USER_AVATAR
Zin5ki
Member
 
Posts: 170
Joined: March 3rd, 2011, 2:39 pm
Location: London, UK
Blog: View Blog (13)


Archives
- March 2012
+ June 2011
+ May 2011
+ April 2011
+ March 2011
Search Blogs

Advanced search (keyword or author)

As part of a Master's application, I have recently prepared an essay concerning metaethical expressivism and the minimalism of truth. You may read the document in question here.

0 Comments Viewed 594 times


By Michael Smith, from Analysis. 54.1 (1994): 1-12.

There is a pleasing economy to minimalism. By accordance to it we needn't claim there to be such thing as a property of truth, nor must we claim that "true" loses meaning or utility as a result. (Disquotational and endorsing uses of "true", following Rorty, demonstrate this.) Expressivism shares a similar economy. Those who wish not to affirm the existence genuine evaluative properties may hold the role of evaluative discourse to be distinct from those of other areas that happen to share their surface features.

Now, if minimalism is a fast track to cognitivism for any speech acts with the appropriate syntactic form, expressivism may be in a bad position. Due to the way evaluative sentences can be used in all the other ways in which truth-assertable ones can be, it is held that evaluative sentences are themselves truth-apt. Being a variant of non-cognitivism however, expressivism of evaluative...

[ continued ]

0 Comments Viewed 146 times


Thick Concepts, Non-Cognitivism, and Wittgenstein's Rule-Following
From The South African Journal of Philosophy 29.3 (2010): 286-309.

Croom's full text is freely available here.

In the decades since McDowell's Non-cognitivism and rule-following was published, it seems that those who follow the non-cogntivist footsteps of Ayer have been lumbered with having to mount a defence of their approach (or at least what is claimed to be their approach) to "thick" evaluative concepts. Adam Croom presents McDowell's arguments in terms of thick concepts (see p.290), and whilst one may have initially taken issue with this — for we assume McDowell's target to include non-cognitivist accounts of "thin" concepts also — it does afford a degree of written clarity tha...

[ continued ]

0 Comments Viewed 141 times


From Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998, pp.198-218.

John McDowell brings to the non-cognitivist's attention a facet of her doctrine that she may not have developed. It is integral to her position that the world, as it exists independently of our value experiences, contains no such things as values. It follows, supposes McDowell, that her account of the world need not involve any evaluative concepts, only the properties to which our evaluative responses are responses to. Evaluative experiences must therefore be "disentangled": experience of whatsoever it is that we respond to must be seperated from the attitudes of this response itself. In much the same vein as Values and Secondary Qualities, McDowell expresses characteristic scepticism of this thesis. The non-cognitivist is said to avow that one can always in principle isolate a feature of the world to which the attitudinal component of a non-congitive...

[ continued ]

0 Comments Viewed 146 times


From Foundations of ethics: an anthology. Ed. Russ Shafer-Landau and Terence Cuneo. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 145-156.

I shall firstly outline the merits of Wiggins' contributions. In recognition of the failure of subjectivism to provide an analysis of what it means to say 'x is good', owing to the fact that citing such things as sentiments of approbation does not answer this question without introducing circularity through implicitly identifying such sentiments by their association to the thought that x is good, an enlightening clarification is provided. His account of the goal of subjectivism with regards to value is, or at least traditionally has been not to provide a definition of what 'good' is, but instead to provide a commentary of what, when holding x to be good, we are actually doing.
Chiefly they (subjectivists) have wanted to persuade us that, when we...


[ continued ]

0 Comments Viewed 167 times

Who is online

Registered users currently online: Google Adsense [Bot], Google [Bot], JohnD, Lomax