The Meaning of 'Ought'
Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:5th Nov '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
Matthew Chrisman has developed an innovative, sophisticated, and plausible set of views about the meaning of 'ought.' This book is a major contribution in metaethics ... The book is deep and contains many extraordinarily valuable resources. It ought to receive wide attention from metaethicists and other philosophers interested in normativity. * David Killoren, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online *
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 *
Chrisman's book is a sophisticated and illuminating work * Giulia Pravato, Philosophical Quarterly *
ISBN: 9780199363001
Dimensions: 236mm x 155mm x 23mm
Weight: 499g
280 pages