Ways of meaning: An introduction to a philosophy of language

By Mark De Bretton Platts

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0710000006
• ISBN13: 9780710000002
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Law Book Co of Australasia
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

What Does Philosophy of Language Matter to Morality?

This is a textbook in the philosophy of language. It is intended as a introduction to the Davidsonian program in the philosophy of language, and it introduces that program by explaining its outlines and applying it a variety of components of ordinary language: sentences involving quantification, quoted speech, names, adjectives, sentences about actions and other events, and (in the second edition) natural kind terms. I'm not expert on this material, so I have little to say about these parts of the book. I do, however, want to talk about Chapter X, where Platt's applies this program as providing a defense for a form of moral realism (i.e. the view that there are mind-independent moral facts). This is a brief, cogent, and influential defense a sort of non-naturalist intuitionism. And, unlike some defenders of views like these (e.g. McDowell and Wiggins), the arguments here are pretty straightforward and the outlines of the resulting position are clear. Indeed, I think this chapter is the best place to start studying views of this sort. Here's an outline of the elements of Platts's position in this chapter. The first element is cognitivism. That is, he claims that moral claims are truth-apt, and that they purport to describe mind-independent moral facts. The second element is autonomy. Platts argues that morality is both semantically and epistemologically autonomous in a very strong sense. Moral language is autonomous of other language in that it cannot be analyzed in terms of non-moral language. Platts also argues that morality is epistemologically autonomous in that we do not reach moral conclusions by drawing inferences from the non-moral facts. We do not first discover what the non-moral facts are, and then apply some general principles about the relation between moral and non-moral facts in order to infer what the moral facts are like. Instead, we intuit the moral facts. Importantly, though, intuition does not require us to possess some special moral fact-detecting power that allows us to be influenced by special moral facts. How, then, does intuition work? Grasping the relevant concepts allows us to simply see, to look and observe, the moral properties of things. Nevertheless, unlike other intuitionists, Platts does not hold that what we intuit is self-evident or certain; for he thinks we have to acknowledge the pervasiveness of fallibility in all areas of inquiry. The third element is a sort of pluralism that is a response to the reality of moral dilemmas and genuine moral conflicts. Platts thinks there can be genuine moral dilemmas--cases in which people are unable to fulfill all there real obligations, cases in which a person does both good and evil. There can be such dilemmas and conflicts since the moral facts do not consist in particulars actions, people, etc. having certain overarching goodness or badness; rather, they consist in these things possessing sundry more specific moral properties. And a single thing ma