1990: 18–19).
Following Silk (2017), we might explore ways in which the first speaker pragmatically communicates (without semantically asserting) her acceptance or endorsement of the norm in some way, and use that to mark the way in which her usage of ‘ought’ inherits the normative status of her underlying judgment. However, I want to resist Silk’s (ibid: 226) suggestion that the only normative dimension in our ‘ought’-claims consists in implicated content about “what norms to accept”. It would be a very odd result if the only normative dimension to our speech concerned the second-order normative question of what norms (about what to do) to accept, and could not concern the first-order normative question of what to do. So instead I say that when the speaker accepts the relevant norms or standards, they accept the first-order ‘ought’-claim under a normative guise.
Someone might try to equate normative usages with aspirational ones by claiming that the person who uses the ‘ought’ of etiquette normatively must be thinking of the etiquette standards as mind-independent and objective. If that’s a psychological claim—as it needs to be for these purposes—I think it’s false. It’s psychologically possible to realize a set of standards is conventional but to treat it as having genuine normative authority—even if that’s a mistake.
Something like this seems to be implicit in the arguments of Enoch (2011: chs. 2–3).
Some naturalist realists such as Brink (1989) seem to think that one can.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful discussions and/or comments related to this paper, I’m grateful to Janice Dowell, Steve Finlay, Daniel Fogal, Chris Howard, Josh Knobe, John Pittard, Emmanuel Viebahn, Ralph Wedgwood, and three anonymous referees. I’m especially grateful to Daniel Wodak for very helpful written comments on a previous draft.
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Worsnip, A. ‘Ought’-contextualism beyond the parochial. Philos Stud 176, 3099–3119 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1165-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1165-9