Michael Hymers

In "What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?" David Braybrooke claims that the justification of a moral claim is independent of the justification of morality generally–that ethical justification does not have to be traced back to meta-ethical justification. I support this claim by appealing to a contextualist theory of epistemic justification. Drawing on the work of Michael Williams and Robert Brandom, I contend, first, that every claim is justified by default and requires articulated reasons only when it is challenged. Not every challenge is a reasonable challenge–only those that share the burden of proof are. Secondly, I hold that sceptics about moral truth and justification, such as J. L. Mackie, are committed to a substantive philosophical position, closely linked to foundationalism, that Williams has called “epistemological realism”, insofar as they hold that moral claims are intrinsically less certain than claims about non-moral facts on which moral facts might be taken to supervene. But there is no reason to believe that any propositions are intrinsically more certain than any others. Certainty is a function of epistemic context, not semantic or empirical content. Therefore, although moral claims may presuppose the truth of some meta-ethical claims, the justification of moral claims does not depend on the justification of meta-ethical claims.

Philosophers have often thought that concepts such as ”knowledge” and ”truth” are appropriate objects for theoretical investigation. In a discussion which ranges widely over recent analytical philosophy and radical theory, Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses takes issue with this assumption, arguing that such theoreticism is not the solution but the source of traditional problems in epistemology (How can we have knowledge of the world around us? How can we have knowledge of other minds and cultures? How can we have knowledge of ourselves?) and in the philosophy of language (How can we know what our words refer to?).The author draws on Wittgenstein and recent neo-pragmatists (Putnam, Rorty, Davidson, Williams) to argue that analytical philosophy and radical theory alike stand in an ambivalent relationship with skepticism, which issues forth in varieties of ”epistemic neuroses” - manifested most clearly in the cases of metaphysical realism, relativism and causal theories of reference. Each of these projects is defined in terms possibilities that conflict with its own chances of cognitive success. Hymers explains not only the mainstream analytical philosophy of such figures as Devitt, Quine and Burge, but also structuralism (Althusser, Lacan), feminist theory (Seller, MacKinnon, Lugones) and critical theory (Marcuse), in an attempt to outline a therapeutic alternative to philosophical theoreticism.