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476Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and VicesEthics 119 (2): 257-309. 2009.This paper is a survey of recent ‘hybrid’ approaches to metaethics, according to which moral sentences, in some sense or other, express both beliefs and desires. I try to show what kinds of theoretical issues come up at the different choice points we encounter in developing such a view, to raise some problems and explain where they come from, and to begin to get a sense for what the payoff of such views can be, and what they will need to do in order to earn that payoff.
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573Showing How to Derive Knowing How (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3): 746-753. 2012.Jason Stanley's Know How aims to offer an attractive intellectualist analysis of knowledge how that is compositionally predicted by the best available treatments of sentences like 'Emile knows how to make his dad smile.' This paper explores one significant way in which Stanley's compositional treatment fails to generate his preferred account, and advocates a minimal solution.
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532Michael Ridge claims to have ‘finessed’ the Frege-Geach Problem ‘on the cheap’. In this short paper I explain a couple of the reasons why this thought is premature.
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83Being for: Evaluating the semantic program of expressivism * by mark Schroeder * clarendon press, 2008. XVI + 198 pp. {pound}27.50: Summary (review)Analysis 70 (1): 101-104. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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517Précis of Slaves of the Passions (review)Philosophical Studies 157 (3): 431-434. 2012.Précis of Slaves of the Passions Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9658-1 Authors Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
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229Weighting for a plausible Humean theory of reasonsNoûs 41 (1). 2007.This paper addresses the two extensional objections to the Humean Theory of Reasons—that it allows for too many reasons, and that it allows for too few. Although I won’t argue so here, manyof the other objections to the Humean Theoryof Reasons turn on assuming that it cannot successfully deal with these two objections.1 What I will argue, is that the force of the too many and the too few objections to the Humean Theorydepend on whether we assume that Humeans are committed to a thesis about the w…Read more
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89Deontic Modality Today: IntroductionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4): 421-423. 2014.Introduction to a special issue of PPQ of papers from a conference on deontic modality held at USC in 2013.
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206Knowledge Based on SeeingLogos and Episteme 7 (1): 101-107. 2016.In Epistemological Disjunctivism, Duncan Prichard defends his brand of epistemological disjunctivism from three worries. In this paper I argue that his responses to two of these worries are in tension with one another.
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101This style of argument comes up everywhere in the philosophy of practical reason, leveled against theories of the norm of means-end coherence on intention, against Humean theories of reasons, and many other places. It comes up in normative moral theory – for example, in arguments against buck-passing. It comes up in epistemology, in discussions of how to account for the rational connection between believing the premises of a valid argument and believing its conclusion. And it comes up in politic…Read more
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218How to be an expressivist about truthIn Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj Pedersen (eds.), New Waves in Truth, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 282--298. 2010.In this paper I explore why one might hope to, and how to begin to, develop an expressivist account of truth – that is, a semantics for ‘true’ and ‘false’ within an expressivist framework. I do so for a few reasons: because certain features of deflationism seem to me to require some sort of nondescriptivist semantics, because of all nondescriptivist semantic frameworks which are capable of yielding definite predictions rather than consisting merely of hand-waving, expressivism is that with which…Read more
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553Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledgePhilosophical Studies 160 (2). 2012.Several authors have recently endorsed the thesis that there is what has been called pragmatic encroachment on knowledge—in other words, that two people who are in the same situation with respect to truth-related factors may differ in whether they know something, due to a difference in their practical circumstances. This paper aims not to defend this thesis, but to explore how it could be true. What I aim to do, is to show how practical factors could play a role in defeating knowledge by defeati…Read more
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45Review of Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency: Essays (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (5). 2007.
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24Expressing Our Attitudes: Explanation and Expression in EthicsOxford University Press UK. 2015.Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by Mark Schroeder, one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. Two new and seven previously published papers weave treatments of propositions, truth, and the attitudes together with detailed development of competing alternative expressivist frameworks and discussion of their relative advantages. A substantial new introduction both offers new arguments of its own, and provides a map to reading these essays as a unified argum…Read more
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185The semantic theory of expressivism has been applied within metaethics to evaluative words like ‘good’ and ‘wrong’, within epistemology to words like ‘knows’, and within the philosophy of language, to words like ‘true’, to epistemic modals like ‘might’, ‘must’, and ‘probably’, and to indicative conditionals. For each topic, expressivism promises the advantage of giving us the resources to say what sentences involving these words mean by telling us what it is to believe these things, rather than …Read more
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239Not so promising after all: Evaluator-relative teleology and common-sense moralityPacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (3). 2006.Douglas Portmore has recently argued in this journal for a "promising result" – that combining teleological ethics with "evaluator relativism" about the good allows an ethical theory to account for deontological intuitions while "accommodat[ing] the compelling idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available state of affairs." I show that this result is false. It follows from the indexical semantics of evaluator relativism that Portmore's compelling idea is false. I also try …Read more
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2505Value and the right kind of reasonOxford Studies in Metaethics 5 25-55. 2010.Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other commitme…Read more
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359The Humean theory of reasonsIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 2, Oxford University Press. pp. 195--219. 2007.This paper offers a simple and novel motivation for the Humean Theory of Reasons. According to the Humean Theory of Reasons, all reasons must be explained by some psychological state of the agent for whom they are reasons, such as a desire. This view is commonly thought¹ to be motivated by a substantive theory about the power of reasons to motivate known as reason internalism, and a substantive theory about the possibility of being motivated without a desire known as the Humean Theory of Motivat…Read more
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678Hypothetical imperatives: Scope and jurisdictionIn Robert Johnson & Mark Timmons (eds.), (unknown), Oxford University Press. forthcoming.The last few decades have given rise to the study of practical reason as a legitimate subfield of philosophy in its own right, concerned with the nature of practical rationality, its relationship to theoretical rationality, and the explanatory relationship between reasons, rationality, and agency in general. Among the most central of the topics whose blossoming study has shaped this field, is the nature and structure of instrumental rationality, the topic to which Kant has to date made perhaps t…Read more
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189Semantics, moralIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. 2022.Semantics is the investigation of meaning, and semantic theories, including semantic theories about moral language, come in two very different kinds. Descriptive semantic theories are theories about what words mean. So descriptive moral semantic theories are theories about what moral words mean: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘right’, ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘reason’, and ‘rational’. In contrast, foundational semantic theories are theories about why words mean what they do, or more specifically, about wh…Read more
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119Getting noncognitivism out of the Woods (review)Analysis 70 (1): 129-139. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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218Buck-passers' negative thesisPhilosophical Explorations 12 (3): 341-347. 2009.Buck-passers about value accept two theses about value, a negative thesis and a positive. The negative thesis is that the fact that something is valuable is not itself a reason to promote or appreciate it. The positive thesis is that the fact that something is valuable consists in the fact that there are other reasons to promote or appreciate it. Buck-passers suppose that the negative thesis follows from the positive one, and sometimes insist on it as if it is the central part of their view. But…Read more
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207Reasons and Agent-neutralityPhilosophical Studies 135 (2): 279-306. 2007.This paper considers the connection between the three-place relation, R is a reason for X to do A and the two-place relation, R is a reason to do A. I consider three views on which the former is to be analyzed in terms of the latter. I argue that these views are widely held, and explain the role that they play in motivating interesting substantive ethical theories. But I reject them in favor of a more obvious analysis, which goes the other way around.
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |