Moral language and thought

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Susana Nuccetelli
Keyword(s):  
Moral Language ◽  
Language And Thought

Expressivism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark van Roojen
Keyword(s):  
Good Evidence ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Tight Connection ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cognitive Attitudes ◽  
Descriptive Language

Expressivism is a kind of noncognitivism, usually about morality. And noncognitivism is a metaethical theory, that is a theory about the subject matter of morality, about the nature of moral thought and about the meaning of moral language. Noncognitivist theories of ethics and morality contrast with cognitivist theories of ethics, according to which moral language and thought is continuous with other descriptive language and thought, which represents the world to be a certain way. Insofar as the idea is to contrast moral language with ordinary descriptive language, noncognitivists must give us an account of how moral thought and language do function. That account must make sense of moral thought and talk and be consistent with how people in fact think and talk about moral matters. Expressivism is perhaps the dominant contemporary strategy for providing that story. Expressivism suggests that the function of moral language is to express desire like attitudes. The fact that moral language does so is supposed to explain the intuitively tight connection between moral opinion and action – that people’s actions provide good evidence about the morality they accept. And it is supposed also to explain why moral terms cannot be translated into nonmoral language, as G.E. Moore alleged in his influential Principia Ethica The general expressivist strategy is to explain these and other features of moral language by correlating moral sentences with the attitudes they are apt to express. The thought is that we can use these states of mind to explain what these sentences mean. Expressivism thus extends the project of the early emotivists, who along with prescriptivists developed the two main early varieties of noncognitivism. Expressivists and emotivists agree that simple indicative moral sentences are conventional devices for the expression of pro and con attitudes as opposed to cognitive attitudes such as belief. Contemporary expressivists have not repudiated emotivism; rather, they have developed it. Most are quasi-realist insofar as they have aimed to generate a systematic account of moral language that vindicates everyday moral practice. They have thus gone some way beyond their emotivist predecessors in generating accounts of more complex sentences that contain moral terms. And they have often been more specific about the attitudes expressed and about the sense in which attitude expression can be used to explain the meanings of moral terms.

Class in Thatcherite Ideology and Rhetoric

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Classless Society ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines Thatcherite rhetoric about class and individualism. Thatcher needed to distance herself from her own, narrow, upper-middle-class image; she also wanted to rid politics of class language, and thought that class was—or should be—irrelevant in 1980s Britain because of ‘embourgeoisement’. For Thatcher, ‘bourgeois’ was defined by particular values (thrift, hard work, self-reliance) and she wanted to use the free market to incentivize more of the population to display these values, which she thought would lead to a moral and also a prosperous society. Thatcherite individualism rested on the assumption that people were rational, self-interested, but also embedded in families and communities. The chapter reflects on what these conclusions tell us about ‘Thatcherism’ as a political ideology, and how these beliefs influenced Thatcherite policy on the welfare state, monetarism, and trade unionism. Finally, it examines Major’s rhetoric of the ‘classless society’ in the 1990s.

The Metaphysics of Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Final Layer ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
The One

What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.

Reality and Morality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Dunaway
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Realist View

This book develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality. It argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms, an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism. And it elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to an explanation of possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in this book can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favor.

Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the “Doctrine of Essence”

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
The World

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

The Prehistory and Analogues of Hesiod’s Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua T. Katz
Keyword(s):  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Holistic Understanding

Hesiod’s indebtedness to Near Eastern material is more frequently discussed than the Indo-European background of his poetry. This chapter argues for a holistic understanding of how Indo-European prehistory and Near Eastern analogues contribute together to the formation of Hesiodic language and thought. Concentrating on Theogony 35, ἀλλὰ τίη μοι ταῦτα περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην;, “But what are these things about a tree or a rock to me?,” I demonstrate that this enigmatic question encapsulates Hesiod’s role as mouthpiece at the head of the simultaneously Indo-European- and Near Eastern-based tradition of Greek poetry. By means of artful phonology here and throughout the proem, Hesiod highlights, in ways not previously noticed, the quite different sounds of the melodious Muses and their loud-thundering father, Zeus, who, like the Near Eastern storm god, has a robust association with prophetic oaks and stones.

scholarly journals Playing ethics and teaching morality: how wittgenstein could help us to apply games to the moral living

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Janyne Sattler
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Moral Engagement

ABSTRACT: In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations the notion of a 'language game' gives human communication a regained flexibility. Contrary to the Tractatus, the ethical domain now composes one language game among others, being expressed in various types of sentences such as moral judgments, imperatives and praises, and being shared in activity by a human form of life. The aim of this paper is to show that the same moves that allow for a moral language game are the ones allowing for learning and teaching about the moral living, where persuasion takes the place of argument by means of a plural appeal. For this purpose, literature would seem to be one of the best tools at our disposal. As a way of exemplifying our moral engagement to literature I proceed at last to a brief analysis of Tolstoy's Father Sergius, to show how playing this game would help us accomplish this pedagogical enterprise.

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