Moral Fictionalism

Moral Fictionalism
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 206
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199275977
ISBN-13 : 0199275971
Rating : 4/5 (971 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Moral Fictionalism by : Mark Eli Kalderon

Download or read book Moral Fictionalism written by Mark Eli Kalderon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-04-14 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral realists maintain that morality has a distinctive subject matter. Specifically, realists maintain that moral discourse is representational, that moral sentences express moral propositions - propositions that attribute moral properties to things. Noncognitivists, in contrast, maintain that the realist imagery associated with morality is a fiction, a reification of our noncognitive attitudes. The thought that there is a distinctively moral subject matter is regarded as somethingto be debunked by philosophical reflection on the way moral discourse mediates and makes public our noncognitive attitudes. The realist fiction might be understood as a philosophical misconception of a discourse that is not fundamentally representational but whose intent is rather practical.There is, however, another way to understand the realist fiction. Perhaps the subject matter of morality is a fiction that stands in no need of debunking, but is rather the means by which our attitudes are conveyed. Perhaps moral sentences express moral propositions, just as the realist maintains, but in accepting a moral sentence competent speakers do not believe the moral proposition expressed but rather adopt the relevant non-cognitive attitudes. Noncognitivism, in its primary sense, is aclaim about moral acceptance: the acceptance of a moral sentence is not moral belief but is some other attitude. Standardly, non-cognitivism has been linked to non-factualism - the claim that the content of a moral sentence does not consist in its expressing a moral proposition. Indeed, the terms'noncognitivism' and 'nonfactualism' have been used interchangeably. But this misses an important possibility, since moral content may be representational but the acceptance of moral sentences might not be belief in the moral proposition expressed. This possibility constitutes a novel form of noncognitivism, moral fictionalism. Whereas nonfactualists seek to debunk the realist fiction of a moral subject matter, the moral fictionalist claims that that fiction stands in no need of debunking butis the means by which the noncognitive attitudes involved in moral acceptance are conveyed by moral utterance. Moral fictionalism is noncognitivism without a non-representational semantics.


Moral Fictionalism Related Books

Moral Fictionalism
Language: en
Pages: 206
Authors: Mark Eli Kalderon
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-04-14 - Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

GET EBOOK

Moral realists maintain that morality has a distinctive subject matter. Specifically, realists maintain that moral discourse is representational, that moral sen
Moral Fictionalism and Religious Fictionalism
Language: en
Pages: 289
Authors: Joyce
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-03 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

GET EBOOK

Atheism is a familiar kind of skepticism about religion. Moral error theory is an analogous kind of skepticism about morality, though less well known outside ac
The Myth of Morality
Language: en
Pages: 265
Authors: Richard Joyce
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2001-11-22 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

GET EBOOK

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapa
Fictionalism in Metaphysics
Language: en
Pages: 364
Authors: Mark Eli Kalderon
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-07-07 - Publisher: Clarendon Press

GET EBOOK

Fictionalism is the view that a serious intellectual inquiry need not aim at truth. It came to prominence in philosophy in 1980, when Hartry Field argued that m
Fictionalism in Philosophy
Language: en
Pages: 257
Authors: Bradley Armour-Garb
Categories: Mathematics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK

This volume collects some of the most up-to-date work on philosophical fictionalism-the idea that a notion of pretense or fiction can help resolve certain puzzl