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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Meaning of 'Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics

The Meaning of 'Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics

Chrisman, Matthew

Hardcover

Series: Oxford Moral Theory

PhilosophyLinguistics

ISBN10: 0199363005
ISBN13: 9780199363001
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Oct 23 2015
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
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

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