Joshua Gert

It is a suggestive feature of English and other languages that an indicative sentence such as ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ can be described not only as an expression of the belief that premarital sex is wrong, but also as an expression of disapproval of premarital sex. Disapproval is plausibly regarded as an attitude that is distinct from belief, in that it does not have truth conditions. What sort of attitude, then, should we take ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ to express: disapproval, belief, or perhaps both? One group of contemporary philosophers advocates the first Option. They hold that evaluative claims serve essentially to express positive and negative attitudes that are more like desires than beliefs, and that cannot be said to be true or false — at least in the robust way in which claims about the ages of trees can be true or false. Call these philosophers ‘expressivists.’ Seemingly opposed to expressivists are those who hold that evaluative claims express beliefs, and can be true or false.

Abstract: This article explains and motivates an account of one way in which we might have substantive a priori knowledge in one important class of domains: domains in which the central concepts are response-dependent. The central example will be our knowledge of the connection between something's being harmful and the fact that it is irrational for us to fail to be averse to that thing. The idea is that although the relevant responses (basic aversion in the case of harm, and a kind of interpretive failure in the case of irrationality) are produced by independent psychological mechanisms, they have distal causes that turn out to be related in ways that—once language enters the picture—yield epistemically accessible necessary connections between the referents of their corresponding terms.

Perceptual-role theories of mental qualities hold that we can discover the nature of a being’s mental qualities by investigating that being’s capacity to make perceptual discriminations. Many advocates of perceptual-role theories hold that the best explanation of these capacities is that mental quality spaces are homomorphic to the spaces of the physical properties that they help to discriminate. This paper disputes this thesis on largely empirical grounds, and offers an alternative. The alternative explains interesting patterns in our perception of color differences and similarities across edges, emphasizing the importance of visual discontinuities. Further, it provides a simple explanation of the intransitivity of indiscriminability. The homomorphism thesis can explain this intransitivity only with the addition of an independently unsupported empirical hypothesis. Also, in contrast to the homomorphism thesis, the alternative view is perfectly consistent with empirical data that suggest that the visual system uses the dynamic allocation of a limited range of responses in order to discriminate a wider range of physical stimuli and that we are much better at detecting changes in relative luminance than changes in absolute luminance. Moreover, it does all this while using a more efficient strategy for encoding sensory information.

Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and T. M. S canlon, among others, all hold that reasons for action are provided by facts about those actions. They also hold that the fact that an action would promote or achieve the object of an agent's desire is not one of the relevant facts, and does not provide a reason. Rather, the facts that provide reasons are typically facts about valuable states of affairs that the action is likely to bring about, or valuable properties that the action itself will instantiate. For this reason it is appropriate to call Parfit, Raz, and Scanlon "value-based" theorists about reasons for action. In contrast to value-based theorists, there is a strong current of contemporary theorizing, starting with Bernard Williams, that can be called "desire-based." Desire-based theorists argue that practical reasons should be understood in terms of the desires of the agents who are said to have those reasons

This article explains and defends the existence of value constancy, understood on the model of color constancy. Color constancy involves a phenomenal distinction between the transient color appearances of objects and the unchanging colors that those objects appear to have. The existence of value constancy allows advocates of response-dependent accounts of value to reject the question “What is the uniquely appropriate attitude to have toward this evaluative property?” as containing a false uniqueness assumption. Rejecting this assumption allows response-dependent accounts of value to deflect or answer a host of popular objections

Julia Markovits has recently argued for what she calls the ‘Coincident Reasons Thesis’: the thesis that one’s action is morally worthy if and only if one’s motivating reasons for acting mirror, in content and strength, the reasons that explain why the action ought, morally, to be performed. This thesis assumes that the structure of motivating reasons is sufficiently similar to the structure of normative reasons that the required coincidence in content and strength is a genuine possibility. But because motivating reasons have only one dimension of strength, while normative reasons have both justifying and requiring strength, one’s motivating reasons can no more coincide with the normative reasons of relevance to one’s action than a line can coincide with a square, or a square with a cube. It is possible to amend the Coincident Reasons Thesis so that it concerns only one dimension of normative strength: for example, requiring strength. But such an amended thesis yields implausible verdicts. In particular it requires us either to deny the existence of supererogatory action, or—still less plausibly—to hold that such action has less moral worth than does doing the morally required minimum

René Jagnow [2012] argues that David Rosenthal's theory of consciousness cannot account for certain experiences that involve colours so fine-grained that we do not and cannot have concepts of them. Jagnow claims that an appeal to comparative concepts such as being slightly darker than cannot help Rosenthal, since, in order to apply such concepts, we would already need to be conscious of two distinct fine-grained colours. The present paper contests this claim. It appeals to the Cornsweet illusion and some other visual phenomena, in order to argue that our visual systems can and do represent brutely comparative matters

Ruth Chang has argued for the existence of a fourth positive value relation, distinct from betterness, worseness and equality, which she calls “parity.” In an earlier article I seemed to criticize Chang's suggestion by offering an interval model for the values of items that I claimed could accommodate all the phenomena characteristic of parity. Wlodek Rabinowicz, offering his own model of value relations, endorsed one central feature of my proposal: the need to distinguish permissible preferences from required ones. But he, along with Chang, correctly pointed out that my own model suffered from serious formal problems. The present article offers an improved interval model, but the main point is not the model itself. Rather, it is the derivation of the model from a response-dependent account of practical rationality. This derivation helps explain why we have a concept for which Rabinowicz's model is appropriate, and therefore supplements Chang's existence arguments. My conclusion is that we can take Chang's view, Rabinowicz's and mine as providing a reinforcing set of views

This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally.

In “ A Light Theory of Color”, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and David Sparrow argue that color is neither a primary quality of objects, nor a disposition that objects have, nor a property of our visual fields. Rather, according to the view they present, color is a property of light. The present paper aims to show, first, that the light theory is vulnerable to many of the very same objections that Sinnott-Armstrong and Sparrow raise against rival views. Second, the paper argues that the strategies that Sinnott-Armstrong and Sparrow use to avoid certain objections are also available to proponents of rival accounts. This might only seem to show that the light theory is in the same shaky boat as other theories: suffering from the same problems but having the same tools for solving them. The paper concludes with a suggestion as to why this is not the case, but why the existence of the light theory is nevertheless likely to bring increased clarity to the debate about color realism.

The question “Why be moral?” is open to at least three extremely different interpretations. One way to distinguish these interpretations is by picturing the question as being asked by, respectively, Allan, who is going to act immorally unless he can be convinced to act otherwise, Beth, who is perfectly happy to do what is morally required on a certain occasion but who wants to know what is it about the act that makes it morally required, and Charles, who is trying to understand why rational people act morally. An answer to the question as understood by Allan is, for some, the holy grail of moral philosophy, and it is also perhaps the default understanding of the question. The question as asked by Beth is what David Copp, in his contribution to this volume, calls the “why-think-morality-requires-this” question. The question as asked by Charles can be called the “what-rationally-justifies-moral-behaviour” question. Charles’ question, importantly, is about rational permissibility, and it is most pointed when moral behaviour requires sacrifice.

Alan Goldman’s Reasons from Within is one of the most thorough recent defenses of what might be called ‘orthodox internalism’ about practical reasons. Goldman’s main target is an opposing view that includes a commitment to the following two theses: (O) that there are such things as objective values, and (E) that these values give rise to external reasons. One version of this view, which we can call ‘orthodox externalism’, also includes a commitment to the thesis (I) that rational people will be motivated by any reason they have of which they are aware. Goldman himself embraces (I), and deploys it frequently in his criticisms of orthodox externalism. But there is logical space for an externalist view that includes a commitment to (O) and (E), but that denies (I). The resulting “hyperexternalist” view holds that some reasons need not motivate us, even if we are rational. In this paper I argue that Goldman’s criticisms of orthodox externalism leave hyperexternalism untouched, and that his specific criticisms of my own version of hyperexternalism do not work. In light of Goldman’s criticisms of orthodox externalism and my own criticisms of Goldman’s view, hyperexternalism emerges as the favored option

This article attempts to do two things. The first is to make it plausible that any adequate dispositional view of color will have to associate colors with complex functions from a wide range of normal circumstances to a wide range of (simultaneously) incompatible color appearances, so that there will be no uniquely veridical appearance of any given color. The second is to show that once this move is made, dispositionalism is in a position to provide interesting answers to some of the most challenging objections that have been pressed against it. It explains why colors do not seem to come on when the lights come on, and why the right thing to say seems to be that the light causes the objects to reveal their colors. It explains why the content of visual experience need not be problematically circular. It eliminates the problem of intrapersonal variation in color appearance. And it even provides resources for dealing with the problem of interpersonal variation. It is true that in moving to the more complex view, the dispositionalist becomes subject to a new objection, which has been called the problem of unity. The paper offers a solution to this problem as well.

Jason Stanley has criticized a contextualist solution to the sorites paradox that treats vagueness as a kind of indexicality. His objection rests on a feature of indexicals that seems plausible: that their reference remains fixed in verb phrase ellipsis. But the force of Stanley’s criticism depends on the undefended assumption that vague terms, if they are a special sort of indexical, must function in the same way that more paradigmatic indexicals do. This paper argues that there can be more than one sort of indexicality, that one term might easily have both sorts, and that therefore, and despite Stanley’s worries, vagueness might easily be assimilated to one form.