Gilbert Harman

Any acceptable account of moral epistemology must accord with the following points. (1) Different people acquire seemingly very different moralities. (2) All normal people acquire a moral sense, whether or not they are given explicit moral instruction. Language resembles morality in these ways. There is considerable evidence from linguistics for linguistic universals. This suggests that (3) despite the first point, there are moral universals. If so, it might be possible to develop a moral epistemology that is analogous to the theory of universal grammar in linguistics. In what follows, I will try to sketch what might be involved in such a moral epistemology.

Philosophers sometimes approach meaning metaphorically, for example, by speaking of “grasping” meanings, as if understanding consists in getting mental hands around something.1 Philosophers say that a theory of meaning should be a theory about the meanings that people assign to expressions in their language, that to understand other people requires identifying the meanings they associate with what they are saying, and that to translate an expression of another language into your own is to find an expression in your language with the same meaning as the expression in the other language.

Originally published in 1990. This study argues that scepticism is an intelligible view and that the issue scepticism raises is whether or not certain sceptical hypotheses are as plausible as the ordinary views we accept. It discusses psychological concepts, definitions of knowledge, belief and hypothetic inference. Starting from ‘Is skepticism a problem for epistemology’, the book takes us through the argument for the possibility of scepticism, including looking at sense data and considering memory and perception.

My thesis is that morality arises when a group of people reach an implicit agreement or come to a tacit understanding about their relations with one another. Part of what I mean by this is that moral judgments - or, rather, an important class of them - make sense only in relation to and with reference to one or another such agreement or understanding. This is vague, and I shall try to make it more precise in what follows. But it should be clear that I intend to argue for a version of what has been called moral relativism.

How do people reason about the what follows from certain assumptions? How do they think about implications between statements. According to one theory, people try to use a small number of mental rules of inference to construct an argument for or proof of a relevant conclusion from the assumptions (e.g., Rips 1994). According to a competing theory, people construct one or more mental models of the situation described in the assumptions and try to determine what conclusion fits with the model or models constructed (e.g., Johnson-Laird 1983, 2006). The present collection offers eleven contributions to the mental models theory.