Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (2):1-24 (2017)
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Abstract |
Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas non-naturalists are unable to provide equally satisfactory metasemantic explanations. This article first describes how the previous non-naturalist accounts of reference fail to tell us how the normative predicates could have come to refer to the non-natural properties rather than to the natural ones. I will then use the so-called qua-problem to show how the causal theories of reference of naturalists also fail to fix the reference of normative predicates to unique natural properties. Finally, I will suggest that, just as naturalists need to rely on the non-causal mechanism of reference magnetism to solve the previous problem, non-naturalists, too, can rely on the very same idea to respond to the pressing metasemantic challenges that they face concerning reference.
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Keywords | Metaethics Non-Naturalism Reference Reference Magnetism Metasemantics |
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DOI | 10.26556/jesp.v11i2.111 |
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References found in this work BETA
Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1984 - MIT Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Representation, Deflationism, and the Question of Realism.Camil Golub - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
Normative Commitments in Metanormative Theory.Pekka Väyrynen - 2019 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 193-213.
Getting a Moral Thing Into a Thought: Metasemantics for Non-Naturalists.Preston J. Werner - 2020 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 140-169.
Metasemantics and Boydian Synthetic Moral Naturalism.Xinkan Zhao - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11161-11178.
Why Conceptual Competence Won’T Help the Non-Naturalist Epistemologist.Preston J. Werner - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):616-637.
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