This paper introduces and defends a high-level generalization about the way that presupposition triggers interact with attitude verbs. This generalization tells us a great deal about what an adequate account of presupposition would have to look like. And it reveals one underappreciated way that presupposition is philosophically interesting.
Attributing Error Without Taking a StandMoral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error.It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories. 1 This paper is about whether, and if so, how, error theorists can avoid this charge.As we will understand it, the charge that the error theory is a position in first-order moral theory can be understood as the charge that it entails taking a stand on some claims within first-order moral theory. Some critics of the error theory may have in mind something stronger, and in our view, clearly false -namely that this makes the error theory normative rather than metaethical. 2 But we have no objections to the idea that a thesis may be metaethical and also have first-order normative consequences. If a thesis has content that is both normative and metaethical, of course, it can't fairly be judged to be true by the standards of normative ethical theory alone -for it should also be beholden to the standard of metaethics. But critics who charge that the error theory has commitments in normative ethics are not claiming that the error theory can be shown to be true by the standards of normative ethics. Rather, they are claiming that it can be shown to be false by those standards.Consider, for example, this argument, against Mackie's error theory:1. Gratuitous infliction of pain is morally wrong. 2. If gratuitous infliction of pain is morally wrong, there are objectively prescriptive facts. 3. If Mackie's error theory is true, there aren't objectively prescriptive facts. 4. So Mackie's error theory isn't true.Mackie insists on premise two, as a conceptual truth about moral judgment. And premise three is just a description of his error theory. So it seems like premise one has to be false if Mackie's error theory is true.1 Here we are thinking, for example, of Dworkin [1996] and Kramer [2009]. Kramer: "the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through non-ethical reasoning" [2009, 1]. 2 Again, this is suggested by much of the language in Dworkin [1996].However, premise one is favored by the sort of evidence that we tend to acknowledge when we're doing normative ethics. (It's intuitively plausible, and it coheres with other moral claims that we tend to accept, and so on.) If we could rely on premise one in arguing against some theory in normative ethics, we would take ourselves to have a powerful argument against that theory. Do we have the same kind of argument against Mackie's error theory? Some error theorists might say that we do -but insist that the argument isn't compelling in either case.But our question in this paper is more systematic: can an error theorist take this kind of argument to be less compelling against her than it is against a theory in normative ethics? As a first...
Hybrid metaethical theories have significant promise; they would have important upshots if they were true. But they also face severe problems. The problems are severe enough to make many philosophers doubt that they could be true. My ambition is to show that the problems are just instances of a highly general problem: a problem about what are sometimes called ‘intensional anaphora'. I'll also show that any adequate explanation of intensional anaphora immediately solves all the problems for the hybrid theorist. We should regard hybrid tools as among the most legitimate tools in our toolkit—at least when we use them properly.
According to a highly natural, orthodox view, epistemic modals like might and must are contextually variable, allowing us to express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. This view (contextualism about epistemic modals) is the orthodox one because the only other ways of making sense of how epistemic expressions are sensitive to information (views like relativism, expressivism, and dynamicism) carry such unorthodox commitments. Yet it has faced more than its share of challenges. In this paper, I will argue that two important challenges for contextualism about epistemic modals receive the very same solution: one problem about disagreement, and one problem about the reasonableness of our epistemic beliefs. The first of these challenges is very familiar, and the second less so, but equally important.
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