Stephen Schiffer

I’m going to argue for something that some of you will find repugnant but which I can’t help thinking may be true—namely, that there are no determinate moral truths. As will become apparent, my interest in moral discourse as manifested in this paper derives more than a little from my interest in the theory of meaning. Moral discourse has always presented a puzzle for the theory of meaning and philosophical logic, and I take myself to be following the advice of Bertrand Russell when he recommended testing philosophical theories by their capacity to deal with puzzles, “since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.” Section (1) offers an epistemological argument for the claim that there are no determinate moral truths. This argument raises further questions, which subsequent sections try to answer. In the course of answering those further questions, another, non-epistemological, argument is offered for the claim that there are no determinate moral truths. In the end, I hope we see not only that there are no determinately true moral propositions, but what it is about moral concepts which makes that so

In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and other sententialist theories of belief, intention based semantics, and related issues in ontology. Stephen Schiffer is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A Bradford Book.

Suppose we think in a language of thought. Then Paul Boghossian' is prepared to argue, first, that there may be ambiguous Mentalese expression types that have unambiguous tokens, and, second, that the way in which this is possible allows for otherwise valid theoretical or practical reasoning to be rendered invalid owing to equivocation of a sort that may be undetectable to the reasoner. Paul sees this as a possible basis from which to launch an argument for what some might call "narrow content", and this is a question I'll take up later

If we think in a lingua mentis, questions about relations between linguistic meaning and propositional-attitude content become questions about relations between meaning in a public language (p-meaning) and meaning in a language of thought (t-meaning). Whether or not the neo-Gricean is correct that p-meaning can be defined in terms of t-meaning and then t-meaning defined in terms of the causal-functional roles of mentalese expressions, it's apt to seem obvious that separate accounts are needed of p-meaning and t-meaning, since p-meaning, unlike t-meaning, must be understood at least partly in terms of communication. Paul Horwich, however, claims that his ‘use theory of meaning’ provides a uniform account of all meaning in terms of ‘acceptance properties’ that, surprisingly, implicate nothing about use in communication. But it turns out that the details of his theory belie his claim about it

I. Vague Properties and the Problem of Vagueness The philosophical problem of vagueness is to say what vagueness is in a way that helps to resolve the sorites paradox. Saying what vagueness is requires saying what kinds of things can be vague and in what the vagueness of each kind consists. Philosophers dispute whether things of this, that, or the other kind can be vague, but no one disputes that there are vague linguistic expressions. Among vague expressions, predicates hold a special place in the problem of vagueness, for it’s their vagueness that is soritesgenerating. That puts the vagueness of predicates at the hub of the problem of vagueness, and there can be little doubt that we’ll be a short step from home if we can account for it. Any account of vagueness will of course require commitment to theses that are themselves foci of philosophical debate, but one can’t expect to get anywhere without taking on some as working hypotheses and then striving to say something that will be plausible if those hypotheses are plausible. One of the working hypotheses of this paper is that propositional attitudes and propositional speech acts are relations to propositions of some stripe or other, in the generic sense in which a proposition is an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity that has a truth condition, and has that truth condition both essentially and absolutely (i.e. without relativization to anything).1 The existence of propositions requires the existence of properties, in the generic sense in which a property is an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity that has an instantiation condition, and has that instantiation condition both essentially and absolutely. For present purposes it will be harmless to pretend that the propositions we believe and assert are Russellian propositions---structured entities whose basic constituents are the objects and properties our beliefs and speech acts are about. When a propositionalist speaks in loosey-goosey mode, she is apt to say that a sentence token is true just in case the proposition expressed in its utterance is true.