Joshua Gert

Neopragmatism is what local expressivism becomes when it is fully generalized and globalized. One of its attractions is its promise to demystify long-standing metaphysical puzzles by shifting the focus from ontology to language. Among current neopragmatists, there is an important divide. Members of one group hold that we cannot explain language without making use of normative notions such as reasons or entitlements. Members of the other group deny this. In this paper, I defend the naturalistic version of neopragmatism from arguments coming from proponents of the normative version.

Neopragmatism is an anti-metaphysical approach to philosophical problems. It addresses such problems by taking the focus off of metaphysics, and turning it onto language. That is, the neopragmatist seeks philosophically uncontentious explanations of the sort of _talk_ that often gives rise to the sense that there is a deep philosophical puzzle to solve. In the domain of perception, reflection on apt ways of describing perceptual experiences have led to various metaphysically committing theories, including (i) sense data theory, (ii) representationalism, and (iii) naïve realism. This chapter uses neopragmatist techniques to undermine the case for the last of these. The attack is two-pronged. First, some of the metaphysical commitments of naïve realism are criticized. Second, neopragmatism is used to explain some of the ideas that were thought to lend naïve realism support. These include the idea that perceptual experience has a peculiar sort of _openness_ or _presentational character_, and the related idea that such experience gives insight into the mind-independent character of the world. Beyond forming the basis for criticizing other views, neopragmatism also suggests a positive view of perception. This is a form of adverbialism that relies on the idea that our sensory states are information-bearing, but not, in any robust sense, representational.

This chapter collects a number of arguments for a robust distinction between the justifying weight and requiring weight of a given normative practical reason. It then presents a new form of argument for such a distinction: a demonstration that it is already latent in the very different accounts of such reasons supported by Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star, T. M. Scanlon, and Joseph Raz. That the justifying/requiring distinction shows up in views that are so different in other ways—views that, moreover, did not set out explicitly set out to capture or even allow for it—suggests that it is a genuine feature of the practical normative domain. The chapter also shows how a more explicit recognition of a robust justifying/requiring distinction would provide important benefits for proponents of all three views. This too provides some reason to accept it.

In Rethinking Metaphysics Amie Thomasson begins with a diagnosis of the characteristic error that leads philosophers to conduct mainstream metaphysics in traditional ways. The source of the problem is a mistaken picture of how language works. She then defends a reconceptualization of at least many traditional metaphysical debates, turning them into attempts at conceptual engineering (or, in some cases, reverse-engineering). In this paper, and despite a very general and deep agreement with Thomasson, I describe a few strategies by which metaphysicians might, in good conscience, continue to theorize in traditional ways. And I try to offer them some avenues by which they might challenge Thomasson's own reconceptualization of the task. The overall point, however, is by no means to defend traditional metaphysics. Rather, it is a contribution toward making the case against it as watertight as possible, by pointing to some gaps that might be filled.

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard presents and defends a neo‐Kantian theory of normativity. Her initial account of reasons seems to make them dependent upon the practical identity of the agent, and upon the value the agent must place on her own humanity. This seems to make all reasons agent‐relative. But Korsgaard claims that arguments similar to Wittgenstein's private‐language argument can show that reasons are in fact essentially agent‐neutral. This paper explains both of Korsgaard's Wittgen‐steinian arguments, and shows why neither of them work. The paper also provides a brief sketch of a different Wingensteinian account of reasons that distinguishes the normative role of justification from that of requirement. On this account, the real agent‐neutrality of reasons applies to their justificatory role, but not to their requiring role.

Neopragmatists – some of whom might be called ‘global expressivists’ – reject metaphysics and take talk of concepts to be talk of the mastery of contingent linguistic practices that have been shaped by human nature. As a result, it may seem much harder for them to account for the sorts of necessary connections – whether conceptual or metaphysical – defended in so much of contemporary analytic philosophy. In some cases, this is right: the connections are really there, and neopragmatists will have to rise to the challenge of explaining them. But in other cases, it may turn out that the putative necessary connections are illusions that neopragmatist lenses can help one see through. In this paper, I try to reveal the workings behind one illusion and to rise to one challenge. In each case the point is a double one; to shed light on the first-order issue and to illustrate the virtues of neopragmatism as a general approach to philosophical problems. And there is a third point: that in some cases the philosophically interesting conclusion about a set of related concepts will only be that there are some ‘for the most part’ connections between them.

The problem of creeping minimalism is the problem of drawing a principled line between expressivism and its rivals. The dominant strategy for solving the problem is explanationism, which tries to distinguish the two camps by looking at their constitutive explanations of claims in which the relevant terms appear in intensional contexts: claims like “Bob believes that murder‐for‐hire is wrong”. The present paper considers two recent and independent attempts to pursue a very distinct strategy, which focuses on claims in which the relevant terms appear in non‐intensional contexts: claims like “Obligation figures in some fundamental laws”. The hope is that expressivists and non‐expressivists will—necessarily—differ in their assessments of at least some such claims. That is, expressivism will leave a characteristic metaphysical residue. While explanationist proposals have received a great deal of critical attention, appeals to metaphysical residue have received virtually none. This paper argues that such appeals fail and that the reasons behind their failure suggest that the problem of creeping minimalism does not have a solution.

When Michael Smith published The Moral Problem, he advocated only Weak Moral Rationalism: the view that moral requirements always provide us with reasons that are relevant to the rationality of our action. But in the intervening years he has changed his position. He now holds Strong Moral Rationalism: the view that moral requirements are all-things-considered rational requirements. In this paper I argue that his change in view was motivated by two things. The first is his correct view that acting as one is morally required to act is never irrational. The second is what David Copp has called The Unitary View of Reasons: the idea that there are both moral reasons for action, and non-moral ones, and both sorts count as reasons that determine what is rational to do. This combination of views pushes Smith to hold that an act counts as morally required just in case the moral reasons that favor it outweigh all other reasons, both moral and non-moral. But, I argue, there is an attractive position between Weak and Strong Moral Rationalism, which I call Moral Permissibilism. On such a view, moral requirements, while not always rational requirements (as against Strong Moral Rationalism), are always rationally permissible (as against Moral Anti-Rationalism). In order to advocate this common-sensical position, however, one must abandon the Unitary View of Reasons, and recognize that reasons of different kinds contribute to different kinds of normative verdicts.

The norms of rationality determine whether an act is irrational, rationally required, or rationally optional. It has seemed theoretically difficult to make significant room for the last category, because rational status is typically taken to be a function of reasons, and reasons are typically taken to have univocal strength values. But there is also a strong intuition that normal choice situations present us with many equally rational options. If this intuition is correct, two questions arise. The first is how it could be true, assuming that rational status is indeed a function of reasons. The second is whether and how we can act in a non-arbitrary way when we are faced with a choice between a number of equally rational options. This chapter examines four strategies for addressing these questions: incommensurability of reasons, parity, the ubiquity of ties, and a distinction between the justifying and requiring roles of practical reasons.

Neopragmatism is a very general language-first approach to questions about the existence or nature of various traditionally philosophically troubling entities or properties. It rejects metaphysical questions about these things by instead focusing our attention on our practices of using the relevant words: words like 'true', 'four', 'immoral', 'necessary', 'art', and so on. Once we have unmysterious naturalistic explanations of our practices of making assertions with these sorts of words, and of assessing those assertions as true or false, metaphysical worries about them should simply fade away. Neopragmatism differs from more common expressivist accounts of the same sorts of vocabulary because expressivism is almost always offered as a local view, presented against a more general representationalist background. Neopragmatists, on the other hand, defend a global view that endorses deflationary accounts of the whole constellation of representational and semantic notions such as reference, truth, belief, assertion, and proposition. A general deflationism of this sort makes it impossible to draw a contrast between representational and non-representational propositions, assertions, or beliefs. While neopragmatism has been on the scene since the 1980's, it has generally only been visible to theorists working on the very general issue of the relation of language to reality. When it comes to first-order philosophical issues such as the nature of time, or the various modals, or color, or art, neopragmatism often seems simply not to be on the radar. This volume takes up the task of exploring the implications - direct and indirect - of the neopragmatist perspective for various first order philosophical issues.

The problem of creeping minimalism is the problem of drawing a principled distinction between expressivists and non-expressivists. Explanationism is a popular strategy for solving the problem, but two of its forms—ontological explanationism and representational explanationism—have fatal problems. Christine Tiefensee and Matthew Simpson have recently, and independently, endorsed a third form: subject matter explanationism. But this form also fails. At bottom, the problem is that it does not note the existence of non-reductive expressivist views, just as earlier forms of explanationism did not note the existence of error theories, or non-naturalist realists, or realists who wanted to endorse deflationary views of truth and representation. The failure of this latest version of explanationism—one that does indeed avoid problems with earlier versions—strengthens the case that we may not actually want a solution to the problem of creeping minimalism after all. Rather, a form of global expressivism—neopragmatism—might be regarded as yielding a version of non-naturalist normative realism.

Twin Earth thought experiments are a standard philosophical tool for those offering, or criticizing, metasemantic theories: theories that attempt explain why referring words have the particular referents they have. The general recipe for Twin Earth thought experiments centrally features the description of a planet and population just like Earth and Earthlings, but with some single crucial differeence. In Hilary Putnam’s original version of the experiment, the difference is that the chemical composition of the stuff that looks and behaves like (our) water is XYZ rather than H2O. Such cases show how variation in the physical environment can induce a corresponding variation in reference. In other versions, variations in the linguistic dispositions of speakers are shown to induce corresponding variations in reference. The extension of the word ‘red’ depends on how the linguistic community is disposed to apply that word, as against ‘purple’ or ‘orange’. Perhaps most interestingly, basic normative terms like ‘ought’ or ‘immoral’ seem to vary in neither of these ways. Even if Earthlings and Normative Twin Earthlings consistently made moral judgments in line with two quite distinct moral theories, they might still be talking about the very same property: moral wrongness. The present paper describes and applies a general metasemantic view that yields plausible claims about all three sorts of cases. The view I will defend—neopragmatism—is a fully generalized version of the sort of local expressivism defended in the past by people like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard. Throughout the paper, a contrast is made with a rival approach to the same phenomena: an appeal to reference magnetism.

Those who endorse the twin theses of transparency and representationalism with regard to visual experience hold that the qualities we are aware of in such experience are, all of them, apparently possessed by external objects. They hold, therefore, that we are not introspectively aware of any qualities of visual experience itself. In this paper I argue that attention to visual noise—also known as ‘eigenlicht’ or ‘eigengrau’—puts pressure on both of these theses, though in different ways. Phenomenally, visual noise does not even seem to belong to any external objects, which is a challenge to transparency. Moreover, visual noise is not the normal visual response to any distinctive external property, such as external graininess. Nor is it treated by our visual system as the perception of any such property. Given extant views of visual representation, it is therefore implausible to claim that it is the transparent representation of any such property.

Research on moral disgust suffers from a methodological bias. The bulk of such investigation focuses almost exclusively on the operation of moral disgust within the psychology of a single individual, or as involving an interaction between two people. This leads to certain questions being salient, while other phenomena, which emerge only at the level of an entire community or society, are largely hidden from view. The present paper explains and defends a perspective that emphasizes the role of moral disgust within a community. It also illustrates the usefulness of this perspective by applying it to three quite distinct accounts of moral disgust: Alexandra Plakias’s response model of moral disgust, David Pizarro’s idea that moral disgust is part of a behavioral immune system, and Jesse Prinz’s self‐consciously simple form of moral sentimentalism.

Justin D’Ambrosio and I have recently and independently defended perceptual adverbialism from Frank Jackson’s well-known Many-Properties Problem. Both of us make use of a similar strategy: characterizing ways of perceiving by using the language of objects, and not just of properties. But while D’Ambrosio’s view does indeed validate the inferences that Jackson’s challenge highlights, it does so at the price of validating additional, invalid inferences, such as the inference from the claim that a small child hallucinates a bottle of aspirin to the claim that the child hallucinates a bottle of acetylsalicylic acid. My view avoids this. The crucial difference is that D’Ambrosio appeals to success conditions, which are extensional, while I appeal to informational content, which is not.

Adverbialism is the view that to have a conscious perceptual experience is to be consciously experiencing in a certain way, and that this way is not to be understood in relational or representational terms. We might compare what it is for a conscious being to be experiencing in a certain way with what it is for a string to be vibrating in a certain way. This paper makes a new case for adverbialism by appealing to the fact that we can pick out ways of experiencing by treating them as information-bearing signals. In both presenting and defending the view, it will be crucial that information is not the same as representational content, but can still concern objects and the properties of those objects. The resulting information-theoretic adverbialism can answer or deflect the most influential objections to adverbialism.

Although it goes against a widespread significant misunderstanding of his view, Michael Smith is one of the very few moral philosophers who explicitly wants to allow for the commonsense claim that, while morally required action is always favored by some reason, selfish and immoral action can also be rationally permissible. One point of this paper is to make it clear that this is indeed Smith’s view. It is a further point to show that his way of accommodating this claim is inconsistent with his well-known “practicality requirement” on moral judgments: the thesis that any rational person will always have at least some motivation to do what she judges to be right. The general conclusion is that no view that, like Smith’s, associates the normative strength of a reason with the motivational strength of an ideal desire will allow for the wide range of rational permissibility that Smith wants to capture.

Jamie Dreier has argued that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral requires explanation, and that attempts by the non-naturalist to provide it, or to sidestep the issue, have so far failed. These comments on Dreier first examine the notion of distinctness at work in the idea that non-natural properties are distinct from natural ones, pointing out that distinctness cannot be understood in modal terms if supervenience is to be respected. It then suggests that Dreier’s implicit commitment to the existence of infinite Boolean combinations of properties plays a significant role in the challenge to non-naturalism, and that the non-naturalist has some principled reasons for rejecting it. It also suggests that the real problem for non-naturalists isn’t explaining supervenience, but is rather the well-known problem of explaining our capacity to know anything about non-natural properties. That is, if the latter epistemological problem can be solved, the former metaphysical one might well disappear, at least as a distinctive problem for non-naturalist realists about morality.

The first half of this paper defends the claim revenge is a personal good. That is, it is the sort of thing, the pursuit of which, for oneself, always provides a reason for action. This makes trouble for the dominant philosophical view of the relation between morality and practical reason: a view held by theorists we can call ‘Angels’. Angels hold that moral requirements are also rational requirements. Devils, on the other hand, hold that immoral behavior is at least sometimes rationally required, so that one would have to act against reason to do what is right. The position in the largely undefended space between the Angels and the Devils is occupied by those we can call ‘Humans’. Humans acknowledge that immoral behavior is sometimes rationally permissible, but they also hold that it is never rationally required. The second half of the paper explains how one can endorse the view that revenge is a good without becoming a Devil. It also argues that the goodness of revenge supports the existence of a theoretically interesting kind of reason: a purely justifying reason.

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality.

A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions.

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard tried to argue against what she called the ‘privacy’ of reasons, appealing to Wittgenstein's argument against the possibility of a private language. In recent work she continues to endorse Wittgenstein's perspective on the normativity of meaning, although she now emphasizes that her own argument was only meant to be analogous to the private language argument. The purpose of the present paper is to show that the Wittgensteinian perspective is not only not useful in support of Korsgaard's general project, but that it is positively inimical to it, in two ways. First, Wittgenstein opposes views on which principled or rule-following behavior requires that one be guided by anything like a mental representation of a rule or principle. But for Korsgaard, human action essentially requires this. Second, Wittgenstein systematically attempts to de-emphasize the importance of the first-personal perspective, and to emphasize the social functions even of concepts that might seem deployed primarily from that perspective: for example, concepts of sensations and intentions. This is the reverse of Korsgaard's emphasis. The paper also argues, however, that the private language argument does have some implications for a theory of rationality and reasons.