The Meaning of ‘Ought’

Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics

Bibliographic Data

ID10690368
AuthorsGiulia Pravato (0000-0003-2219-4507, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, corresponding author)
Year2016
Pagespqw057
Publication date2016-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pq/pqw057
OpenAlexW2516535864
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited2

Matthew Chrisman's The Meaning of Ought develops a view about what ‘ought’ means, in two crucial senses of the word ‘meaning’. First, he articulates a new rule to capture what competent users of ‘ought’ master. This is what he calls a semantics for ‘ought’. Secondly, he defends a certain interpretation of the formal machinery invoked by this rule. He calls this a metasemantics for ‘ought’. These two enterprises, Chrisman insists, are independent from one another. And that's a third claim running through the book. Chrisman spends a large part of The Meaning of Ought (§3–5) motivating the introduction of his new semantic rule for ‘ought’. His conception of linguistic competence is the classical one: the rule implicitly followed by competent speakers who use ‘ought’ can be modelled by a function that spits out certain values (classically and neutrally: ‘1’ or ‘0’) for all sentences that embed ‘ought’. He further thinks that Kratzer-style orthodoxy is roughly right: ‘ought’ is an intensional operator that evaluates the truth of the content it embeds (the ‘prejacent’) relative to a space of possibilities that are ordered in a certain way, where both the relevant possibilities and the relevant ordering are fixed by the context. So, for example, ‘Jim ought to clean his room’ is true iff Jim cleans his room in all the relevant worlds that are maximally ranked by the contextually supplied ordering (say, the rules of the house).

Agnosticism · Epistemology · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Sociology · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

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