•  369
    On the Meaning of 'Ought'
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 7, Oxford University Press. pp. 304. 2012.
    Discussions about the meaning of the word “ought” are pulled in two apparently competing directions. First, in ethical theory this word is used in the paradigmatic statement of ethical principles and conclusions about what some agent is obligated to do. This leads some ethical theorists to claim that the word “ought” describes a real relation, roughly, of being obligated to (realism) or expresses some non-cognitive attitude toward agents acting in certain ways (expressivism). Second, in theoreti…Read more
  •  6
    Ethical Expressivism
    In Christian Miller (ed.), Continuum Companion to Ethics, Continuum. pp. 29. 2011.
    This is an advanced overview of ethical expressivism, which discuss some of the history of the research program and recent developments in the work of Michael Ridge and Mark Schroeder.
  •  331
    ‘Ought’ and Control
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3): 433-451. 2012.
    Ethical theorists often assume that the verb ‘ought’ means roughly ‘has an obligation’; however, this assumption is belied by the diversity of ‘flavours’ of ought-sentences in English. A natural response is that ‘ought’ is ambiguous. However, this response is incompatible with the standard treatment of ‘ought’ by theoretical semanticists, who classify ‘ought’ as a member of the family of modal verbs, which are treated uniformly as operators. To many ethical theorists, however, this popular treat…Read more
  •  121
    The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation of t…Read more
  •  176
    Expressivism, truth, and (self-) knowledge
    Philosophers' Imprint 9 1-26. 2009.
    In this paper, I consider the prospects of two different kinds of expressivism – ethical expressivism and avowal expressivism – in light of two common objections. The first objection stems from the fact that it is natural to think of ethical statements and avowals as at least potential manifestations of knowledge. The second objection stems from the fact that it is natural to treat ethical statements and avowals as truth-evaluable. I argue that, although a recent avowal expressivist attempt (Bar…Read more
  •  155
    Constructivism, Expressivism and Ethical Knowledge
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (3): 331-353. 2010.
    In the contemporary metaethical debate, expressivist (Blackburn, Gibbard) and constructivist (Korsgaard, Street) views can be viewed as inspired by irrealist ideas from Hume and Kant respectively. One realist response to these contemporary irrealist views is to argue that they are inconsistent with obvious surface-level appearances of ordinary ethical thought and discourse, especially the fact that we talk and act as if there is ethical knowledge . In this paper, I explore some constructivist an…Read more
  •  108
    X—Knowing What One Ought to Do
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2pt2): 167-186. 2015.
    This paper considers two competing pictures of knowledge of what one ought to do—one which assimilates this to other propositional knowledge conceived as partial ‘locational’ knowledge of where one is in a space of possibilities, the other which distinguishes this from other propositional knowledge by construing it as partial ‘directional’ knowledge of what to do in particular circumstances. I argue that the apparent tension can be lessened by better understanding the contextualized modal-cum-pr…Read more
  •  62
    Reasons as Defaults by John F. Horty
    Mind 124 (495): 919-924. 2015.
  •  431
    Expressivism, Inferentialism, and the Theory of Meaning
    In Michael Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2011.
    One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit – roughly, as part to whole – with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind is the sort of metaethical expressivism inspired by Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, and defended and worked out in more detail recently by Blackburn, Gibb…Read more
  •  320
    Ethical neo-expressivism
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 4, Oxford University Press. pp. 132-65. 2009.
    A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. We can either treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that one cannot believe without being at least somewhat motivated (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as…Read more
  •  341
    It is a piece of philosophical common sense that belief and knowledge are states. Some epistemologists reject this claim in hope of answering certain difficult questions about the normative evaluation of belief. I shall argue, however, that this move offends not only against philosophical commonsense but also against ordinary common sense, at least as far as this is manifested in the semantic content of the words we use to talk about belief and knowledge. I think it is relatively easily to show …Read more
  •  202
    From Epistemic Expressivism to Epistemic Inferentialism
    In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2010.
    Recent philosophical debate about the meaning of knowledge claims has largely centered on the question of whether epistemic claims are plausibly thought to be context sensitive. The default assumption has been that sentences that attribute knowledge or justification have stable truth-conditions across different contexts of utterance, once any non-epistemic context sensitivity has been fixed. The contrary view is the contextualist view that such sentences do not have stable truth-conditions but c…Read more
  •  59
    Emotivism
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
    This is a brief overview of the view in metaethics called Emotivism.
  •  480
    The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg
    In Pedro Schmechtig & Martin Grajner (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms, and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 357-382. 2016.
    This paper considers an argument from Rosenberg (Thinking about Knowing, 2002) that truth is not and cannot be the aim of belief. Here, I reconstruct what I take to be the most well worked out version of this idea tracing back to Rorty and Davidson. In response, I also distinguish two things the truth-aim could be: a goal regulating our executable epistemic conduct and an end which determines the types of evaluation, susceptibility to which is partially constitutive of what a belief is.
  •  250
    Epistemic Normativity and Cognitive Agency
    Noûs 52 (3): 508-529. 2016.
    On the assumption that genuinely normative demands concern things connected in some way to our agency, i.e. what we exercise in doing things with or for reasons, epistemologists face an important question: are there genuine epistemic norms governing belief, and if so where in the vicinity of belief are we to find the requisite cognitive agency? Extant accounts of cognitive agency tend to focus on belief itself or the event of belief-formation to answer this question, to the exclusion of the acti…Read more
  •  1103
    Is epistemic expressivism incompatible with inquiry?
    Philosophical Studies 159 (3): 323-339. 2012.
    Expressivist views of an area of discourse encourage us to ask not about the nature of the relevant kinds of values but rather about the nature of the relevant kind of evaluations. Their answer to the latter question typically claims some interesting disanalogy between those kinds of evaluations and descriptions of the world. It does so in hope of providing traction against naturalism-inspired ontological and epistemological worries threatening more ‘realist’ positions. This is a familiar positi…Read more
  •  101
    Using big words to explain little words
    Think 10 (29): 23-36. 2011.
    Sometimes, when I go to dinner parties organized by my partner, people ask me what I do, and I say that I'm a philosopher. But when I fumble at their questions about ‘my philosophy’, my partner will describe what I do by saying, ‘He uses big words to explain little words.’ Although this is meant tongue in cheek, it's basically right. My philosophical research is mainly in metaethics and the philosophy of language with a focus on the semantics of moral words. This means, for better or worse, that…Read more
  •  545
    Ought to Believe
    Journal of Philosophy 105 (7): 346-370. 2008.
    My primary purpose in this paper is to sketch a theory of doxastic oughts that achieves a satisfying middle ground between the extremes of rejecting epistemic deontology because one thinks beliefs are not within our direct voluntary control and rejecting doxastic involuntarism because one thinks that some doxastic oughts must be true. The key will be appreciating the obvious fact that not all true oughts require direct voluntary control. I will construct my account as an attempt to surpass other…Read more
  •  389
    Epistemic Expressivism
    Philosophy Compass 7 (2): 118-126. 2012.
    Epistemic expressivism is the application of a nexus of ideas, which is prominent in ethical theory (more specifically, metaethics), to parallel issues in epistemological theory (more specifically, metaepistemology). Here, in order to help those new to the debate come to grips with epistemic expressivism and recent discussions of it, I first briefly present this nexus of ideas as it occurs in ethical expressivism. Then, I explain why and how some philosophers have sought to extend it to a vers…Read more
  •  467
    Attitudinal Expressivism and Logical Pragmatism
    In Graham Hubbs & Douglas Lind (eds.), Pragmatism, Law, and Language, . pp. 117-135. 2014.
    Contemporary discussions of expressivism in metaethics tend to run together two quite different antidescriptivist views, and only one of them is subject to the objection about compositional semantics pressed most recently by Schroeder (following Dreier, Unwinn, Hale, Geach and others). Here I distinguish the two versions of expressivism and then go on to suggest that those sympathetic to the second sort of expressivism might improve their account of normative vocabulary and the way it figures in…Read more