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Neo-pragmatism, morality, and the specification problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Joshua Gert
Joshua Gert*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions.

Keywords

Neo-pragmatismmoralityexpressivismcognitivismmetaethicsdisagreement
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 48 , Issue 3-4: Special issue: Representation and Evaluation , 2018 , pp. 447 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2018

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