21-22 September 2007
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NORMATIVE CONCEPTS AT ZURICH UNIVERSITY Further information www.philosophie.uzh.ch/concepts <http://www.philosophie.uzh.ch/concepts> 21 - 22 September 2007, KO2 F 152, Rmistrasse 71, Zurich University Participation is free, but registration requested: ray@philos.uzh.ch <mailto:ray@philos.uzh.ch> Organised by Prof. Dr. Hanjo Glock & Dr. phil. Reto Givel 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 arent 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 Boche, Yank, and Nigger? Is their extension necessarily the same as the extension of their descriptive correlates (i.e. German, American, and Black Person respectively)? Are their extensions empty or at least limited to a sub-set of their correlates extensions? Why is saying X is not a Nigger just as racist as X is a Nigger is? Is it okay to call Either X is a Nigger or it is not the case that X is a Nigger 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 Ouch and Oops What, if anything, is said when we utter Ouch!? Are we saying that we are in pain? If so, why is it linguistically inappropriate to respond, Are you sure? If nothing is said, is Ouch! 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 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 Boo! and Hurrah!). 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.