Meaning of 'Ought' (eBook)

Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics

Matthew Chrisman (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2015
320 Seiten
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-936301-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation of their meaning. But Chrisman argues that this leaves important metasemantic questions about what it is in virtue of which ought-sentences have the meanings that they have unanswered. His appeal to inferentialism aims to provide a viable anti-descriptivist but also anti-expressivist answer to these questions. This is a remarkably bold and interesting book. Chrisman challenges nothing less than the entire conceptual framework within which most previous metaethics (and indeed, much other contemporary philosophy) has been done, and advances a very ambitious rethinking of the theoretical space. It's not only ambitious, but also extremely imaginative and smart, and Chrisman's scholarship is at a rare level, as he has assimilated a literature that is unusually broad both in terms of field and historical scope. -Stephen Finlay, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.9.2015
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Sprachphilosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-19-936301-3 / 0199363013
• ISBN-13: 978-0-19-936301-8 / 9780199363018