Logic List Mailing Archive
"Normative Concepts", Z?h (Switzerland), 21-22 Septeber 2007
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
NORMATIVE CONCEPTS
AT ZURICH UNIVERSITY
21 - 22 September 2007, KO2 F 152, Rmistrasse 71, Zurich University
Participation is free, but registration requested:
<mailto:ray@philos.uzh.ch> ray@philos.uzh.ch
Organised by Prof. Dr. Hanjo Glock & Dr. phil. Reto Givel
Further information:
<http://www.philosophie.uzh.ch/concepts>
www.philosophie.uzh.ch/concepts
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Steve Barker (Nottingham): How to be a Global Expressivist
Value-sentences can be asserted, truth-apt, and embedded in logical
compounds. How could it be, as expressivists contend, that in asserting a
value-sentence one expresses an affective state, since real assertions
express beliefs? Quasi-realism, minimalism, or a dual-content theory aren~Rt
solutions to the puzzle. The solution is to reject the implicit assumption
that real assertions express beliefs, in the sense that belief is part of an
explanation of what assertion is. Rejecting this assumption is the path to a
totally new perspective on expressivism.
Reto Givel (Zurich): The Meaning of Derogatory Terms
What is the extension of derogatory terms such as ~QBoche~R, ~QYank~R, and
~QNigger~R? Is their extension necessarily the same as the extension of
their descriptive correlates (i.e. ~QGerman~R, ~QAmerican~R, and ~QBlack
Person~R respectively)? Are their extensions empty or at least limited to a
sub-set of their correlates~R extensions? Why is saying ~QX is not a
Nigger~R just as racist as ~QX is a Nigger~R is? Is it okay to call ~QEither
X is a Nigger or it is not the case that X is a Nigger~R true? Or do
derogatory claims lack truth-value in the first place? This paper tries to
develop desiderata that the correct account of derogatory speech is supposed
to match, and compares different theories that are currently developed by
different philosophers.
David Kaplan (UCLA): The Meaning of ~SOuch~T and ~SOops~T
What, if anything, is said when we utter ~SOuch!~T? Are we saying that we
are in pain? If so, why is it linguistically inappropriate to respond, ~SAre
you sure?~T If nothing is said, is ~SOuch!~T meaningless? Is it gibberish?
In recent years, Linguists have intensively studied competing conceptions of
the proper form for a syntactical theory. It is natural to raise the
corresponding question: What form should a Semantical Theory have? That is
the general question under review here. It may be that the primary problem
in semantics is not what does this or that mean, but rather, in what form
should we attempt to say what this or that means. Driven by a single,
seemingly anomalous phenomenon -- the form of the semantical metalanguage
for an object language containing indexicals -- I have explored a wide
variety of linguistic phenomena that appear to call for a similar form of
semantical metalanguage. This led me to conclude that an extension of the
methods of the earlier work on indexicals and demonstratives may apply to a
range of expressions that have a use, but a use that does not seem to derive
from their meaning, in any traditional sense of "meaning". Among such
expressions are "Ouch", "Goodbye", "damn" (the adjective), racial epithets,
and familiar vs. formal forms of address. Such expressions have been
thought to 'color' language, but it has also been thought that truth, and
hence logic, is immune to such coloration. The research aims to challenge
these dicta.
Gerhard Ernst (Munich): Normative concepts ~V Finding an Analogy
The problem of understanding normative concepts is, in my opinion, the
problem of finding a suitable object of comparison. Expressivists try to
show that we use normative and evaluative terms just like other, less
complex, expressive terms (like ~SBoo!~T and ~SHurrah!~T). Prescriptivists
try to show that judgements containing normative terms resemble requests or
commands. Naturalists try to show that normative concepts are just plain old
empirical concepts, and not normative after all. All these philosophers, I
think, choose the wrong objects of comparison. As I am going to argue,
normative and evaluative concepts are, in fact, of the same kind as
scientific concepts. Whether this analogy helps to understand the normative
realm or rather makes scientific concepts more mysterious remains to be
seen.
Michael Ridge (Edinburgh): Ecumenical Expressivism and the Ideal Prescriber
There is a long history of so-called 'ideal advisor' analyses of normative
discourse. In this paper I work within that tradition, but with two key
twists: First, I see advice as a species of prescription, and a species
which has a 'take it or leave it' connotation. Not only prescriptions are
like this, and I argue that it is better to analyze normative discourse in
terms of the broader concept of an ideal prescriber, where prescriptions can
include not only advice, but insistence. Second, whereas historically ideal
advisor theories have been developed within a cognitivist framework, my own
version of the view is developed in the context of a form of expressivism I
have been independently developing - ecumenical expressivism. I argue that
this combination of views has several distinctive advantages over its
rivals.