This category needs an editor. We encourage you to help if you are qualified.
Volunteer, or read more about what this involves.
Related

Contents
125 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 125
  1. All Reasons Are Moral.Daniel Muñoz - manuscript
    Morality doesn't always require our best. Prudent acts and heroic sacrifices are optional, not obligatory. To explain this, some philosophers claim that reasons of self-interest must have a special "non-moral" significance. A better explanation, I argue, is that we have prerogatives based in rights.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  2. Modals, Contextual Parameters, and the Modal Uniformity Hypothesis.Daniel Skibra - manuscript
    There is a common assumption in the semantics of modal auxiliaries in natural language; in utterances of MOD φ , where MOD is a modal and φ is the prejacent, context determines the particular flavor of modality expressed by the modal. Such is the standard contextualist semantics of Kratzer and related proposals. This winds up being a problem, because there is a significant class of modals which have constraints on the admissible modal flavor that are not traceable to context. For (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. The Language of Reasons and 'Ought'.Aaron Bronfman & J. L. Dowell - forthcoming - In Daniel Star (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Reasons.
    Here we focus on two questions: What is the proper semantics for deontic modal expressions in English? And what is the connection between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons? Our contribution towards thinking about the first, which makes up the bulk of our paper, considers a representative sample of recent challenges to a Kratzer-style formal semantics for modal expressions, as well as the rival views—Fabrizio Cariani’s contrastivism, John MacFarlane’s relativism, and Mark Schroeder’s ambiguity theory—those challenges are thought to motivate. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  4. Deontic Modals and Probability: One Theory to Rule Them All?Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. Oxford University Press.
    This paper motivates and develops a novel semantic framework for deontic modals. The framework is designed to shed light on two things: the relationship between deontic modals and substantive theories of practical rationality and the interaction of deontic modals with conditionals, epistemic modals and probability operators. I argue that, in order to model inferential connections between deontic modals and probability operators, we need more structure than is provided by classical intensional theories. In particular, we need probabilistic structure that interacts directly (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  5. Deontic Logic and Natural Language.Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - In Dov Gabbay, Ron van der Meyden, John Horty, Xavier Parent & Leandert van der Torre (eds.), The Handbook of Deontic Logic (Vol. II). College Publications.
    There has been a recent surge of work on deontic modality within philosophy of language. This work has put the deontic logic tradition in contact with natural language semantics, resulting in significant increase in sophistication on both ends. This chapter surveys the main motivations, achievements, and prospects of this work.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  6. On the Agent-Relativity of 'Ought'.Junhyo Lee - forthcoming - Analysis.
    In the standard theory of deontic modals, ‘ought’ is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern’s puzzle about deontic ‘ought’, according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern’s challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Sequent Calculi and Interpolation for Non-Normal Modal and Deontic Logics.Eugenio Orlandelli - forthcoming - Logic and Logical Philosophy:1.
    G3-style sequent calculi for the logics in the cube of non-normal modal logics and for their deontic extensions are studied. For each calculus we prove that weakening and contraction are height-preserving admissible, and we give a syntactic proof of the admissibility of cut. This implies that the subformula property holds and that derivability can be decided by a terminating proof search whose complexity is in Pspace. These calculi are shown to be equivalent to the axiomatic ones and, therefore, they are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Normativity in Language and Law.Alex Silk - forthcoming - In David Plunkett, Kevin Toh & Scott Shapiro (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  9. The Onus in 'Ought'.Mahrad Almotahari & Brian Rabern - 2023 - Analysis 83 (1):13-21.
    We present a puzzle about deontic modals. An adequate resolution requires abandoning the standard theory. What to replace it with isn’t clear. We consider two possibilities.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10. Noncognitivism without expressivism.Bob Beddor - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):762-788.
    According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  11. Putting Oughts Together.David Boylan - 2023 - Semantics and Pragmatics 16.
    Consistent Agglomeration says that, when φ and ψ are consistent, ⌜ought φ ⌝ and ⌜ought ψ⌝ entail ⌜ought (φ ∧ ψ)⌝; I argue this principle is valid for deontic, but not epistemic oughts. I argue no existing theory predicts these data and give a new semantics and pragmatics for ought: ought is an existential quantifier over the best partial answers to some background question; and presupposes that those best partial answers are pairwise consistent. In conjunction with a plausible assumption about (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Vanilla Rules: the "No Ice Cream" Construction.Felix Frühauf, Hadil Karawani, Todor Koev, Natasha Korotkova, Doris Penka & Daniel Skibra - 2023 - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 27:209-227.
    This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as "No ice cream" or "Dogs on leash only". DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. A puzzle about scope for restricted deontic modals.Brian Rabern & Patrick Todd - 2023 - Snippets 44:8-10.
    Deontic necessity modals (e.g. 'have to', 'ought to', 'must', 'need to', 'should', etc.) seem to vary in how they interact with negation. According to some accounts, what forces modals like 'ought' and 'should' to outscope negation is their polarity sensitivity -- modals that scope over negation do so because they are positive polarity items. But there is a conflict between this account and a widely assumed theory of if-clauses, namely the restrictor analysis. In particular, the conflict arises for constructions containing (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14. Ought Implies Can Or Could Have.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (4):779-807.
    The moral principle that Ought Implies Can (“OIC”) is often assumed without argument in normative discourse. Is this assumption defensible? Some would argue that it is not, as there are many purported counterexamples against it in the literature. However, OIC is not so much a single principle as rather a family of them. In this paper, I will argue that, while not every OIC-type principle is defensible, at least one of them may be. I defend the cognate moral principle that (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. Metalinguistic negotiations in moral disagreement.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (3):352-380.
    The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  16. ‘Must’ implies ‘can’.Miklós Kürthy, Fabio Del Prete & Luca Barlassina - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (3):620-643.
    An open question in the semantics of modality is what relations there are among different modal flavours. In this article, we consider the thorny issue of whether ascribing to an agent the obligation to φ implies that it is possible for the agent to φ. Traditionally, this issue has been interpreted as whether ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. But another linguistic interpretation is available as well, namely, whether ‘must’ implies ‘can’ (MIC). We show that ‘must’ does imply ‘can’ via a convergent argument. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. Weak and Strong Necessity Modals: On Linguistic Means of Expressing "A Primitive Concept OUGHT".Alex Silk - 2022 - In Billy Dunaway & David Plunkett (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard. pp. 203-245.
    This paper develops an account of the meaning of `ought', and the distinction between weak necessity modals (`ought', `should') and strong necessity modals (`must', `have to'). I argue that there is nothing specially ``strong'' about strong necessity modals per se: uses of `Must p' predicate the (deontic/epistemic/etc.) necessity of the prejacent p of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent ``weakness'' of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing whether the necessity of the prejacent is verified in the actual world. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  18. Ought and agency.Daniel Skibra - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-40.
    A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which traces (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  19. Error, Consistency and Triviality.Christine Tiefensee & Gregory Wheeler - 2022 - Noûs 56 (3):602-618.
    In this paper, we present a new semantic challenge to the moral error theory. Its first component calls upon moral error theorists to deliver a deontic semantics that is consistent with the error-theoretic denial of moral truths by returning the truth-value false to all moral deontic sentences. We call this the ‘consistency challenge’ to the moral error theory. Its second component demands that error theorists explain in which way moral deontic assertions can be seen to differ in meaning despite necessarily (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  20. Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse.Pekka Vayrynen - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (2).
    Many normative judgments play a practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is natural to wonder whether the phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic. The standard assumption in moral philosophy is that at least terms which can be used to express “thin” normative concepts – such as 'good', 'right', and 'ought' – are associated with certain practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But this view is rarely given explicit defense (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  21. Inheritance: Professor Procrastinate and the logic of obligation1.Kyle Blumberg & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):84-106.
    Inheritance is the principle that deontic `ought' is closed under entailment. This paper is about a tension that arises in connection with Inheritance. More specifically, it is about two observations that pull in opposite directions. One of them raises questions about the validity of Inheritance, while the other appears to provide strong support for it. We argue that existing approaches to deontic modals fail to provide us with an adequate resolution of this tension. In response, we develop a positive analysis, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  22. Consequences of Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):70-98.
    We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  23. A Problem for Frankfurt Examples.Samuel J. M. Kahn - 2021 - Southwest Philosophy Review 37 (1):159-167.
    In this paper I intend to raise a problem for so-called Frankfurt examples. I begin by describing the examples and what they are used for. Then I describe the problem.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. “Ought” and Intensionality.Junhyo Lee - 2021 - Synthese 199:4621-4643.
    The syntactic structure of the deontic “ought” has been much debated in philosophy and linguistics. Schroeder argues that the deontic “ought” is syntactically ambiguous in the sense that it can be associated with either a control or raising construction. He distinguishes between deliberative and evaluative “ought”s and argues that the deliberative “ought” is control while the evaluative “ought” is raising. However, if there is a control sense of “ought,” it implies that there is a sense of “ought” in which the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  25. Pejoratives & Oughts.Teresa Marques - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (3):1109-1125.
    Chris Hom argued that slurs and pejoratives semantically express complex negative prescriptive properties, which are determined in virtue of standing in external causal relations to social ideologies and practices. He called this view Combinatorial Externalism. Additionally, he argued that Combinatorial Externalism entailed that slurs and pejoratives have null extensions. In this paper, I raise an objection that has not been raised in the literature so far. I argue that semantic theories like Hom’s are forced to choose between two alternatives: either (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  26. Knowledge of Objective 'Oughts': Monotonicity and the New Miners Puzzle.Daniel Muñoz & Jack Spencer - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):77-91.
    In the classic Miners case, an agent subjectively ought to do what they know is objectively wrong. This case shows that the subjective and objective ‘oughts’ are somewhat independent. But there remains a powerful intuition that the guidance of objective ‘oughts’ is more authoritative—so long as we know what they tell us. We argue that this intuition must be given up in light of a monotonicity principle, which undercuts the rationale for saying that objective ‘oughts’ are an authoritative guide for (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  27. Imperative Bilateralism.Kai Tanter - 2021 - In Martin Blicha & Igor Sedlár (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2020. College Publications. pp. 237-252.
    This paper provides a proof-theoretic account of imperative logical consequence by generalising Greg Restall’s multiple conclusion bilateralism for declarative logic. According to imperative bilateralism, a sequent Γ ⊢ Δ is valid iff jointly commanding all the imperatives Φ ∈ Γ and prohibiting all the imperatives Ψ ∈ Δ clashes. This account has three main virtues: (1) it provides a proof-theoretic account of imperatives; (2) it does not rely on the controversial notion of imperative inference; and (3) it is neutral regarding (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms.Pekka Väyrynen - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 28 (3):505-530.
    Normative naturalism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine: there are normative facts and properties, and these fall into the class of natural facts and properties. Many objections to naturalism rely on additional assumptions about language or thought, but often without adequate consideration of just how normative properties would have to figure in our thought and talk if naturalism were true. In the first part of the paper, I explain why naturalists needn’t think that normative properties can be represented or ascribed in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  29. Permissibility Is the Only Feasible Deontic Primitive.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2020 - Philosophical Perspectives 34 (1):117-133.
    Moral obligation and permissibility are usually thought to be interdefinable. Following the pattern of the duality definitions of necessity and possibility, we have that something’s being permissible could be defined as its not being obligatory to not do it. And that something’s being obligatory could be defined as its not being permissible to not do it. In this paper, I argue that neither direction of this alleged interdefinability works. Roughly, the problem is that a claim that some act is obligatory (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  30. Nominalizations: The Case of Nominalizations of Modal Predicates.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - In Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullman, Thomas Ede Zimmermann & Daniel Gutzmann (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Semantics. New York: Wiley.
    Nominalizations of modal predicates have received little, if any, attention in the semantic or philosophical literature. This paper will argue that nominalizations of modal predicates require recognizing a novel ontological category of modal objects and it will outline a new semantics of modals based on modal objects.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  31. Truthmaker Semantics for Natural Language: Attitude Verbs, Modals, and Intensional Transitive Verbs.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - Theoretical Linguistics 3:159-200.
    This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their semantics. This paper is (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  32. Infinite options, intransitive value, and supererogation.Daniel Muñoz - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (6):2063-2075.
    Supererogatory acts are those that lie “beyond the call of duty.” There are two standard ways to define this idea more precisely. Although the definitions are often seen as equivalent, I argue that they can diverge when options are infinite, or when there are cycles of better options; moreover, each definition is acceptable in only one case. I consider two ways out of this dilemma.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  33. Future Orientation on an Event-Relative Semantics for Modals.Daniel Skibra - 2020 - In Maggie Baird (ed.), NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society: Volume 3. Amherst, MA: GLSA, Dept. of Linguistics. pp. 149-162.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  34. Some Constraints on Contextualism About Modals.Daniel Skibra - 2020 - In Tadeusz Ciecierski & Pawel Grabarczyk (eds.), The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. pp. 295-315.
    The following paradigm, most closely associated with the work of Angelika Kratzer, dominates the literature on the semantics of modals: MUST is a universal quantifier over a contextually determined set of worlds, where ⌜MUST.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  35. A Preference Semantics for Imperatives.William B. Starr - 2020 - Semantics and Pragmatics 20.
    Imperative sentences like Dance! do not seem to represent the world. Recent modal analyses challenge this idea, but its intuitive and historical appeal remain strong. This paper presents three new challenges for a non-representational analysis, showing that the obstacles facing it are even steeper than previously appreciated. I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics. Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives. This (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  36. "Ought" and Error.Christine Tiefensee - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (2):96-114.
    The moral error theory generally does not receive good press in metaethics. This paper adds to the bad news. In contrast to other critics, though, I do not attack error theorists’ characteristic thesis that no moral assertion is ever true. Instead, I develop a new counter-argument which questions error theorists’ ability to defend their claim that moral utterances are meaningful assertions. More precisely: Moral error theorists lack a convincing account of the meaning of deontic moral assertions, or so I will (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  37. Deontic Modality in Rationality and Reasoning.Alessandra Marra - 2019 - Dissertation, Tilburg University
    The present dissertation investigates certain facets of the logical structure of oughts – where “ought” is used as a noun, roughly meaning obligation. I do so by following two lines of inquiry. The first part of the thesis places oughts in the context of practical rationality. The second part of the thesis concerns the inference rules governing arguments about oughts, and specifically the inference rule of Reasoning by Cases. These two lines of inquiry, together, aim to expound upon oughts in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38. Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought.Jacob M. Nebel - 2019 - Mind 128 (510):459-484.
    I defend the view that a reason for someone to do something is just a reason why she ought to do it. This simple view has been thought incompatible with the existence of reasons to do things that we may refrain from doing or even ought not to do. For it is widely assumed that there are reasons why we ought to do something only if we ought to do it. I present several counterexamples to this principle and reject some (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  39. Anankastic conditionals are still a mystery.Milo Phillips-Brown - 2019 - Semantics and Pragmatics 12 (13):1-17.
    ‘If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train’ doesn’t look special. Yet a compositional account of its meaning, and the meaning of anankastic conditionals more generally, has proven an enigma. Semanticists have responded by assigning anankastics a unique status, distinguishing them from ordinary indicative conditionals. Condoravdi & Lauer (2016) maintain instead that “anankastic conditionals are just conditionals.” I argue that Condoravdi and Lauer don’t give a general solution to a well-known problem: the problem of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  40. ‘Ought’-contextualism beyond the parochial.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):3099-3119.
    Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  41. Decision-theoretic relativity in deontic modality.Nate Charlow - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (3):251-287.
    This paper explores the idea that a semantics for ‘ought’ should be neutral between different ways of deciding what an agent ought to do in a situation. While the idea is, I argue, well-motivated, taking it seriously leads to surprising, even paradoxical, problems for theorizing about the meaning of ‘ought’. This paper describes and defends one strategy—a form of Expressivism for the modal ‘ought’—for navigating these problems.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  42. Clause-Type, Force, and Normative Judgment in the Semantics of Imperatives.Nate Charlow - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal Daniel Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 67–98.
    I argue that imperatives express contents that are both cognitively and semantically related to, but nevertheless distinct from, modal propositions. Imperatives, on this analysis, semantically encode features of planning that are modally specified. Uttering an imperative amounts to tokening this feature in discourse, and thereby proffering it for adoption by the audience. This analysis deals smoothly with the problems afflicting Portner's Dynamic Pragmatic account and Kaufmann's Modal account. It also suggests an appealing reorientation of clause-type theorizing, in which the cognitive (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  43. Needing and Necessity.Guy Fletcher - 2018 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 170-192.
    Claims about needs are a ubiquitous feature of everyday practical discourse. It is therefore unsurprising that needs have long been a topic of interest in moral philosophy, applied ethics, and political philosophy. Philosophers have devoted much time and energy to developing theories of the nature of human needs and the like. -/- Philosophers working on needs are typically committed to the idea that there are different kinds of needs and that within the different kinds of needs is a privileged class (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  44. The Free Choice Permission as a Default Rule.Daniela Glavaničová - 2018 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 25 (4):495-516.
    It is quite plausible to say that you may read or write implies that you may read and you may write (though possibly not both at once). This so-called free choice principle is well-known in deontic logic. Sadly, despite being so intuitive and seemingly innocent, this principle causes a lot of worries. The paper briefly but critically examines leading accounts of free choice permission present in the literature. Subsequently, the paper suggests to accept the free choice principle, but only as (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  45. An object‐based truthmaker semantics for modals.Friederike Moltmann - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):255-288.
    Possible worlds semantics faces a range of difficulties for at least certain types of modals, especially deontic modals with their distinction between heavy and light permissions and obligations. This paper outlines a new semantics of modals that aims to overcome some of those difficulties. The semantics is based on an a novel ontology of modal objects, entities like obligations, permissions, needs, as well as epistemic states, abilities, and essences. Moreover, it is based on truthmaking, in the sense of Fine’s recent (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  46. Justification as faultlessness.Bob Beddor - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):901-926.
    According to deontological approaches to justification, we can analyze justification in deontic terms. In this paper, I try to advance the discussion of deontological approaches by applying recent insights in the semantics of deontic modals. Specifically, I use the distinction between weak necessity modals and strong necessity modals to make progress on a question that has received surprisingly little discussion in the literature, namely: ‘What’s the best version of a deontological approach?’ The two most obvious hypotheses are the Permissive View, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  47. Deontic Modals.Jennifer Carr - 2017 - In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. Routledge. pp. 194-210.
    This chapter provides a selective survey of prominent theories of the semantics of deontic modals in logic and natural language. We focus on Kratzer’s (1977; 1981; 1991) semantics and extensions to this analysis. Kratzer’s semantics has been far and away the most influential theory of deontic modals, which provide a base case for the interpretation of normative language in general. Understanding the logic and truth-conditions of normative language is one of the core areas of metaethics. It informs our understanding of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  48. Truth-assessment Methodology and the Case against the Relativist Case 1 a gainst Contextualism about Deontic Modals.J. L. Dowell - 2017 - Res Philosophica 94 (3):325-357.
    Recent challenges to Kratzer’s canonical contextualist semantics for modal expressions are united by a shared methodological practice: Each requires the assessment of the truth or warrant of a sentence in a scenario. The default evidential status accorded these judgments is a constraining one: It is assumed that, to be plausible, a semantic hypothesis must vindicate the reported judgments. Fully assessing the extent to which these cases do generate data that puts pressure on the canonical semantics, then, requires an understanding of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  49. Cognitive Products and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs and Deontic Modals.Friederike Moltmann - 2017 - In Friederike Moltmann & Mark Textor (eds.), Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 254-289.
    This paper outlines a semantic account of attitude reports and deontic modals based on cognitive and illocutionary products, mental states, and modal products, as opposed to the notion of an abstract proposition or a cognitive act.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  50. Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty.John Pittard & Alex Worsnip - 2017 - Mind 126 (501):155-193.
    We offer a new argument in favour of metanormative contextualism, the thesis that the semantic value of a normative ‘ought’ claim of the form ‘ S ought to Φ’ depends on the value of one or more parameters whose values vary in a way that is determined by the context of utterance. The debate over this contextualist thesis has centred on cases that involve ‘ought’ claims made in the face of uncertainty regarding certain descriptive facts. Contextualists, relativists, and invariantists all (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
1 — 50 / 125