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Two nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative statements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Matthew Chrisman
Matthew Chrisman*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
*
Email: matthew.chrisman@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

The dominant route to nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative language is through the expressivist idea that normative terms have distinctive expressive roles in conveying our attitudes. This paper explores an alternative route based on two ideas. First, a core normative term ‘ought’ is a modal operator; and second, modal operators play a distinctive nonrepresentational role in generating meanings for the statements in which they figure. I argue that this provides for an attractive alternative to expressivist forms of nondescriptivism about normative language. In the final section of the paper, I explore ways it might be extended to evaluative language.

Keywords

Metaethicsexpressivisminferentialismrepresentationalismmodals
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 48 , Issue 3-4: Special issue: Representation and Evaluation , 2018 , pp. 405 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2018

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