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• W2320808839 abstract "This work's central contention is that for discourses and thoughts not evaluable in terms of truth, notions like logic, rationality, and evidence nevertheless get traction. What are arguably the central normative aspects of inquiry needn't be—and ultimately are not—grounded in the relationship between that inquiry and the truth. The idea—less a specific position than an expression of a distinctive (but not unfamiliar, for readers with a grounding in speech-act theory) methodological orientation—is variously illustrated in chapters on slurs, paradox, moral discourse, relative truth, and taste. The book is a tour de force. However, those immersed in certain of the book's subject matters—this best describes my relationship to the material on moral discourse—are likely to feel Richard ignores some of their major explanatory concerns.Chapter 1 argues against the idea that discourse and thought involving, for example, ethnic slurs are properly regarded as apt for truth. Richard considers various ways slurred discourse and thought might be made apt for truth, finding none acceptable. Slurs do not, for example, involve the attribution of a defective property (e.g., being contemptible because Irish); it is wrong to say Liam Neeson is not a mick, even though he—like all things—lacks the property of being contemptible because Irish. Nor do they involve the attribution of a nondefective property (e.g., being Irish) against the background of an objectionable presupposition, conventional implicature, or evaluative attitude. Any such view will say that the thought Liam Neeson is a mick is not to be faulted for how it represents him—it represents him correctly, that is, as Irish—but rather for how an objectionable presupposition, implicature, or evaluation portrays him. Richard denies “slurring talk truth and falsity because to ascribe it such we must represent as does he who slurs, and to so represent is to represent wrongly” (34).Here and throughout, Richard aims to outline an appealing—generally unorthodox, sometimes “heretical”—alternative view. While his view of slurs seems worth considering, it invites uneasiness. It leans on an unelucidated and, rhetoric aside, alien notion of representation—one that rejects the traditional Humean opposition between representation and evaluation, in favor of a notion that allows thought to be (wholly) representational even when its direction-of-fit is essentially (partly) mind-to-world. Richard seems to ask, almost rhetorically: why not think of the bigot's thought and speech thus? Some will answer: it trades orthodox Humean moral psychology, which allows that the bigot may represent correctly, even while evaluating objectionably, but denies these jointly constitute a representation, for explanatory obscurity.1 (While there are venerable opponents of Humean orthodoxy on whom Richard might draw here—I am thinking Scanlon, Nagel, Dancy, Shafer-Landau, and the various proponents of neo-Intuitionist views in moral epistemology—they tend to assume commitments he seems unlikely to accept.) This highlights one of the book's general shortcomings: it seems, at crucial points—I describe others below—content to substitute rhetorical, conceptual, and technical virtuosity for explanatory depth.Chapter 2 develops the book's main innovation—a semantics on which (i) utterances express commitments, and (ii) connectives in natural language can express not only Boolean operations on propositional contents but also, roughly, Boolean operations on commitments. Commitments are individuated by conditions under which they are appropriate. The appropriateness-condition (AC) of only some commitments, for example, that undertaken in asserting that sheep scream, is a proposition's truth. The AC of other commitments—on which Richard spends large portions of the book's remainder—is something else. For instance, sentences of the form not-ϕ can express denials, which involve commitment to the nontruth (falsity or truth-value-less-ness) of their complements. (Denial is sui generis: commitment to the nontruth of ϕ is equivalent to neither commitment to the truth of ϕ's truth-functional negation, nor commitment to the truth of the claim that ϕ is nontrue.) For the connectives, if ϕ and ψ respectively express (commitments with respective ACs) c and c′, the basic picture is that ‘not-ϕ’ expresses (the commitment with the AC) ¬c, ‘ϕ or ψ’ expresses c ∨ c′, and so forth. Logic gets recast in expected ways: a sentence is consistent if its AC is; a sentence entails another if the former's AC entails the latter's; and so forth.Chapter 2 uses this apparatus to explain why it is coherent (indeed, obligatory) to deny the Liar sentence, as well as to deny a sentence asserting the baldness (or nonbaldness) of, say, Prince William. Because denials are appropriate iff their complements are false or truth-value-less, and because Richard thinks the Liar sentence and sentences ascribing baldness to borderline cases lack truth-value, one must deny them to state the facts. (Liar connoisseurs will wonder whether Richard's solution is able to avoid revenge paradoxes; in an appendix he argues he is.)This is a lovely idea, and I think something like it is likely right—at least for the Liar, if not vagueness. However, we needn't assume Richard's semantic orientation to use it: we can associate sentences with the sorts of commitments Richard encourages without taking those commitments to give their meaning. This requires thinking negation can function, in some cases, as an operation on nonsemantic content (e.g., a speech-act-level operation), but negation has many such functions (Horn 1989). Since there are problems with Richard's approach to semantics—I will outline some—we may wish to avoid taking it on if possible.Chapter 3 uses the framework of chapter 2 to “defend the coherence” (72) of an emotivist metaethic by showing why “Geach-style objections to emotivism are completely and profoundly without merit” (80n11). Though Richard calls this project “quite modest” (72), resolving the primary objection to emotivism would be a remarkable accomplishment, while paving the way for its extension to discourses for which kindred views have seemed most promising (e.g., conditionals and epistemic modals). The proposal's core is as you'd expect: associate moral claims with commitments individuated by ACs; treat environments embedding them as operations on ACs. Logico-rational relationships between moral claims are simply recast as logico-rational relationships between their ACs. Standard objections to emotivism wither in the face of a compositional, appropriateness-conditional semantics for moral claims.That gets things only about half right. Approaches to linguistic meaning outside the tradition of truth-conditional semantics have historically been vulnerable to the objection that they cannot hope to give a semantics for natural language that is compositional and explanatory of the relevant empirical phenomena. Richard's semantics skirts part of this worry. Unfortunately, Richard seems not to appreciate its full force (and, as a result, mischaracterizes his view's advantages over alternatives). Few familiar with the literature on, for example, expressivism would understand the Geachean challenge to views outside the model-theoretic-cum-truth-conditional paradigm as one overcome simply by providing a compositional semantics. For all the ink spilled on compositionality, interpreted weakly enough, it is an extraordinarily low bar, a purely formal constraint, which rival theories (e.g., the plan semantics of Gibbard 2003) meet equally well. Good semantics is not, however, just compositional; it is explanatory (see, e.g., Schroeder 2008b).Richard's semantics leaves fundamental matters unexplained or unaddressed. What makes a moral claim and its negation inconsistent? Moral claims and their negations are claimed to express conflicting commitments—something that follows as a matter of stipulation, since nonpropositional negation, for Richard, expresses the negation of the complement's AC. But whether this is a sensible view of the AC of a moral claim's negation depends on Richard's account of the AC of the moral claim. If, say, the commitment expressed by Xis wrong is disapproval of X, the commitment expressed by its negation is nondisapproval of X. Clearly, though, that is not the commitment its negation expresses; it expresses permission, not merely nondisapproval (Dreier 2006). Richard, taking a cue from Gibbard, suggests that moral claims express commitments to norms of action and planning and stipulates that norms permitting X do not prohibit X (hence that no norms both permit and prohibit X, hence that commitments to such norms—commitments expressed by Xis not wrong and Xis wrong—are inconsistent) (84). But this amounts to stipulating that—not explaining why—Xis wrong and its negation are inconsistent.2Chapters 4 and 5 sketch Richard's views on relativism and predicates of personal taste. Somewhat surprisingly, he argues that relativizing truth to standards of assessment is appropriate for gradable adjectives like ‘rich’—where we generally regard those who disagree as mistaken—but inappropriate for taste predicates like ‘cool’ or ‘yummy’—where we generally do not. Faultless disagreement, contrary to prevailing fads, undermines the case for relativism. It makes sense to evaluate something in terms of truth and falsity only when we are prepared to regard those who disagree with opinions to which we ascribe truth as mistaken: “A truth is what any acceptable perspective would have to grant, if it is not to be convicted of error” (135).Despite being, in a manner of speaking, about truth, this book has little specific to say about it. Richard addresses deflationism in his introduction, to emphasize why his view is distinct: the deflationist is stuck saying, for example, that anything (i) one accepts and (ii) having syntax consonant with the T-Schema must be regarded as true. This strays from what Richard apparently regards as an uncontroversial phenomenology of truth: truth-aptness involves regarding a kind of perspective as normative.This is a weak foundation on which to base a view about taste predicates (or slurs). A decision about whether to regard a kind of perspective on p as normative is suffused with phenomena that, on the face of it, have little to do with p's semantics. To see this, notice that, even if John is poor and honest, we will not tend to regard a perspective according to which John is poor, but honest as normative, but will nevertheless accept—for broadly theoretical reasons—that the content of a sentence voicing that perspective is true.More generally, such a phenomenology of truth is incompatible with the ascription of truth-values for dominantly theoretical or empirical reasons—for example, the sorts of reasons (stemming from Geach) that have led metaethicists to insist that moral discourse must be truth-apt, in spite of apparently strong arguments (e.g., the argument from Motivational Internalism) against this; or those that have led many linguists (Kaufmann, Aloni, Han, among many others) to claim, incredibly, that certain nondeclaratives (e.g., imperatives) have truth-conditions as their meanings. This is a limiting (and, in effect, quite regressive) way of thinking about semantics and the philosophy of language, and I hope it is resisted." @default.
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• W2320808839 title "When Truth Gives Out" @default.
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