Semantic Normativity and Semantic Causality

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3):626-645 (2017)
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Abstract

Semantic normativism, which is the view that semantic properties/concepts are some kind of normative properties/concepts, has become increasingly influential in contemporary meta-semantics. In this paper, I aim to argue that semantic normativism has difficulty accommodating the causal efficacy of semantic properties. In specific, I raise an exclusion problem for semantic normativism, inspired by the exclusion problem in the philosophy of mind. Moreover, I attempt to show that the exclusion problem for semantic normativism is peculiarly troublesome: while we can solve mental-physical exclusion by adopting the so-called ‘autonomy approach’, a similar autonomy solution to semantic exclusion is implausible if semantic properties are understood as normative properties.

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Lei Zhong
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Citations of this work

Taking Emergentism Seriously.Lei Zhong - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1):31-46.
Mental causation, compatibilism and counterfactuals.Dwayne Moore - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (1):20-42.
Semantic supervenience.Luca Gasparri - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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