Specter of Reason

I just reread this post of mine from June, 2008: The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and The Knowledge Argument . My approach to the distinction is quite different from the one I presented ten days ago , but perhaps these two views are complementary. In the first post, I approach the distinction in epistemological terms. Analyticity and syntheticity are two different ways of testing the validity of the same propositions. They are different propositional attitudes--different knowledge relationships towards propositions. In my more recent post, I regard the distinction as a way of indicating different sorts of speech acts: one in which rules are stated and another in which predictions about the world are made. On the face of it, these are distinct ways of looking at the distinction, though they don't seem so far apart from each other. I'll have to think more about it to see if one entails the other. For now, I have to say that both views make sense to me, and I thi...

For my own edification, I present the following review of a paper I'm reading called "The Distinction Between Semantics and Pragmatics" by Zoltan Gendler Szabo, which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (2006). (All page references are to this text unless otherwise noted). I. Introduction Szabo defines pragmatics as "the study of contexts of utterance, or more precisely, a study of the way context can influence our understanding of linguistic utterances" (363). Semantics , in turn, is presented as "the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings" (363). This might look simple enough, but I find it impenetrable. Presumably, what a linguistic expression means in some circumstance depends on context. Thus, following Szabo's characterization, pragmatics and semantics both study the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. Similarly, i...

I've been discussing moral noncognitivism lately, and the topic turned to the question of whether or not mathematical truths are analytic. Analytic truth is truth by definition (or truth by virtue of meaning), whereas synthetic truth is truth in relation to what is the case. There's a lot of controversial history in philosophy over how to construe this distinciton, and whether or not we should even take the distinction seriously. Some say it is not a principled distinction at all. Much of the disagreement stems from different attitudes towards the very notions of meaning and truth . I prefer a pragmatic view of the distinction, since I regard meaning and truth as matters of how sentences are used, and not as properties of sentences themselves. Thus, sentences are neither analytic nor synthetic, but they can be used to make analytic or synthetic assertions. One consequence of this view is that all sentences can be used to make both analytic and synthetic assertions. The ...

As I've noted before , Richard Carrier has a problem with definitions. His recent argument for moral realism has several awkward moments, like when he says being a moral realist means "being able to ontologically ground the existence of moral facts"--as if the mere presence of moral realists proved that moral realism was true! But it's his ludicrous discussion of "ought" which prompted me to blog. He approaches the definition as a rational choice theorist might: "ought" means whatever we would do if we reasoned logically and knew all of the relevant facts. But he makes no mention of goals, as if any logical and knowledgeable person would do the same as any other in any given circumstance. Furthermore, we generally make "ought" statements without supposing knowledge of all of the relevant facts. "Oughts" might normally imply a "given what we know" qualification, but not a "given what we would know if we knew ...

I recently discussed my reasons for thinking we should look for a non-cognitivist account of morality. Now I want to take some positive steps outlining what I think such an account might look like. I'm still working through all this, so I expect to stumble a bit here and there. First, there might be a misconception that moral non-cognitivists don't believe in morality, or don't believe that moral statements have the sort of reason-giving power that people normally think. The concern is that non-cognitivism doesn't account for morality as it is commonly understood, and that it tries to undermine the common notion of morality. On the contrary, non-cognitivism (in my view) should fully account for everything philosophically and psychologically interesting about morality. Morality is taken as a given, as a process which we all observe and participate in, and which stands in need of psychological exploration and philosophical elucidation. Another common concern is that...