Realidade, linguagem e não-cognitivismo em Wittgenstein

Este artigo analisa de que modo, a partir da posição de Wittgenstein em relação à ética, não é possível derivar uma postura não-cognitivista como pretende, por exemplo, o quase-realismo de Simon Blackburn. Primeiramente, reconstruímos as consequências da interpretação a respeito da existência de proposições morais para, posteriormente, sustentar que há um equívoco no modo de compreender a dicotomia entre fatos e valores. E, por último, mostramos que o filósofo vienense recusa, por um lado, uma visão platônica sobre as regras e, por outro, a tese de que não há regras objetivas. As regras são expressão intersubjetiva compartilhada pela forma de vida, argumento diametralmente oposto ao não-cognitivismo quase-realista de Blackburn.

The Competition

Chapter 4 shows why QUD Reasons Contextualism is preferable to its competitors. In particular, it considers Stephen Finlay’s conceptual analysis of reasons locutions, an expressivist view of reasons locutions based on the work of Simon Blackburn, Tim Henning’s information contextualism, and Niko Kolodny’s semantic relativism.

Past Masters of the Postmodern

There is a widespread sense, Simon Blackburn observes, that a number of philosophical theories have escaped the academic world, and, in the wild, are doing great harm. Chief among them: postmodernism.

Considering Dispositional Moral Realism

My aim in this paper is to consider a series of arguments against Dispositional Moral Realism and argue that these objections are unsuccessful. I will consider arguments that try to either establish a dis-analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities or try to show that a dispositional account of moral properties fails to account for what a defensible species of moral realism must account for. I also consider criticisms from Simon Blackburn (1993), who argues that there could not be a corresponding perceptual faculty for moral properties, and David Enoch (2011), who argues that Dispositional Moral Realism does not most plausibly explain the difference between moral disagreements and disagreements of mere preference. Finally, I examine a novel criticism concerning the relationship between the diverse variety of moral properties and the range of our normative affective attitudes, arguing that the view has no problem accounting for this diversity.

Separationism

The main aim of this chapter is to describe in detail separationism: its core aspects, its motivations, its advantages, and its weaknesses. In doing so two broad forms of separationism are detailed and contrasted. ‘Simple separationism’ is developed using the work of Simon Blackburn. ‘Complex separationism’ was expressed in a paper by Daniel Elstein and Thomas Hurka and is extended in this chapter. As well as showing how these two forms of separationism contrast and their advantages and disadvantages, this chapter highlights the desiderata that any account of thin and thick concepts much satisfy and lists four worries that one may have with nonseparationism.

The Practical Turn

The pragmatist approach to philosophical problems focuses on the role of disputed notions—for example, truth, value, causation, probability, necessity—in our practices. The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that our analysis of such philosophical concepts must start with, and remain linked to, human experience and inquiry. As a self-conscious philosophical stance, pragmatism arose in America in the late nineteenth century, in the work of writers such as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. While popular wisdom would have it that British philosophy thoroughly rejected that of its American cousins, that popular view is coming into dispute. Many distinguished British philosophers have also taken this practical turn, even if few have explicitly identified themselves as pragmatists. This book traces and assesses the influence of American pragmatism on British philosophy, with particular emphasis on Cambridge in the inter-war period (for instance, the work of Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein), on post-war Oxford (for instance, the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, P. F. Strawson and Michael Dummett), and on recent developments (for instance, the work of Simon Blackburn and Huw Price). There is a comprehensive introduction to the topic and the history of pragmatism, and Price and Blackburn, in their contributions, add their most recent thoughts to the debates.

Smile When You’re Winning: How to Become a Cambridge Pragmatist

This chapter traces the development of a particular current of thought known by the label ‘pragmatism’ during the last part of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, and latterly associated with the work of Simon Blackburn and Huw Price. Three questions are addressed. First, how did this current of thought actually develop? Second, does this current of thought constitute a single, coherent, theoretical outlook? Third, does this current of thought constitute an attractive philosophical outlook? In answering these questions, attention is drawn to a tension between the two main proponents of this current of thought, namely the different attitudes they take to the naturalist ‘master narrative’ on which it depends.

I Might be Fundamentally Mistaken

Quasi-realism aspires to preserve the intelligibility of the realist-sounding moral judgments of ordinary people. These judgments include ones of the form, “I believe that p, but I might be mistaken,” where “p” is some moral content. The orthodox quasi-realist strategy (famously developed by Simon Blackburn) is to understand these in terms of the agent’s worrying that some improving change would lead one to aban-don the relevant moral belief. However, it is unclear whether this strate-gy generalizes to cases in which the agent takes their error to be funda-mental in a sense articulated by Andy Egan. In an influential paper, Egan argues that it does not. Egan suggests that Blackburn’s approach is the only game in town for the quasi-realist when it comes to making sense of judgment of fallibility, and therefore concludes that Blackburn’s ina-bility to handle worries about fundamental moral error refutes quasi-realism tout court. Egan’s challenge has generated considerable discus-sion. However, in my view, we have not yet gotten to the heart of the matter. I argue that what is still needed is a fully general, quasi-realist-friendly theory of the nature of first-person judgments of fallibility, such that these judgments are demonstrably consistent with judging that the belief is stable in Egan’s sense. In this article, I develop and defend a fully general quasi-realist theory of such judgments, which meets this demand. With this theory in hand, I argue that Egan’s challenge can be met. Moreover, my discussion of how the challenge is best met provides an elegant diagnosis of where Egan’s argument against goes wrong. On my account, Egan’s argument equivocates at a key point between a “could” and a “would.”

Because

This chapter responds to J. L. Mackie’s challenge to show just what there is in reality that supports claims about what is valuable and obligatory. It seeks to explain the relationship between a moral fact and a non-moral one and to consider the charge that perfectionism of any form commits the so-called naturalistic fallacy. In so doing, five ways of understanding the supposed gap between what is and what is valuable—that is, the ontological, logical, semantic, epistemological, and motivational gaps—are considered (along with some of the views of David Hume, G. E. Moore, Simon Blackburn, and Stephen Darwall). It is argued that individualistic perfectionism, which is grounded in a life-based, non-reductionist naturalistic account of teleology (which is in certain ways like that of Philippa Foot’s), does not commit any fallacy and that it can meet Mackie’s challenge.