Non-cognitivism, normativity, belief

Ratio

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 420-435

  Jackson, Frank ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645149879     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00102     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. See, e.g., Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
2. and Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)
3. See, e.g., Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984)
4. and David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)
5. See, e.g., Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
6. and Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978)
7. See, e.g., Paul Boghossian, 'The Status of Content', Philosophical Review, 99 (1990): 157-84
8. I take the term 'truth apt' from Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)
9. A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936)
10. Philip Pettit and I argue in 'A Problem for Expressivism', Analysis, 58 (1998): 239-51, that there are serious problems for this common way of putting why the sentences in question are not truth apt. We argue, on the basis of considerations in the philosophy of language quite separate from minimalism, that it is much harder than non-cognitivists (expressivists) appreciate for ethical sentences to fail to be truth apt (and the same would go for normative ones, in general). But I here go along, for the purposes of the argument and ease of exposition, with the more usual view
11. Which is why a minimalist like Paul Horwich rejects non-cognitivism; see his 'Gibbard's Theory of Norms', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (1993): 67-78
12. Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
13. For a fuller account of what follows, see Frank Jackson, 'II - Naturalism and the Fate of the M-Worlds', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Sodety, supp. vol. 71 (1997): 269-82
14. See, e.g., Ernest Adams, The Logic of Conditionals (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975)
15. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chs 5 and 6