A Third Way in Metaethics

Abstract

What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like 'is the right thing to do'? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competent speakers must grasp a particular criterion for identifying the property picked out by the term. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that these difficulties derive from a shared background assumption that competence conditions must be explained in terms of a determinate conceptual role. We propose a new way of characterizing competence with evaluative terms: what's required for competence is participation in a shared epistemic practice with a term. Our approach, we argue, better explains the nature of evaluative inquiry and the extent of disagreement about evaluative questions.

Communicating content

“…Putnam, (and later Tyler Burge (1979)) convincingly argued that this is the case even if that thinker cannot distinguish between beech and elm trees, since a thinker could possess concepts that are vague or inaccurate 5 : it is possible to be a competent concept user whilst entertaining idiosyncratic beliefs that substantially diverge from the prevailing beliefs falling under that concept (e.g. Burge, 1979;Schroeter and Schroeter, 2009). (X)'s non-metalinguistic beliefs and abilities do not fix the extension of their concept ELM.…”

Reasons as right-makers

“…Some theorists may hold that thin normative terms like 'reason' or 'right' are amenable to a traditional descriptivist treatment. We believe such an account would be highly implausible (for our take on the semantics of normative terms, see Schroeter and Schroeter 2009). 4.…”

Intuitions about Disagreement Do Not Support the Normativity of Meaning

“…Yet even if meanings are psychologically "internal" concepts or senses, concepts may not be transparent to their possessors (Jackson 1998, Chapters 2-3;and 2004, 272ff (Jackson 1998, Chapter 3;and Schroeter and Schroeter, 2009). Similarly, we can correctly apply concepts and terms without being able to explain how we identify instances.…”

“…In any case, Moorean openness could simply be a reflection of the fact that two speakers could express the same concept, but have different theories on how the concept should be analyzed, just as they could speak the same language while having different theories about its grammatical rules. 6 Also see (Schroeter and Schroeter, 2009) for a helpful summary of recent internalist semantics and their application to specifically normative terms, along with criticism. 7 Gibbard acknowledges that his own argument risks exploiting the paradox of analysis (41).…”

“…29 See (Schroeter and Schroeter, 2009) for a detailed version of a view similar to Tyler's, albeit without any endorsement of the normativity of rationality or the consequent normativity of meaning. 30 A referee notes that Gibbard's original (1990) expressivist theory was primarily an expressivist treatment of 'rational'.…”