Emotions and Incommensurable Moral Concepts

Philosophy ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Randel Koons
Keyword(s):  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Concept ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Moral Realist ◽  
Epistemic Role

Many authors have argued that emotions serve an epistemic role in our moral practice. Some argue that this epistemic connection is so strong that creatures who do not share our affective nature will be unable to grasp our moral concepts. I argue that even if this sort of incommensurability does result from the role of affect in morality, incommensurability does not in itself entail relativism. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that one must share our emotions and concerns to be able to apply our moral concept successfully. Finally, I briefly investigate whether the moral realist can seek aid and comfort from Davidsonian arguments to the effect that incommensurability in ethics is in principle impossible, and decide that these arguments are not successful. I conclude that the epistemic role our emotions play in moral discourse does not relativize morality.

Moral Disagreement and Reason-Giving

2021 ◽  
pp. 82-105
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
General Pattern ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Moral Claim ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Constitutive Function ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Attitudes

According to practical expressivism, moral disagreement is a species of disagreement in attitude whereby agents have moral commitments that advocate incompatible policies of action and reaction. This follows from a unified general account of disagreement as involving mental states that cannot collectively fulfil their constitutive functions, and the practical expressivist hypothesis that the constitutive function of moral attitudes is to advocate and reinforce collective patterns of action and reaction. To reason in favour of a moral claim is to cite a feature of the world to which the related moral attitude is a response, typically in order to alter the attitudes of others. Further, the constraint of ascriptive supervenience and a standing preference for ‘guiding’ over ‘goading’ in moral discussion make sense in light of the practical function that practical expressivism attributes to moral practice. A general pattern for some aspects of moral discourse can be discerned, and this pattern can be applied to the phenomenon of moral avoidability.

scholarly journals Eleventh Graders’ Increasingly Elaborate Language Use for Disentangling Amount and Change: A Case Study on the Epistemic Role of Syntactic Language Complexity

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Prediger ◽  
Dilan Şahin-Gür
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Language Complexity ◽  
Test Items ◽  
Challenging Tasks ◽  
Eleventh Graders ◽  
Epistemic Role ◽  
Communicative Role

AbstractThe syntactic dimension of academic language has often been studied with respect to students’ difficulties with syntactic features in mathematical textbooks and test items, and these studies have contributed to understanding the communicative role of language. In contrast, the epistemic role of students’ language use has mainly been explored in lexical and discourse dimensions. This research has shown that higher order cognitive demands require more elaborate language means. The aim of this article is to contribute to theorizing the epistemic role of syntactic language complexity by means of a topic-specific investigation using the mathematical topic of qualitative calculus, i.e., the informal meanings of amount and change. In order to do this, the learning process study presented in this article investigates 18 eleventh graders’ conceptual pathways while dealing with challenging tasks on amount and change. The identification of different syntactic complexities in students’ utterances provides an overview of the variance of possible phrase structures. Further, it shows that successive conceptual conciseness requires either increasing syntactic complexity or conceptual condensation. So increasing elaborateness in the lexical and syntactic dimensions seem to compensate each other.

The Epistemic Role of Technical Functions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Preston
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Biological Functions ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
The Common ◽  
Technical Functions ◽  
Analysis Of Function ◽  
Epistemic Role ◽  
Special Case ◽  
The Continuum

Technical functions of artifacts are commonly distinguished from their social functions and from biological functions of organisms. Schemes for classifying functions often encounter what the author calls the continuum problem—the imperceptible merger of function kinds. This is a special case of a debate about natural kinds in philosophy of science, which has resulted in a turn to an epistemological construal of kinds, in contrast to the traditional, purely ontological construal. The author argues for an epistemic analysis of function kinds along the lines of John Dupré’s (1993) “promiscuous realism.” This provides leverage for asking new and important questions about the epistemic purposes served by our various schemes for classifying artifact functions, and about the epistemic role of technical functions in particular. The author argues that the common classification into technical, social, and biological functions has more disadvantages than it has advantages.

scholarly journals The Role of the Holy Will

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Callanan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Moral Perfection ◽  
Immoral Action ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractIt is well known that Kant uses the notion of the holy will in the Groundwork so as to contrast it with the finite wills of human beings. It is less clear, however, what function this contrast is supposed to perform. I argue that one role of the holy will is to illustrate transcendental idealism’s account of the relation between moral knowledge and moral practice. The position is one intended to negotiate between ostensibly competing traditions. Kant uses the holy will as a way of endorsing the metaphysical picture of the scholastic tradition’s so-called ‘ethics of freedom’, whereby the ideal of moral perfection is conceived as the perfection of one’s power of freedom to the point where one is constitutively incapable of immoral action. This position is married however with the claim that the holy will’s inaccessibility to human cognition motivates a subject-oriented moral epistemology more usually associated with Enlightenment humanism. I conclude by claiming that the nuanced role for the holy will can be understood as part of Kant’s expansion of the value of religious faith [Glaube] to the domain of practical inquiry in general.

Information Requirements and the Characteristics of Sales Situations

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Mooradian
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Information Requirements ◽  
Adequate Model ◽  
Information Giving ◽  
Broad Framework ◽  
Sales Agents ◽  
Epistemic Role

Abstract:The focus of this paper is the ethics of information giving in the context of complex sales. It is argued that, while current theories provide a broad framework for describing the responsibilities of sales agents, they lack adequate descriptions of the conditions characteristic of complex sales situations. Without an adequate model of complex sales, ethical theories will fail to provide guidance to sales agents facing issues that arise from features of sales situations not accounted for in the theories. To motivate this claim, I develop a brief case study in the area of information system sales. The problem can be remedied, however, if the theories take into account the features of complex sales. A tentative list of such features is presented and their relevance to the case is discussed. One of the most important to emerge is the epistemic role of the buyer as the judge of competing information.

The Epistemic Role of Core Cognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 129 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Jenkin
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Picture Perception ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Object Representations ◽  
Basing Relation ◽  
The Core ◽  
Core Cognition ◽  
Epistemic Role

According to a traditional picture, perception and belief have starkly different epistemic roles. Beliefs have epistemic statuses as justified or unjustified, depending on how they are formed and maintained. In contrast, perceptions are “unjustified justifiers.” Core cognition is a set of mental systems that stand at the border of perception and belief, and has been extensively studied in developmental psychology. Core cognition's borderline states do not fit neatly into the traditional epistemic picture. What is the epistemic role of these states? Focusing on the core object system, the author argues that core object representations have epistemic statuses like beliefs do, despite their many prototypically perceptual features. First, the author argues that it is a sufficient condition on a mental state's having an epistemic status as justified or unjustified that the state is based on reasons. Then the author argues that core object representations are based on reasons, through an examination of both experimental results and key markers of the basing relation. The scope of mental states that are subject to epistemic evaluation as justified or unjustified is not restricted to beliefs.

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