A semantic challenge to non-realist cognitivism

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 569-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Copp
Keyword(s):  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Normative Realism ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Orthodox View

AbstractRecently, some philosophers have attempted to escape familiar challenges to orthodox nonnaturalist normative realism by abandoning the robust metaphysical commitments of the orthodox view. One such view is the ‘Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalism’ or ‘Non-Realist Cognitivism’ proposed by Derek Parfit and a few others. The trouble is that, as it stands, Non-Realist Cognitivism seems unable to provide a substantive non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. The paper considers various strategies one might use to address the challenge. There is a rich field of views that are cognitivist and non-realist. But the paper is skeptical of the prospects of Non-Realist Cognitivism.

scholarly journals Can Theists Avoid Epistemological Objections to Moral (and Normative) Realism?

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-312
Author(s):  
Justin Morton ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Moral Skepticism ◽  
Normative Realism ◽  
Important Constraint ◽  
Moral Claims

Epistemological objections to moral realism allege that realism entails moral skepticism. Many philosophers have assumed that theistic moral realists can easily avoid such objections. In this article, I argue that things are not so easy: theists run the risk of violating an important constraint on replies to epistemological objections, according to which replies to such objections may not rely on substantive moral claims of a certain kind. Yet after presenting this challenge, I then argue that theists can meet it, successfully replying to the objections without relying on the problematic kinds of substantive moral claims. Theists have a distinctive and plausible reply to epistemological objections to moral (and, in fact, normative) realism.

Aboutness

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Library Science ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Made In

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

Mechanisms and Causation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter motivates a theory of causation according to which causal claims are existential claims about mechanisms. The chapter begins with a review of the variety of causal claims, emphasizing the differences between singular and general claims, and between claims about causal production and claims about causal relevance. I then argue for singularism—the view that the truth-makers of general causal claims are facts about collections of singular and intrinsic causal relations, and specifically facts about the existence of particular mechanisms. Applying this account, I explore possible truth conditions for causal generalizations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between mechanistic and manipulability approaches to causation. I argue that Woodward’s manipulability account provides valuable insights into the meaning of causal claims and the methods we use to assess them, but that the underlying truth-makers for the counterfactuals in that account are in fact mechanisms.

Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Demographic Variables ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Early Archaic ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Orthodox View

The orthodox view of ancient Mediterranean slavery holds that Greece and Rome were the only ‘genuine slave societies’ of the ancient world, that is, societies in which slave labour contributed significantly to the economy and underpinned the wealth of elites. Other societies, labelled as ‘societies with slaves’, apparently made little use of slave labour, and have therefore been largely ignored in recent work. Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800–146 BC presents a radically different view. Slavery was indeed particularly highly developed in Greece and Rome; but it was also highly developed in Carthage and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and played a not insignificant role in the affairs of elites in Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. This new study portrays the Eastern Mediterranean world as a patchwork of regional slave systems. In Greece, diversity was the rule: from the early archaic period onwards, differing historical trajectories in various regions shaped the institution of slavery in manifold ways, producing very different slave systems in regions such as Sparta, Crete, and Attica. In the wider Eastern Mediterranean world, we find a similar level of diversity. Slavery was exploited to different degrees across all of these regions, and was the outcome of a complex interplay between cultural, economic, political, geographic, and demographic variables.

Causal Idealism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relation ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Causal Judgments

This chapter argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, is at least as attractive as several contemporary views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. The chapter discusses three such views: contextualism, which holds that truth conditions for causal judgments are contextual; contrastivism, which holds that the causal relation is a quaternary relation between a cause, an effect, and contextually specified contrast classes for the cause and the effect; and pragmatism, which holds that causal claims are sensitive to pragmatic factors. This chapter suggests that causal idealism has at least as much explanatory strength as these three theories, and is more parsimonious and internally stable.

Challenging the Modern Synthesis

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Modern Synthesis ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
New Biology ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Orthodox View

Since its origin in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis theory of evolution has grown to represent the orthodox view on the process of organic evolution. It is a powerful and successful theory. Its defining features include the prominence it accords to genes in the explanation of development and inheritance, and the role of natural selection as the cause of adaptation. Since the advent of the 21st century, however, the modern synthesis has been subject to repeated and sustained challenges. In the last two decades, evolutionary biology has witnessed unprecedented growth in the understanding of those processes that underwrite the development of organisms and the inheritance of characters. The empirical advances usher in challenges to the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory. Many current commentators charge that the new biology of the 21st century calls for a revision, extension, or wholesale rejection of the modern synthesis theory of evolution. Defenders of the modern synthesis maintain that the theory can accommodate the exciting new advances in biology, without forfeiting its central precepts. The original essays collected in this volume—by evolutionary biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of biology—survey and assess the various challenges to the modern synthesis arising from the new biology of the 21st century. Taken together, the essays cover a spectrum of views, from those that contend that the modern synthesis can rise to the challenges of the new biology, with little or no revision required, to those that call for the abandonment of the modern synthesis.

Problematic Political Consumerism

2018 ◽  
pp. 698-720
Author(s):  
Michele Micheletti ◽  
Didem Oral
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Type Model ◽  
Political Consumerism ◽  
Research Challenges ◽  
Moral Claims

Typically, political consumerism is portrayed in straightforward, unproblematic ways. This chapter discusses how and why political consumerism—and particularly boycotts—can be confusing and problematic. Theoretically it focuses on moral dilemmas within political consumerism and the key role of overriding moral claims in the motivations for and actions of political consumer causes. An ideal type model, constructed for analyzing unproblematic and problematic political consumerism, is applied to cases of more unproblematic political consumerism (e.g., the Nestlé, Nike, and South African boycotts) and more problematic political consumerism (e.g., the Disney boycott and the movement against Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestine territories). The chapter also addresses why other forms of political consumerism (buycotts and discursive actions) seem less vulnerable to moral dilemmas as well as the research challenges in studying more problematic cases of political consumerism.

scholarly journals The Beholder’s Eyes: Audience Reactions to Organizational Self-claims of Authenticity

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 237802311879303 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Lehman ◽  
Balázs Kovács ◽  
Glenn R. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Major Part ◽  
Online Reviews ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Category Type ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Made In

Organizations normally benefit from being perceived as authentic. Yet an ongoing puzzle persists about self-claims of authenticity: although the weight of findings suggests that individuals will devalue organizations touting themselves as authentic, some findings suggest that such self-claims may be rewarded. The authors suggest that this puzzle can be answered, at least partly, by considering two fundamental but different meanings of authenticity. The authors posit that individuals will react negatively when claims concern being true to a category (“type authenticity”), whereas they will react positively when claims concern being true to the organization’s values (“moral authenticity”). A major part of this reasoning involves the emotional reactions evoked by moral claims. In study 1, authenticity claims made in the texts of 1,393 restaurant menus and corresponding ratings of 449,919 online reviews from 2009 to 2016 were analyzed. Study 2 involved an experiment to examine reactions to the two kinds of claims separately. The findings generally support the argument and apparently help explain audience reactions to organizational self-claims about authenticity.

scholarly journals A DEFENSE OF HUMEAN PROPERTY THEORY

Legal Theory ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Ira K. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Humean Theory

ABSTRACT Two rival approaches to property rights dominate contemporary political philosophy: Lockean natural rights and egalitarian theories of distributive justice. This article defends a third approach, which can be traced to the work of David Hume. Unlike Lockean rights, Humean property rights are not grounded in pre-institutional moral entitlements. In contrast to the egalitarian approach, which begins with highly abstract principles of distributive justice, Humean theory starts with simple property conventions and shows how more complex institutions can be justified against a background of settled property rights. Property rights allow people to coordinate their use of scarce resources. For property rules to serve this function effectively, certain questions must be considered settled. Treating existing property entitlements as having prima facie validity facilitates cooperation between people who disagree about distributive justice. Lockean and egalitarian theories endorse moral claims that threaten to unsettle property conventions and undermine social cooperation.

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