Nietzsche on Morality

Though many of the entries I’ve posted on this blog have been elucidations of a general theory of moral realism, I have admitted that looming skepticism does make moral nihilism plausible. In fact, for some time I accepted something close to an error theory, with the minimal metaphysical and epistemological commitments of contractualism, though I […]

Ralph Wedgwood on The Metaphysics of Normative Facts

Part Two: The Metaphysics of Normative Facts In part two of The Nature of Normativity, Wedgwood delves into the messy metaphysics of normativity, and takes some pretty remarkable positions, which include, that “the intentional is normative”, that normative facts are causally efficacious, and that though normative facts and mental states are irreducible, his view is […]

The United States-Germany Tie Conspiracy (and how we advance, the goal differential, and the prisoner’s dilemma)

While normally I have no interest in sports, I find something truly compelling about the World Cup. It’s worth noting I never have had an interest in soccer or the Olympics, but for some reason I just find the World Cup massively entertaining, for reasons unknown to me. As if the action on the pitch […]

Wedgwood’s Moral Semantics Program: Conceptual Role Semantics

It is now that Wedgwood posits his favored semantic theory for normative judgments, drawing inspiration from proponents of conceptual role semantics to argue that the nature of a concept is its role in thought and reasoning, and from this that the essential role of normative concepts is a regulative role in practical reasoning. This semantic […]

Ralph Wedgwood on Cornell Realism and Australian Realism (moral semantics)

Having defeated expressivism (see here for his arguments) in a way that suggests the necessity of a truth-conditional semantics for normative statements, Wedgwood outlines what a factualist semantics must accomplish, and in so doing, reveals the failure of two factualist semantic theories: the causal theory put forward by the Cornell realists, and the conceptual analysis theory […]

Ralph Wedgwood on Expressivism (moral semantics and truth)

Wedgwood sets his sight on the semantic project that is expressivism, the view that the fundamental explanations of the meaning of normative statements are the types of mental states that those statements express. This view is in contrast to the factualist approach, which holds that the fundamental explanation of the meaning of normative statements are […]