In a series of publications Burgess, Plunkett and Sundell have developed a metalinguistic negotiation view that they call ‘Conceptual Ethics.’ I argue that their position adequately captures our intuition that some cases of value disputes are metalinguistic, but that they reverse the direction of justification when they state that speakers ‘negotiate’ the best use of a term or concept on the basis of its prior social role. Borrowing ideas from Putnam, I instead suggest distinguishing two meanings of (...) general terms and value predicates. Core meaning represents the lowest common denominator between speakers and is primarily based on our needs to coordinate behavior. In contrast to this, the noumenal meaning of a general term or value predicate is intended to capture an aspect of reality and represents what a term really means. Like many other disputes about theoretical terms, terms for abstract objects, and predicates, metalinguistic value disputes are about noumenal meaning on the basis of a shared core meaning. This direction towards reality is what sets the account apart from mere metalinguistic negotiation. (shrink)

The problem of value disagreement and contextualist, relativist and metalinguistic attempts of solving it are laid out. Although the metalinguistic account seems to be on the right track, it is argued that it does not sufficiently explain why and how disagreements about the meaning of evaluative terms are based on and can be decided by appeal to existing social practices. As a remedy, it is argued that original suggestions from Putnam's 'The Meaning of "Meaning"' (...) ought to be taken seriously. The resulting dual aspect theory of meaning can explain value disagreement in much the same way as it deals with disagreement about general terms. However, the account goes beyond Putnam's by not just defending a version of social externalism, but also defending the thesis that the truth conditional meaning of many evaluative terms is not fixed by experts either and instead constantly contested as part of a normal function of language. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes (...) a Stalnakerian theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

Many of our deepest disagreements turn on matters of definition. Philosophers discuss the definitions of knowledge, art, truth, and freedom, and social and political questions about personhood, health and disease, marriage and gender are also commonly thought of as turning in part on definitions. This book contributes to our understanding of how we engage with questions and disagreements of this kind. It argues that disputes about matters of definition are not just about the meanings of words or our concepts, and (...) they do not typically involve change of meaning. Instead, it develops a conception of definition on which engaging in an investigation or a discussion helps determine the meanings of our words without changing them; what is determined is the meaning our words had all along. This temporal externalist view—that what happens at the end of our investigation or discussion can play a role in determining what we meant and thought throughout—puts us in a position to see why typical ways we engage with questions of definition make sense, and are not confused or in need of revision. The book develops this style of view in unprecedented detail and shows how it helps make sense not only of definitional disputes, but also of disagreements about matters of taste (such as discussions of whether a particular food is delicious, or a certain film is funny.) Its defencse of temporal externalism includes powerful new criticisms of competing philosophical views about verbal dispute, metalinguistic negotiation, inconsistent concepts, conceptual engineering, and relativism. (shrink)

One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positivists say (...) might well then be true of one thing (e.g., law1) but false of another (e.g., law2). Accepting this thesis does not mean that the philosophers engaged in this dispute are “talking past each other” or engaged in a “merely verbal dispute” that lacks substance. I argue that participants in this dispute are sometimes arguing about what they should mean by the word “law” in the context at hand. This involves putting forward competing proposals about which concept the word “law” should be used to express. This is an issue in what I call “conceptual ethics.” This argument in conceptual ethics can be well worth having, given the connotations that the term “law” plays in many contexts, ranging from legal argument to political philosophy to social-scientific inquiry. Sometimes, I claim, philosophers (and ordinary speakers) engage in such argument tacitly by competing “metalinguistic” usages of the term “law”—usages of the term that express a view (in this case, a normative view) about the meaning of the word itself. In such cases, speakers on different sides of the positivism debate might in fact both speak truly, in terms of the literal (semantic) content of what they both say. Nonetheless, they may disagree in virtue of views in conceptual ethics about “law” that they express through the nonliteral content of what they say. These views in conceptual ethics often reflect further disagreements about issues that are not ultimately about words or concepts. These include foundational ones in ethics and politics about how we should live and what kind of institutions should govern our lives. My metalinguistic account of the dispute over legal positivism better equips us to identify what such issues are and to engage them more fruitfully. (shrink)

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 a semantics that allows contextual variance in the meanings of ‘ought’. (shrink)

Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on which (...) these disagreements have no “epistemic significance” because they are always faultless. This paper introduces an alternative strategy: accounting for disagreement in terms of “metalinguistic negotiation”. It argues that this strategy constitutes a better solution to the challenge disagreement poses for moral relativists because it leads to a nuanced understanding of the epistemic significance of moral disagreement between members of different communities. The upshot is a novel account of disagreement for moral relativists that has consequences for how moral relativism should be understood. (shrink)

This paper defends a particular view of explaining reasonable disagreement: the Conceptual View. The Conceptual View is the idea that reasonable disagreements are caused by differences in the way reasonable people use concepts in a cognitive process to make moral and political judgements. But, that type of explanation is caught between either an explanatory weakness or an unparsimonious and potentially self-undermining theory of concepts. When faced with deep disagreements, theories on the Conceptual View either do not have the resources to (...) explain them, or can only explain them by committing to a completely new theory of concepts where all moral and political concepts are a unique type of concept. This paper shows how the Conceptual View can avoid this dilemma by adopting what I dub the ‘Metalinguistic Strategy’ for explaining reasonable disagreement. The Metalinguistic Strategy uses recent innovations in the philosophy of language on metalinguistic negotiation to explain reasonable disagreements whether they be ordinary or deep disagreements as genuine disagreements whilst maintaining our ordinary ideas about concepts. (shrink)

According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than (...) its recent critics recognize, and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

According to the theory theory of metalinguistic disputes, disagreements in metalinguistic disputes are based on diverging underlying theories, opinions, or world views. An adequate description of metalinguistic disagreement needs to consider the compatibility and topics of such theories. Although topic continuity can be spelled out in terms of measurement operations, it is argued that even metalinguistic disputes about a term used in different, mutually compatible theories can be substantive because the dispute is indirectly about the virtues (...) of the underlying theories. The account is defended against externalist and holist objections. (shrink)

In constructing semantic theories of normative and evaluative terms, philosophers have commonly deployed a certain type of disagreement -based argument. The premise of the argument observes the possibility of genuine disagreement between users of a certain normative or evaluative term, while the conclusion of the argument is that, however differently those speakers employ the term, they must mean the same thing by it. After all, if they did not, then they would not really disagree. We argue that in many of (...) the cases in which this argument is deployed, the conclusion not only fails to follow from the premises, but is very likely false. Disagreements between speakers who do not mean the same things by their words are common, genuine, and not easily distinguished from ordinary disagreements over the truth of literally expressed content. We make this case by developing the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, an exchange in which speakers tacitly negotiate the proper deployment of some linguistic expression in a context. Metalinguistic negotiations express disagreements over information that is conveyed pragmatically and about what concepts should be deployed in the context at hand. We argue that neither of these features poses any obstacle to metalinguistic negotiations serving to express genuine, substantive disagreements that can be well worth engaging in. Contrary to what has been widely assumed in the literature, many normative and evaluative disputes—among ordinary speakers and even among philosophers themselves—may be of exactly this type, a conclusion with important consequences for both the subject matter and the methodology of metanormative theory. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and metaethicists are concerned with persistent normative and evaluative disagreements – how can we explain persistent intelligible disagreements in spite of agreement over the described facts? Tim Sundell recently argued that evaluative aesthetic and personal taste disputes could be explained as metalinguistic negotiations – conversations where interlocutors negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. I argue here that metalinguistic negotiations are neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine evaluative and normative disputes to (...) occur. A comprehensive account of value talk requires stronger metanormative commitments than metalinguistic negotiations afford. (shrink)

In previous work, we have developed the idea that, in some disputes, speakers appear to use (rather than mention) a term in order to put forward views about how that term should be used. We call such disputes “metalinguistic negotiations”. Herman Cappelen objects that our model of metalinguistic negotiation makes implausible predictions about what speakers really care about, and what kinds of issues they would take to settle their disputes. We highlight a distinction (which we have emphasized in (...) prior work) between the question of which disagreements speakers have vs. which disagreements are immediately expressed in a given linguistic exchange. Once this distinction is clear, we can appreciate that speakers who are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation (where certain issues in conceptual ethics are immediately expressed) can also disagree about other issues, including both other issues in conceptual ethics and “object-level” issues that aren’t about words or concepts. In many metalinguistic negotiations, speakers (we think correctly) care more about these other issues than they do about ones concerning the meaning of a word. Because of this, Cappelen’s objection fails to identify any data that challenge our model. (shrink)

In recent years, David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have published a series of interesting articles that made an original use of resources from linguistics and philosophy of language to reply to arguments for legal antipositivism, the thesis according to which moral or value facts are part of what determines what the law is in a given jurisdiction at a given time. Plunkett and Sundell’s strategy for resisting antipositivism appeals to the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, which incorporates the (...) notion of a metalinguistic or context disagreement. Sundell 2011 had argued that metalinguistic disagreements are a possible component of disputes about evaluative matters. A further notion deployed is that of conceptual ethics, an essential component of metalinguistic negotiations. This paper approaches a crucial concern about the deployment of both notions against disagreement-based arguments for legal antipositivism. Metalinguistic negotiations displace disagreements from the semantic to the metalinguistic level, but do not eliminate the appeal to moral or other normative reasons from legal disagreements. Conceptual ethics purports to be a normative activity, engaged with prescribing ways one ought to think and talk. On a broad understanding of legal reasoning and practice, metalinguistic negotiations and conceptual ethics are an integral part of it, and hence are consistent with evaluative and normative facts being essential to, and constitutive of, the law. Or so this paper argues. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of metalinguistic negotiation in lawyers’ and judges’ speech about the law. A speaker engages in metalinguistic negotiation when the speaker uses a term to advocate for what that term should mean or how it should be used relative to context. While I doubt that legal practitioners employ metalinguistic negotiation in the ways that David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have proposed, it is plausible that practitioners do so in another way. Specifically, I contend (...) that lawyers and judges sometimes use key terms in legal interpretation – e.g., ‘plain’, ‘meaning’, or ‘holding’ – to advocate for what those terms should mean or how courts should use them in adjudication. This suggests an intriguing role for metalinguistic negotiation in legal argumentation, one that could shed light on practitioners’ disputes in a range of cases dealing with constitutional, statutory, or common-law interpretation. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic (...) negotiation, speakers argue about such issues implicitly, via competing “metalinguistic” usages of terms. Here, we argue that some disputes involving generics are best thought of as metalinguistic negotiations, and that these cases can be illuminating for our more general theorizing about generics. Specifically, we argue that the “contextualist” theory of generics that one of us (Sterken) has developed in other work is best equipped to account for these metalinguistic negotiations, relative to other leading views of generics. We thus argue for a “package deal” view of generics: a view that combines Plunkett and Sundell’s account of metalinguistic negotiation with Sterken’s contextualist view of generics. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that metalinguistic negotiations are not as common as David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell assume. They make two related controversial claims: the claim that speakers don’t know what they say and the claim that they directly communicate metalinguistic contents. These two claims generate two challenges that the metalinguistic-negotiation view should meet. Firstly, it should clarify why speakers are oblivious to what they are saying and communicating, and secondly, it should explain the mechanism that (...) transforms what seems like a typical object-language disagreement into a metalinguistic dispute. I argue that the way in which Plunkett and Sundell meet these challenges is unsatisfactory. Regarding their answer to the first challenge, I’ll argue that the theoretical cost of postulating massive semantic and pragmatic blindness in otherwise competent speakers is too high. Regarding what they say in relation to the second challenge, I’ll claim that metalinguistic contents can only be conveyed when speakers uttering apparently contradicting claims know that they are using terms with different meanings. If my arguments are correct, then metalinguistic negotiations are certainly not ubiquitous. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that, at least, some metaphysical debates are ‘metalinguistic negotiations’. I will take the dispute between the dominant approaches of realism and the anti-realism ones about the ontological status of scientific models as a case-study. I will argue that such a debate may be better understood as a disagreement, at bottom normatively, motivated, insofar as a normative and non-factual question may be involved in it: how the relevant piece of language (...) ought to be used. Even though I will generally assess the prospects for a broadly deflationist approach, I shall outline a sense in which the dispute can be recast as ‘minimally substantive’. (shrink)

This paper is about philosophical disputes where the literal content of what speakers communicate concerns such object-level issues as ground, supervenience, or real definition. It is tempting to think that such disputes straightforwardly express disagreements about these topics. In contrast to this, I suggest that, in many such cases, the disagreement that is expressed is actually one about which concepts should be employed. I make this case as follows. First, I look at non-philosophical, everyday disputes where a speaker employs a (...) metalinguistic usage of a term. This is where a speaker uses a term to express a view about the meaning of that term, or, relatedly, how to correctly use that term. A metalinguistic negotiation is a metalinguistic dispute that concerns a normative issue about what a word should mean, or, similarly, about how it should be used, rather than the descriptive issue about what it does mean. I argue that the same.. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the connection between moral disagreement and moral relativism. Moral relativists, generally speaking, think both (i) that there is no unique objectively correct moral standard and (ii) that the rightness and wrongness of an action depends in some way on a moral standard accepted by some group or an individual. This chapter will first consider the metaphysical and epistemic arguments for moral relativism that begin from the premise that there is considerable amount of moral disagreement both within (...) individual societies and between them. The second half of the chapter, by contrast, focuses on the objection that moral relativism threatens to make us unable to have moral disagreements because it seems to make us speak past one another. This part of the chapter also evaluates relativist responses to this disagreement problem that rely on semantic opacity, disagreement in attitude, metalinguistic negotiations, and truth relativism. The chapter finally concludes by considering future directions of research in this area. (shrink)

Steven Hales and Jennifer Johnson—building off their (2014) work as well as Hales (2015, 2016)—have recently conducted two studies in Philosophical Psychology (2018) that show that there is a relationship between optimism and folk assessments of luck. Hales and Johnson use these results to argue that there is no such thing as luck. Instead, they claim that the concept is highly subjective and a cognitive illusion and that what we are in need of is an error theory. After reviewing Hales (...) and Johnson’s position, I levy four objections against their view. First, they ignore the fact that luck involves a chanciness condition. Second, their standards for what it means to be a useful philosophical theory are too high. Third, their view ignores the fact that there are various accounts of value in the literature and assumes a kind of relativism that few people would be willing to accept. Lastly, their error theory is not supported by the empirical evidence. Because of these problems, Hales and Johnson’s argument is not a serious threat to extant accounts of luck. (shrink)

Metaethical relativism is the view that whether a moral claim is true depends on the standards endorsed by an individual or society. This view is attractive because it allows one to hold that moral claims can be true or false in an ordinary correspondence sense, without being committed to the view that moral claims state objective facts. But what could it mean to say that a whether a moral claim is true depends on an individual or society’s standards? How could (...) a single claim be true or false in an ordinary sense, and yet be true for some people while false for others? This thesis defends a certain answer to this question: metaethical truth relativism. Metaethical relativists have historically endorsed a different view: content relativism, which is the view that the semantic contents of moral claims vary across contexts of use. However, semanticists working outside metaethics have recently shown that an alternative exists, namely truth relativism: the view that the truth values of moral contents vary across contexts. Metaethicists have been slow to investigate the significance of this discovery. This is surprising, because truth relativism appears to avoid some of the most influential objections to content relativist views. Thus, this development in semantics appears to offer an exciting new direction for research on relativism in metaethics. The scope of this thesis is not narrowly semantic, however. Questions in moral semantics often interconnect with questions in substantive metaethics, and the question of whether ethical thought and talk is semantically relativistic is no exception. Therefore, while the core of the this thesis focuses on moral semantics, it also contains a fair amount of substantive metaethical material, located primarily in the first and final chapters. The plan of the thesis is as follows. Chapters 1 & 2 begin with a discussion of the most historically influential argument for metaethical relativism: the argument from disagreement. Chapter 1 discusses an epistemic version of this argument, but concludes that this version provides only limited evidence for relativism. However, chapter 2 introduces a different version of the argument, with a more semantic focus, and begins to make the case that this argument provides evidence not only for metaethical relativism broadly construed, but for truth relativism in particular. The broad strokes of this argument are that there can be moral disagreements which are faultless and furthermore that only truth relativism can vindicate the sense that these are genuine disagreements, rather than mere differences of opinion. Chapter 2 presents empirical evidence for the claim that putative moral disagreements can be faultless. Chapters 3 and 4 then take a deep dive into the topic of disagreement. Chapter 3 develops a positive account of disagreement which is available only to truth relativists. And chapter 4 advances detailed arguments against contextualist accounts of disagreement. Chapters 3 and 4 together thus defend in detail the claim that truth relativism can, while content relativism cannot, account for the sense that there is genuine disagreement in the relevant cases. Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, form a single long argument for truth relativism. They show that there is a compelling argument for relativism broadly construed, and that deep analysis of the issues surrounding this argument favour truth relativism over content relativism. Chapter 5 zooms back out to the broader metaethical landscape, discussing two remaining objections to relativism. The first objection is that relativism has objectionably subjectivistic implications, and the second is that moral standards cannot helpfully be understood as determined by societies. In the course of responding to these objections, natural opportunities to flesh out the substantive metaethical commitments of the theory will arise. And this will set us up to conclude with a brief comparison of truth relativism with some of the other main options in the space of substantive metaethical theory. (shrink)

According to contextualist theories in metaethics, when you use a moral term in a context, the context plays an ineliminable part in determining what natural property will be the semantic value of the term. Furthermore, on subjectivist and relativist versions of these views, it is either the speaker's own moral code or her moral community's moral code that constitutes the reference-fixing context. One standard objection to views of this type is that they fail to enable us to disagree in (...) ordinary conversations. In this chapter, I develop a new response to this objection on the basis of Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies' notion of proposition clouds. I argue that, because we live in a multicultural society, the conversational contexts we face will fail to disambiguate between all the things we could mean. This is why we can at best put into play proposition clouds when we make moral utterances. All the propositions in such clouds are then available for rejection and acceptance on the behalf of our audiences. The norms of conversation then guide us to make informative contributions to the conversation - accept and reject propositions in a way that leads to co-ordination of action and choice. (shrink)

This paper defends negotiation as a way of rationally overcoming disagreements. Negotiation is a type of dialogue where the parties begin with a conflict and a need for cooperation, and their main goal is to make a deal as reported (Walton and Krabbe 1995, p 72). It has been discussed whether differences of opinion can be shifted from persuasion to negotiation dialogue. If two parties disagree, is it reasonable to overcome their disagreement by employing negotiation? Van Laar and Krabbe (2018a) (...) argue that negotiation is the correct way to settle disagreements when the parties arrive at a stalemate. Godden and Casey (2020) deny this. They argue that the goal of persuasion dialogue (to resolve a conflict by verbal means) can never be replaced by a bargaining procedure. This paper claims that shifts to negotiation are reasonable, but only if the shift meets two conditions. The practical condition requires the disagreement to be practical rather than theoretical, and the sacrifice condition requires that the parties freely agree to shift the dialogue to negotiation. When the parties do not meet these conditions, they commit fallacies such as ad consequentiam, ad baculum or the fallacy of middle ground. Finally, I argue that negotiation arises in practical argumentation when the parties assign different relative values to their goals. When this process occurs, we see negotiation as a small step within the practical argumentation process. Persuasion, deliberation and negotiation dialogue are, then, deeply intertwined and are sometimes indistinguishable. (shrink)

Our cultural disagreements can often be anticipated, negotiated and resolved using shared methods of moral reasoning. This claim is incompatible with any extreme version of communitarianism or strong ethical relativism, which hold that one's culture is the final arbiter of good, bad, right and wrong, or that the rights of the community should trump individual rights within that community. This view is discussed and found to be implausible using the example of common grounds for responding to different cultural views about (...) being truthful in medical practice. Its implausibility stems from difficulties individuating cultures, and accounting for intercultural goals, values and methods. Given our increasingly diverse populations, problems arise as clinicians from one culture try to care respectfully and compassionately for people from other groups. Yet working from shared values and goals, we can use some bridging methods such as discussing grim news in the third person. Claims that something is a cultural belief or attitude, moreover, cannot always be taken at face value. Various meanings of ‘multiculturalism’ are distinguished. (shrink)

In componential analysis, word meanings are (partly) decomposed into other meanings, and semantic and syntactic markers. Although a theory of word meaning based on such semantic decompositions remains compatible with the linguistic labor division thesis, it is not compatible with Kripke/Putnam-style indexical externalism. Instead of abandoning indexical externalism, a Separation Thesis is defended according to which lexical meaning need not enter the truth-conditional content of an utterance. Lexical meaning reflects beliefs about word meaning shared (...) in a speaker community, and these may rest on possibly erroneous world-level theories. It is argued that this type of lexical meaning is indispensable for explaining word composition processes and the rationality of metalinguistic disputes. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio (...) ad absurdum argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

I argue that relativists about evaluative language face some of the same objections as non-naturalists in ethics. If these objections are powerful, there is reason to doubt the existence of relative evaluative states of affairs. In they do not exist, then relativism leads to an error theory. This is unattractive, as the position was specifically designed to preserve the truth of many evaluative claims.

I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of (...) metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

While “meaning negotiation” has become an ubiquitous term, its use is often confusing. A negotiation problem implies not only a convenience to agree, but also diverging interest on what to agree upon. It implies agreement but also the possibility of disagreement. In this chapter, we look at meaning negotiation as the process through which agents starting from different preferred conceptual representations of an object, an event or a more complex entity, converge to an agreement through some communication medium. (...) We shortly sketch the outline of a geometric view of meaning negotiation, based on conceptual spaces. We show that such view can inherit important structural elements from game theoretic models of bargaining – in particular, in the case when the protagonists have overlapping negotiation regions, we emphasize a parallel to the Nash solution in cooperative game theory. When acceptable solution regions of the protagonists are disjoint, we present several types of processes: changes in the salience of dimensions, dimensional projections and metaphorical space transformations. None of the latter processes are motivated by normative or rationality considerations, but presented as argumentation tools that we believe are used in actual situations of conceptual disagreement. (shrink)

Different notions of truth imply and encourage different ideals of thinking, knowledge, meaning, and learning. Thus, these concepts have fundamental importance for educational theory and practice. In this paper, I intend to draw out and clarify the notions of truth, knowledge and meaning that are implied by P4C's pedagogical ideals. There is some disagreement amongst P4C theorists and practitioners about whether the community of inquiry implies either relativism or absolutism. I will argue that both relativism and absolutism are (...) incompatible with P4C, as neither one of them can facilitate all of P4C's ideals of reflective thinking, community, fallibilism, care, open-mindedness, empathy, and meaningfulness. I will argue that P4C incorporates Dewey's middle ground position between relativism and absolutism. (shrink)

'Epistemic' accounts of vagueness argue that so called 'borderline' cases of a term actually always do (or don't) fall within that term's extension. What makes the case borderline is that this fact may be unknowable. Such epistemic theories have traditionally been taken to be unable to accommodate the intuitive connection between meaning and use. However, it will be argued here that if one endorses a type of 'Temporal Externalism' about meaning (according to which future linguistic developments can (...) help determine the semantic values of our current utterances), then one can both endorse epistemic accounts of vagueness and hold on to the traditional tie between meaning and use. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one right logic. A particular version of the view, what is sometimes called domain-specific logical pluralism, has it that the right logic and connectives depend somehow on the domain of use, or context of use, or the linguistic framework. This type of view has a problem with cross-framework communication, though: it seems that all such communication turns into merely verbal disputes. If two people approach the same domain with different logics (...) as their guide, then they may be using different connectives, and hence talking past each other. In this situation, if we think we are having a conversation about “¬A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot A$$\end{document}”, but are using different “¬\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot $$\end{document}”s, then we are not really talking about the same thing. The communication problem prevents legitimate disagreements about logic, which is a bad result. In this paper I articulate a possible solution to this problem, without giving up pluralism, which requires adopting a notion of metalinguistic negotiation, and allows people to communicate and disagree across domains/contexts/frameworks. (shrink)

Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theory—of (...) it turning out, on account of the diversity of agents' relevant dispositions, that nothing is really a value, since nothing is disposed to elicit R in everybody. Alternatively, there is a danger of an objectionable fragmentation of value, according to which there is no such thing as a value simpliciter, but only valuesme and valuesyou, valuesus and valuesthem. I advocate a de se relativist version of a dispositional theory of value. If we go for this sort of de-se-ified dispositional theory, we get to keep our theoretical goodies, but we avoid the problem of nonconvergence that leads to a danger of either collapse into an error theory, or else talking-past, and a loss of common subject matter. (shrink)

Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ?Socrates? means ?the bearer of ?Socrates??). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nominal description theory. We can make significant progress on (...) Frege's puzzle and Plato's beard without committing ourselves one way or the other on the semantic values of proper names. The view on offer can also be motivated by analogy with Tarski's schema T, inviting the idea that the equivalence between a name and the associated nominal description has more to do with the semantics of representational locutions than it does with names per se. My response to the modal argument exploits the Kripkean distinction between reference at a world and reference in a world, and can be accepted by metalinguistic descriptivists and Millians alike. (shrink)

Introduction -- Wittgenstein's early conception of value -- An outline of tractarian ontology -- Value, the self, and the mystical -- The lecture on ethics -- Language-games, the private language argument and aspect psychology -- Language-games -- The private language argument -- Aspect psychology -- The soul and attitudes towards the living -- Wittgenstein's general conception of the soul -- Ilham Dilman on the soul and seeing-as -- Religious contexts -- J.B. Watson and the denial of the soul (...) -- Attitudes towards other minds and forms of life -- The soul and the face -- Aspect blindness and dawning -- Particularism, rule-following, and evaluations -- David McNaughton on the property of humanity and particularism -- John McDowell on rule-following and values -- Peter Winch on moral particularism -- The meaning and value of the religious point of view -- Wittgenstein on Frazer's golden bough -- Truth in religion -- Wittgenstein on art : reactions and causes -- Aesthetics, causes, and natural history -- A contemporary evolutionary account of aesthetic value -- Neuro-scientific accounts -- Aesthetic realism and the definition of art -- Aesthetic historicism and relativism -- Institutional and historical theories of art -- Forms of life, moral truth, and justification -- Cora Diamond on forms on seeing-as theory and imagination -- Paul Johnston on moral justification and truth -- D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce on the justification of morality -- Doubt and certainty : framework beliefs and core values -- An overview of certainty -- Avrum Stroll, Anthony O'Hear , and Cyril Barrett on certainty and value -- Cultural relativism and institutional embodiment -- Peter Winch on cultural relativism -- Sabina Lovibond on moral facts and institutional embodiment -- Cyril Barrett on cultural relativism -- Conclusion: How to do things with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

According to content-relativist theories of moral language, different speakers use the same moral sentences to say different things. Content-relativism faces a well-known problem of lost disagreement. Recently, numerous content-relativists (including the author) have proposed to solve this problem by appeal to various kinds of non-content-based, or broadly pragmatic, disagreement. This presents content-relativists with a new problem—of found agreement. Which (if any) of these newly identified kinds of conflict is correctly identified as the lost moral disagreement we were looking for? This (...) paper offers a critical comparison of different content-relativist proposals. It divides them into two broad categories, quasi-expressivist theories (QED) and metalinguistic theories (MLD). Objections to each are considered, and QED is tentatively found to be superior. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this (...) temporal externalist view, speaker behaviours such as retraction of previous assertions play a role in making it the case that a past utterance has a given meaning. (shrink)

Suppose we have a persistent disagreement about a particular set of policy options, not because of an underlying moral disagreement, or a mere conflict of interest, but rather because we disagree about a crucial non-normative factual assumption underlying the justification of the policy choices. The main question in the paper is what political legitimacy requires in such cases, or indeed whether there are defensible answers to that question. The problem of political legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements has received almost no (...) attention in political philosophy, which has focused mostly on value disagreements and proposed theories of legitimate coercive legislation in valuedependent disagreements. The paper presents an argument showing that under certain plausible assumptions regarding legitimacy, there are serious difficulties in identifying legitimate choices in fact-dependent policy disagreements. This may be unsurprising to political philosophers preoccupied with value-based disagreements, perhaps because it has been assumed that legitimacy-related concerns are irrelevant to fact-dependent policy disagreements. The paper argues that this response is premature. If we should care about legitimacy et al.l, then it is by no means clear why we should ignore issues of legitimacy in policy-disputes that depend on factual disagreements. The paper ends by defining a set of possibilities that merit further exploration in search of a theory of legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the plausibility of metaethical relativism, or more specifically, what I call “moral truth-value relativism”: the idea that the truth of a moral statement or belief depends on who utters or has it, or who assesses it. According to the most prevalent variants of this view in philosophical literature – “standard relativism” – the truth-values are relative to people’s moralities, often understood as some subset of their affective or desirelike attitudes. Standard relativism has two main contenders: absolutism (...) – the view that the truth-values of moral statements and beliefs do not vary in that way – and non-cognitivism – the view that moral judgements do not have truth-values, since they express affective or desire-like attitudes rather than beliefs. Almost the entire dissertation concerns the plausibility of standard relativism in contrast to absolutism. Part 1 examines first the two main arguments for standard relativism: that it accounts for the connection between moral judgements and motivation (chapter 2), and for the prevalence of diversity of moral opinion (chapter 3). Then the most common objection is considered: that it is inconsistent with the existence of genuine moral disagreements (chapter 4). I argue that these arguments are inconclusive. Both relativism and absolutism can account for the features discussed. Part 2 focuses on the fact that different people have different strongly held intuitions about the relative or absolute nature of morality. I argue that given a common methodological approach in philosophy and metaethics, which takes such intuitions as evidence of correct analyses, this difference in intuitions suggests that neither a relativist nor absolutist analysis can be correct for everyone’s moral judgements. I argue that this result holds both given semantic internalism (chapter 6) and given semantic externalism (chapter 7). To get one single analysis of everyone’s moral judgements we would have to abandon the intuitionbased methodology. In chapter 8, however, I argue that we can maintain this methodology if we accept analysis pluralism, the view that different analyses hold for different people’s moral judgements. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the view that some ontological disputes are “metalinguistic negotiations”, and to make sense of the significance of these controversies in a way that is still compatible with a broadly deflationist approach. I start by considering the view advocated by Eli Hirsch to the effect that some ontological disputes are verbal. I take the Endurantism–Perdurantusm dispute as a case-study and argue that, while it can be conceded that the dispute is verbal at (...) the object-level, this does not rule out the possibility of a non-verbal disagreement at the metalinguistic level. I then explore the metalinguistic dispute hypothesis by seeing how it can be defended from a first objection playing on the idea of inter-translatability, as well as a second objection raising the question of equal theoretical virtues. (shrink)

Some philosophers and historians of science have suggested that the meanings of scientific terms change in the course of the history of science in such a way that the comparison of successive theories becomes impossible. This claim of "incommensurability", usually associated with Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, has attracted attention for its relativist and anti-rationalist implications. It would seem to make the choice between two theories into a random affair, not one of direct comparison. ;The principal attempts to defeat this (...) claim are based either on Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam's causal theory of reference, first proposed as an account of the reference of proper names, or on Donald Davidson's general argument that all languages are inter-translatable. However, the former is inappropriate as a reply to incommensurability and the latter must be modified before it can serve as a procedure for theory-comparison. After looking at these two replies in detail, the dissertation proposes a method for comparing theories. ;Davidson's argument against incommensurability is adapted so that his interpretive method can serve as the basis of a procedure for comparing scientific theories. Certain constraints on interpretation are spelt out in order to arrive at a unique way of isolating the agreements and disagreements among theories. The main attraction of the interpretive approach is that it consists of a descriptional account of meaning which is also holistic. That is to say, it identifies a term from one theory with a term from another on the basis of the overlap between the two theories, but without relying on the analytic-synthetic distinction. ;A number of case studies are used to demonstrate how theories can be compared and their concepts matched up. One of the consequences of this approach is that transitivity in the translation of concepts will generally break down. But that does not force an anti-realist position in the philosophy of science. To justify this claim, a discussion of scientific taxonomy is undertaken and criticisms are made of the essentialist conception of natural kinds. (shrink)

The contemporary consensus in analytic philosophy concerning cultural relativism is: it is impossible to formulate relativism coherently, diversity does not provide good reason for accepting relativist conclusions anyway, and if relativism is false, or incoherent, then cross-cultural disagreement, however intractable, raises no important epistemological challenge. I challenge every aspect of this consensus in the light of contemporary theories of reference and knowledge, focussing on various traditional cultures' supernatural explanations of illness. ;I defend the coherence of relativism against standard objections, arguing (...) that: it is possible to make sense of the claim that a sentence has different truth-conditions in different frameworks, while, in significant respects, retaining the same meaning; cultural relativism does not rule out the possibility of rational discussion between distinct cultural traditions; even self-referential relativist theses are neither self-refuting nor self-undermining. I suggest a distinctive way of arguing from cross-cultural differences to relativism, which is plausible, though inconclusive. ;I then argue that the alternative to relativism about rationally irresolvable cross-cultural disagreement is skepticism. Far from undermining the anthropological challenge to the objective justification of our beliefs--as might be thought--naturalistic epistemology and semantics themselves provide reasons to appreciate the force of this challenge, though they require us to rethink its nature. Reliability of belief production or regulation is not sufficient to provide knowledge, or even justification, in cases in which rival methods of belief assessment pose salient alternatives and there is no "neutral" reason for supposing one method to be more reliable. If, as I argue, neutral reasons for rejecting traditional methods of witchcraft detection are not available, then we do not know that witches do not exist. The resulting skepticism, however, would be a fairly circumscribed one. Most scientific beliefs we ordinarily take to be well confirmed--including beliefs about unobservable entities--remain so on the standards I defend. What proves less epistemically secure are the deeper metaphysical commitment to materialism and naturalism associated with Western science, commitments underlying our rejection of supernatural explanations of illness. (shrink)

Despite their important applications in metrology and in spite of numerous experimental demonstrations, weak measurements are still confusing for part of the community. This sometimes leads to unjustified criticism. Recent papers have experimentally clarified the meaning and practical significance of weak measurements, yet in Kastner, Kastner seems to take us many years backwards in the the debate, casting doubt on the very term “weak value” and the meaning of weak measurements. Kastner appears to ignore both the basics (...) and frontiers of weak measurements and misinterprets the weak measurement process and its outcomes. In addition, she accuses the authors of Aharonov et al. in statements completely opposite to the ones they have actually made. There are many points of disagreement between Kastner and us, but in this short reply I will leave aside the ontology and focus mainly on the injustice in her criticism. I shall add some general comments regarding the broader theory of weak measurements and the two-state-vector formalism, as well as supporting experimental results. Finally, I will point out some recent promising results, which can be proven by projective measurements, without the need of employing weak measurements. (shrink)

The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between (...) linguistic conservatives and reformers who are speaking different languages. The objection generalises to metalinguistic approaches to e.g. moral disagreements. This paper discusses the Babel objection and shows how to dispel it. (shrink)

Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, they nevertheless face difficulty in accounting for the intuitive limits of faultless disagreement. Second, I develop a new non-relativist theory which can (...) account for the full range of data regarding faultless disagreement. This view—‘Humean Absolutism’—integrates two of Hume’s central principles from Of the Standard of Taste into a truth-conditional framework, resulting in a non-bivalent theory of aesthetic truth. I argue that Humean Absolutism can underwrite the possibility of faultless disagreement whilst retaining reasonable limits around the phenomenon. I close by relating this positive account of faultless disagreement to broader issues concerning the cognitive role of truth-value gaps. -/- *NB - this is an unpublished paper and is no longer in progress.*. (shrink)

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. -/- This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue (...) for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. -/- Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists. (shrink)

Misunderstanding occurs between speakers when they disagree about the meaning of words in use. In the case of truth-values, Frege took these to be referents of sentences which consist of classes of accepted (i.e. “true”) or rejected (i.e. “false”) sentences. From this usual depiction of truth and falsity, a general algebraic framework is proposed to systematize the use of truth-values from a dialogical point of view of logic. A special attention will be paid to two radically opposed pseudo-speakers: Heraclites (...) and Nagarjuna, according to whom truth-values respectively refer to everything or nothing. Finally, dialectical (pseudo-Hegelian) negation will be rendered as a very special function: an ontological object-forming operator, similar to the arithmetic successor-forming operator Sn+1(x) on integers and consistent within our generalized theory of truth-values as variable referents. (shrink)

Pragmatism's founder, C. S. Peirce, initially envisioned philosophy as a means of rationally validating our beliefs and actions. Afterward, William James changed pragmatism into a way of undermining commitment to rational cogency. With the subsequent turn of various contemporary pragmatisms to relativism and subjectivism, such irrational tendencies have become still more prominent. Vagaries of Value aims to create a version of realistic and rationalistic pragmatism that is systemically viable and does justice to traditional pragmatism's salient insights. Nicholas Rescher strives (...) to return pragmatism to its realistic and objectivistic roots in a detailed survey of issues across the whole board of philosophical thought, action, and evaluation. Rescher argues that the crisis of pragmatism created by today's subjective tendencies should be met by adopting not a revisionary, but a reconstructive understanding of pragmatism, keeping close to its Peircean roots. He argues that such a turning does not mitigate against the pragmatic program's practical orientation, but provides an opportunity for sharpening our understanding of how pragmatism can and should be developed. (shrink)

This paper gives a critical evaluation of the philosophical presuppositions and implications of two current schools in the sociology of knowledge: the Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes; and the Constructivism of Latour and Knorr-Cetina. Bloor's arguments for his externalist symmetry thesis (i.e., scientific beliefs must always be explained by social factors) are found to be incoherent or inconclusive. At best, they suggest a Weak Programme of the sociology of science: when theoretical preferences in a scientific community, SC, are first (...) internally explained by appealing to the evidence, e, and the standards or values, V, accepted in SC, then a sociologist may sometimes step in to explain why e and V were accepted in SC. Latour's story about the social construction of facts in scientific laboratories is found to be misleading or incredible. The idea that scientific reality is an artifact turns out to have some interesting affinities with classical pragmatism, instrumentalism, phenomenology, and internal realism. However, the constructivist account of theoretical entities in terms of negotiation and social consensus is less plausible than the alternative realist story which explains consensus by the preexistence of mind-independent real entities. The author concludes that critical scientific realism, developed with the concept of truthlikeness, is compatible with the thesis that scientific beliefs or knowledge claims may be relative to various types of cognitive and practical interests. However, the realist denies, with good reasons, the stronger type of relativism which takes reality and truth to be relative to persons, groups, or social interests. (shrink)