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A Dual Aspect Account of Moral Language
Author(s) -
STRANDBERG CAJ
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00447.x
Subject(s) - implicature , utterance , sentence , meaning (existential) , expressivism , action (physics) , dual (grammatical number) , epistemology , psychology , linguistics , virtue , philosophy , pragmatics , physics , quantum mechanics
It is often observed in metaethics that moral language displays a certain duality in as much as it seems to concern both objective facts in the world and subjective attitudes that move to action. In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account which is intended to capture this duality: A person’s utterance of a sentence according to which φing has a moral characteristic, such as “φing is wrong,” conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that φing has a moral property, and the utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the person in question has an action‐guiding attitude in relation to φing. This account has significant advantages over competing views: ( i ) As it is purely cognitivist, it does not have the difficulties of expressivism and various ecumenical positions. ( ii ) Yet, in spite of this, it can explain the close, “meaning‐like,” connection between moral language and attitudes. ( iii ) In contrast to other pragmatic accounts, it is compatible with any relevant cognitivist view. ( iv ) It does not rest on a contentious pragmatic notion, such as conventional implicature. ( v ) It does not imply that utterances of complex moral sentences, such as conditionals, convey attitudes. In addition, the generalized implicature in question is fully calculable and cancellable.