Prescriptions are Assertions: An Essay on Moral Syntax (original) (raw)
Related papers
Universals and Other Generalities (2006)
Peter F. Strawson and Arindam Chakrabarti, eds. Universals, Concepts and Qualities: New Essays on the Meaning of Predicates (London: Ashgate), 2006
P.K. Sen’s reconstruction of an account of universals – an account that is presented in various of the writings of P.F. Strawson – combines sympathetic exegesis with telling criticism. His method is one he describes as philosophical ‘pruning’ – cutting away the metaphysical dead wood in order to uncover a healthy and elegant theory beneath. These are certainly not minor alterations to the theory Strawson has put forward, and we shall have to ask if the result of any one of them, or of all taken together, is compatible with, and indeed a development of, the underlying considerations which motivate that theory, this being, I take it, the substance of the idea of a ‘pruning’. With regard to the proper extension of the domain of universals, I shall have little to say, other than to observe that Strawson is willing to remark that it is only if ‘we stretch the notion of a universal sufficiently’ that we can bring under it types, numbers and ‘mathematical entities generally’ (1974, p. 134), but that he still maintains that there are nominal constructions, such as that-clauses, gerundial phrases and accusative and infinitive constructions, whose function is the ‘individual specification of propositions or facts’ (ibid., p. 130). I shall have more to say about the treatment of features as universals, and about Sen's putative elimination of the characterizing tie.
The Future of Predication Theory [draft]
Key Words: predication, combinatorial, dyadic relation, formalism From a logical point of view, the theory of predication has moved over time from one reflecting the surface grammar of certain natural languages, predominantly but not completely Indo-European, to one more in tune with the deep structure of relations and indeed of the world, at least as our current scientific theory presents it. In Aristotelian terms, we have moved from what is most evident to us but least evident in itself to one that is (largely) most evident in itself but least evident to us. I do not propose here to give a history of predication and its theory, even for the Indo-European languages. Yet, in order to motivate the theory that is to follow, I shall note certain historical trends in the language of science and philosophy and its theory, without offering much support. • An emphasis on third-person—or better: impersonal--statements, and a de-emphasis on statements of others, like first- and second-person and dual. • A move from speaker meaning to sentence meaning—in Latin medieval terms, a focus on the proposition rather than on the usus loquendi. Accordingly, the social context of language drops out—so far as is possible. • An elimination of intentionality and standpoint via the elimination of indexicals • A move from ordinary to ideal language Continuing these trends and their historical success, I suggest that we should develop a theory of predication with the following features: • Formalism • A sharp distinction between the pure theory and its interpretations • The primacy of two-place relations Accordingly, I shall propose a theory of predication with the following features: • An uninterpreted language, based on the combinatorials of primitive symbols and on application of formation rules so as to give well-formed formulae [wffs]. • Construction of n-place predicates via unsaturating the wffs • The reduction of all n-place predicates to two-place predicates [relations] In short, I shall present a purely formal theory where predication has the basic syntactic structure of a two-place relation. Various configurations of that relation constitute other n-place predicates, both monadic and polyadic. I end with considering how successfully such a predication theory may be interpreted and applied, in particular to metaphysics. comments appreciated [back@kutztown.edu]
Why have Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) that are universal quantifiers only been attested in the domain of modal auxiliaries (cf. Homer t.a., Iatridou & Zeijlstra 2010, 2013) and never in the domain of quantifiers over individuals? No PPI meaning everybody or everything has ever been reported. In this paper, I argue that universal quantifier PPIs actually do exist, both in the domain of quantifiers over individuals and in the domain of quantifiers over possible worlds, as, I argue, is predicted by the Kadmon & Landman (1993) – Krifka (1995) – Chierchia (2006, 2013) approach to NPIhood. However, since the covert exhaustifier that according to Chierchia (2006, 2013) is induced by these PPIs (and responsible for their PPI-hood) can act as an intervener between the PPI and its anti-licenser, it is concluded in this paper that a universal quantifier PPIs may scope below it and thus appear in disguise; their PPI-like behaviour only becomes visible once they morpho-syntactically precede their anti-licenser. Another conclusion of this paper is that Dutch iedereen (‚everybody’), opposite to English everybody, is actually a PPI.
Universality and particularity
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1990
I am honored to contribute to this volume on Lawrence Kohlberg's work. Kohlberg was always an inspirational figure for me-first, as a psychologist who saw both philosophy and psychology as necessary for an understanding of the phenomena of morality and moral development; and second, as a thinker who invited criticism of his views and who struggled to come to grips with the criticism. As a philosophical critic of Kohlberg's view of morality, I always felt welcome to engage him in dialogue. Complementary Principles of Morality The notion of universality plays various roles within Kohlberg's system. First, it is involved in the empirical claim that the development from preconventional through conventional to principled reasoning is a human and cultural universal (though according to Kohlberg's own findings only a minority of people in any culture actually attain the highest stage). Universality is also involved in the related normative claim that, from a universal standpoint, the empirically final stage of moral reasoning, preferred by all of those who can understand that stage, is also the normatively most" adequate form of moral reasoning. Without directly taking issue with either of these claims, I focus on a third claim concerning how, for Kohlberg, universality characterizes
Laws, the Inference Problem, and Uninstantiated Universals
2014
The difficulties facing Humean regularity accounts of laws have led some philosophers to a theory that takes laws to be necessitation relations between universals. In this paper I evaluate David Armstrong’s version of this theory by considering two of its key elements: its solution to the so-called “Inference Problem” and its denial of uninstantiated universals. After considering some potential problems with each of these elements on their own, I argue that Armstrong’s solution to the Inference Problem and his denial of uninstantiated universals are not two independent aspects of his view. His solution to the Inference Problem depends upon his denial of uninstantiated universals.
A Reductive Analysis of Statements about Universals
Synthese, 2022
This paper proposes an analysis of statements about universals according to which such statements assert nothing more than that the evidence we'd take to confirm them obtains, where this evidence is understood to consist solely of patterns in the behavior of particulars that cannot be explained by other regularities in the way things behave. On this analysis, to say that a universal exists is simply to say that there is such a pattern in the behavior of certain particulars, and for any predicate F that is presumed to correspond to a universal, to say that a particular is F is simply to say that its behavior exhibits a pattern of this sort. I argue that there is no theoretical work that we want postulations and ascriptions of universals to do that they'd be unfit for if analyzed in this way, and consequently that there is no reason to treat such statements as asserting anything more than what the proposed analysis suggests.