Ethical and Epistemic Expressions
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ETHICAL AND EPISTEMIC EXPRESSIONS Matthew Tate Chrisman A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord Jay F. Rosenberg William G. Lycan Jesse J. Prinz Gerald G. Postema © 2006 Matthew Tate Chrisman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Matthew Tate Chrisman: Ethical and Epistemic Expressions (Under the direction of Geoffrey Sayre-McCord) My dissertation has two principal aims. First, I develop a novel account of the meaning of ethical claims that provides a way to retain the advantages while overcoming problems with prominent descriptivist and noncognitivist metaethical accounts. Second, I show how this account extends naturally into an account of the meaning of epistemic claims in a way that can recast and begin to adjudicate recent metaepistemological debate between prominent contextualists and invariantists. Thus, in my dissertation the two central paradigms of normative discourse receive parallel treatment. Many philosophers treat ethical claims as descriptions of a special kind of fact, which raises difficult questions about the nature of ethical facts and our access to them. Other philosophers have argued that ethical clams are not descriptions but instead expressions of noncognitive attitudes, which avoids ontological and epistemological commitments but undercuts the apparent truth-evaluability and cognitive structure of ethical claims. My account of the meaning of ethical claims offers a third option, which I argue retains the benefits of descriptivism and noncognitivism while avoiding the drawbacks. To develop this view, I exploit the inferentialist idea that part of the meaning of ethical claims can be given in terms of what sort of commitment they express, where types of commitments are individuated by their inferential role. In brief, the thesis is that ethical claims express distinctively practical commitments. iii Although there is much recent debate about the truth-conditions of knowledge claims, many epistemologists have not even considered the epistemological parallel to the question at issue between ethical descriptivists and noncognitivists: What is the expressive role of knowledge claims? In the second part of this dissertation, I develop an inferentialist answer to this question modeled on my inferentialist version of ethical expressivism. The idea is to treat knowledge claims as the expression of a particular kind of distinctively practical commitment—roughly, it’s the commitment to trust someone’s judgment about some matter. iv PREFACE When wandering through the corridors of Caldwell Hall on late-night study-breaks, one can be inspired to pick up dissertations written by people whose names are vaguely familiar from departmental lore. If you are like me, you ask yourself questions like: “What does a complete dissertation look like?” “Has Jay Rosenberg ever approved of any dissertation?” “What’s the shortest possible dissertation?” “She got a good job; what did she write her dissertation on?” So you start reading. If you are anything like me, however, you rarely read past the abstract and preface. For this seems to carry some obligation to engage philosophically with the dissertation; the reflexes engendered by proto-seminar kick in and you begin to ask: what’s the main thesis, what’s the main argument, why is this important, where are the holes? But then you remember that you had picked up the dissertation in the course of taking a break from engaging philosophically with what was probably a more important and more clearly written piece of philosophy. It is, therefore, unfortunate that so many dissertations either lack prefaces altogether or have prefaces that do barely more than thank the supervising committee. I think we should strive for more substantial prefaces. (Ironically, 2006 is the first year in which dissertations can be submitted electronically, so the likelihood of stumbling onto this preface while wandering through the corridors of Caldwell Hall will be quite low.) v As I rationally reconstruct it, this dissertation began its life in the summer of 1998 in a Mexican dive in Durham, North Carolina called the Cosmic Cantina. Somehow my friends Graham Hubbs and Jonah Johnson and I had convinced Duke University’s Talent Identification Program to hire all of us as teaching assistants for various classes in their summer nerd-camp for high schoolers. We were often forced to seek respite at the Cosmic Cantina from the brutal (7 hours a day) teaching load and the AC-free and alcohol-free dorms. One night, with a plastic picnic table full of burrito wrappers and Corona bottles in front of us, I insisted—despite appreciating the manifest punkness of their Nietzschean- and Foucaultian-inspired disdain for concepts like ‘moral objectivity’ and ‘moral truth’—that it is a desideratum of moral theory to construe many ordinary moral judgments as true. They balked: Moral discourse is nothing like ordinary discourse about objects of perception like tables and chairs—for it attempts to sway our wills. Moreover, moral discourse is nothing like scientific discourse—for morality lacks anything like the self-corrective methodology and explanatory power of science. Moral truths are a fiction—moral reality is a hoax. I’m not sure how boldly Graham and Jonah would assert this thesis today. But the vigor with which they defended it at the Cantina back then left a lasting impression on me. I later learned that many metaethicists don’t want to concede that moral discourse is interestingly different from paradigmatically descriptive discourses, but I was then (and today remain) convinced that there is such a difference. However, I was then (and today remain) convinced that it is a desideratum of moral theory to construe many ordinary moral judgments as true. Much of my work in metaethics has been driven by the goal of reconciling these two deeply held but apparently conflicting convictions. The key, as I see it, is to conceive of moral discourse as aiming at a distinctive kind of truth—practical truth. These are truths not about the way the world is but about the way to live in it. But, lest I scare off vi the casual procrastinator even before the end of this preface, let me now merely promise much more discussion of that in the pages that follow. My present aim is to acknowledge the inspiration provided by Graham and Jonah. This dissertation is dedicated our friendship. My parents have kindly supported and encouraged my intellectual development throughout my life. This dissertation may not make me the kind of doctor “that helps people”—at least not physiologically. However, I am grateful to my parents for helping me to realize that there are other ways to help people and that some of these involve asking the right questions rather than having the right answers. I also want to express my appreciation to the people who supervised both this dissertation and, more generally, my graduate education. As I write this, the philosophy graduate program in Chapel Hill is thriving. This is due in large part to the extraordinary efforts of the person who has been chair of the department for my tenure: Geoffrey Sayre- McCord. I thank him for finding time in his busy schedule as departmental chair to be a good chair of this dissertation committee, to read my work carefully, and to offer insightful criticisms, suggestions, and amplifications. Geoff has been a constant presence in my graduate education—from his seminar on 20th Century Ethical Theory to his being on my M.A. committee to his meeting me weekly one summer to brainstorm ideas for my dissertation to his coaching me into the realization of some of these ideas. I owe a debt of gratitude to Geoff that one can owe only to one’s dissertation director. Hopefully what follows this preface is the first of many installments in my repayment. Jay Rosenberg and William Lycan were the other two committee members on this dissertation, and both have been philosophical inspirations to me as well as incredibly diligent committee members. Jay successfully transmitted to me his admiration for the work of Wilfrid Sellars; moreover, Jay’s own writings have made Sellarsian themes and theses much more accessible to me. Early on in the project, he suggested that I take a look at vii chapter 7 of Sellars’ Science and Metaphysics, which is a chapter in metaethics. In the context of that book, the chapter almost comes across as an afterthought. But, as a result of Jay’s suggestion, the positive metaethical view which is at the heart of this dissertation is inspired by the problematic Sellars sought to address in his brief foray into metaethics. It was in Bill’s seminar on epistemic contextualism that I had and first articulated (in the form of a seminar paper) the leading structural idea of this dissertation. This was to see metaethical relativism as parallel to epistemic contextualism, and then to explore the expressivist alternatives to relativism/ contextualism with a clear eye on each side of the ethics-epistemology divide. Bill’s encouragement of this idea has allowed it to flourish. Despite being committed only as “readers” on this dissertation, Jesse Prinz and Jerry Postema have been very active in reading various drafts of the material and giving me helpful feedback. As members of my M.A. committee, Mike Resnik and Keith Simmons were both seminal influences on my early work towards this dissertation. I want to thank Mike especially for his sage advice at several crucial stages in my graduate career. Ever since he came to Chapel Hill, Ram Neta has been a seemingly indefatigable philosophical conversant with virtually all members of the philosophical community here. I want to thank Ram for suffering through many of my nascent paper drafts; many of the thoughts he forced me to have found their way into this dissertation.