Metaethics for Neo-Pragmatists: A Pragmatic Account of Linguistic Meaning for Moral Vocabulary

Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this dissertation, I aim to develop and defend a novel, pragmatist approach to foundational questions about meaning, especially the meaning of deontic moral vocabulary. Drawing from expressivists and inferentialists, I argue that meaning is best explained by the various kinds of norms that govern the use of a vocabulary. Along with inferential norms, I argue we must extend our account to discursive norms that govern normative statuses required to felicitously utter certain speech-acts—norms of authority—and the transitions in normative statuses affected by speech-acts—pragmatic norms. These structural discursive norms differentiate discursive practices and account for distinctive features such as objectivity and motivational import that some have and others lack. The structure exhibited by a practice is then explained in terms of its utility, making it possible to see how different discursive practices are answerable to the different needs and purposes of the discursive beings who use them. I call the resulting explanatory framework a pragmatic analysis of linguistic meaning (PALM). Turning my attention to moral “ought,” I argue that the structural discursive norms of moral discourse differentiate it from other objective discourses, like empirical discourse, on the one hand, and from other normative discourses, like prudential discourse, on the other. Drawing on work in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, I complete the PALM with an account of moral discourse a meta-normative practice with a metacoordinative function. Its utility for the discursive beings who use it lies in its enabling them to remedy certain tensions and instabilities that arise in their other coordinative, normative practices in a way that minimizes the risk of domination by alpha-type freeriders, the fracturing of social groups, and individual defection from cooperative endeavors. In the final two chapters, I leverage the account to defend a pragmatist-friendly notion of objectivity in terms of a structure of distributed epistemic authority according to which no claim within a practice is ultimately authoritative or immune from challenge and to reconcile this sense of objectivity with a persistent pressure toward a kind of relativism that restricts the standing to make moral claims to members of the relevant communities.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Morals, meaning and truth in Wittgenstein and Brandom.Jordi Fairhurst - 2019 - Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin 9 (8).
Queries and Assertions in Minimally Discursive Practices.Jared A. Millson - 2014 - Questions, Discourse and Dialogue: 20 Years After Making It Explicit, Proceedings of Aisb50.
Expressing Rules.Giacomo Turbanti - 2017 - Phenomenology and Mind 13:168-174.
Naturalism and Normativity.John Garde Fennell - 2000 - Dissertation, Northwestern University
On participation and membership in discursive practices.Kenneth Shockley - 2006 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (1):67-85.
Normative Pragmatism, Interpretationism, and Discursive Recognition.Joshua Wretzel - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Research 42:379-398.
Ideology, Discursive Norms and Rationality.Christopher J. Sturr - 1998 - Dissertation, Cornell University
Speaker Meaning and Conventional Meaning in Legal Norms.Boyan Bahanov - 2022 - Philosophical Alternatives 31 (1):120-138.
Moral inferentialism and the Frege-Geach problem.Mark Douglas Warren - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (11):2859-2885.
Contingency and reason. Some Habermasian reflections on a-legality.Stefan3 Rummens - 2014 - Universita Degli Studi di Trieste-Dispartimento di Filosofia 16 (2):981-992.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-03-24

Downloads
363 (#50,504)

6 months
84 (#44,745)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Thomas Wilk
Widener University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Trust, Communities, and the Standing To Hold Accountable.Thomas Wilk - 2017 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (S2):1-22.

Add more references