tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post4481128839483387755..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Non-Metaphysical CognitivismRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-52276054520760610192010-12-13T09:06:59.492-05:002010-12-13T09:06:59.492-05:00Many people seem unsqueamish about making superven...Many people seem unsqueamish about making supervenience relations brute. (In virtue of what do normative properties supervene on natural properties in precisely the way you think they do? Presumably it isn't just analytic. So why that way?) Is it worse to be brutish about this than it is to be brutish about the reasons themselves? I'm not even sure there is a substantive difference.Nick Becksteadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16561745593227211371noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-59520129995994622792010-11-24T14:48:49.161-05:002010-11-24T14:48:49.161-05:00Richard,
I've never quite understood that par...Richard,<br /><br />I've never quite understood that part either. It is some sort of quietism - refusal to give further answers. I quite like what Wedgwood says about that view in the Nature of Normativity.<br /><br />Yet, I've defended a view which is in the same ballpark and hopefully may not be quite as mysterious. So, I'm a non-reductivist realist about the reason-relations. There are distinct, sui generis normative counting in favour relations between facts and attitudes and actions. We just cannot do without.<br /><br />However, I'm an anti-realist of other normative properties - the reason-involving ones that Parfit mentions. In this sense, the truths of these properties don't have ontological implications over and above the reasons that already are there. I run a version of Crispin Wright's anti-realist of these properties. Some claims about rightness, goodness, kindness, and so on are superassertible on the basis information about reasons. And, there's then nothing further about the truth of these claims and the properties themselves are metaphysically projections from the minimally true claims. <br /><br />So, maybe this is slightly less mysterious. Of course, I do accept the extra metaphysical package that comes with reasons.Jussi Suikkanenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14674648308580750897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-63995516201046939762010-11-20T09:11:56.912-05:002010-11-20T09:11:56.912-05:00Here's a nearby worry. Suppose you want to rep...Here's a nearby worry. Suppose you want to represent an agent's beliefs by a set of "doxastically possible worlds", a la Lewis/Stalnaker. Then you're committed to needing a special story for beliefs in necessary truths, since they are true in all possible worlds, and so on a crude version of the picture would be believed by all agents (since no matter what your set of doxastically possible worlds, each member of it will be one in which any necessary truth you like is true).<br /><br />Just as possible worlds theorists will offer strategies for explaining what the sense is in which somebody can fail to believe that Hesperus is Phosphorus (e.g., diagonalization), or to believe the logical consequences of one's other beliefs (fragmentation--see e.g., Logic for Equivocators, or Inquiry), they'll also need some special story for how one can fail to believe moral truths, if those truths are supposed to be necessary.<br /><br />One move (in the spirit of expressivism) is to treat moral judgments not as beliefs that are true in all possible worlds, but as something more like desires that are satisfied in only some. Since they already have a broadly pragmatic story about what it is to have desires (and there are no problems with desires whose contents are contingent), this avoids the problem.<br /><br />I mention this only to make clear another motivation for doubting the combination of views according to which moral judgments are robustly belief-like and objectively true or false (in some sense expressivists can't capture), and yet don't involve any commitments about "the world being one way rather than another," in your terms.Danielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17911116321628968901noreply@blogger.com