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Meaning of 'ought'

By Matthew Chrisman

Meaning of 'ought'

By Matthew Chrisman

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Description
The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation of their meaning. But Chrisman argues that this leaves important metasemantic questions about what it is in virtue of which ought-sentences have the meanings that they have unanswered. His appeal to inferentialism aims to provide a viable anti-descriptivist but also anti-expressivist answer to these questions. "This is a remarkably bold and interesting book. Chrisman challenges nothing less than the entire conceptual framework within which most previous metaethics (and indeed, much other contemporary philosophy) has been done, and advances a very ambitious rethinking of the theoretical space. It's not only ambitious, but also extremely imaginative and smart, and Chrisman's scholarship is at a rare level, as he has assimilated a literature that is unusually broad both in terms of field and historical scope."-Stephen Finlay, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
278
Release Date:
2015-10-23
Publication Date:
2015-10-01
Publisher:
OXFORD UNIV PR
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0199363005
ISBN13:
9780199363001
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
584 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
20 cm
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