Matti Eklund

In recent work – primarily the book Choosing Normative Concepts (2017) – I has presented what I see as a new, significant problem regarding normativity. Briefly, it has to do with the existence of alternative normative concepts. What if I know that I ought to φ, but at the same time I know that I ought* to ψ, where ψ is an incompatible course of action and the concept OUGHT* is an alternative OUGHT-like concept? I think that this kind of question raises many different issues. But one thing it does is to present problems for what I call ardent realism, a view which I believe often underlies what realists about normativity say and hold. Several theorists have suggested that expressivism somehow provides a way out of the problem I present, and my main aim here is to evaluate this suggestion.1 My conclusions are negative. Expressivism does not provide a way out. Or, more carefully: it does not provide a way out not already afforded by other views, and that has not already been discussed in the context of discussing such other views.

The chapter illustrates conceptual engineering by bringing up a number of issues in metaontology and metaethics. A prominent debate in metaontology relates to whether some existence concept is metaphysically privileged. On the one hand, ontological realists say yes, and, on the other hand, friends of quantifier variance say no. The chapter brings up the corresponding question in metaethics by asking, is some rightness concept normatively privileged? It investigates this question, and compares the metaethics case and the metaontology case. One aim is to arrive at conclusions regarding possible limits to the project of conceptual engineering.

This paper addresses the following two questions: (1) What it is for a _linguistic expression_ or a _concept_ to be evaluative (or normative)? (2) What it is for a _property_ or a _fact_ to be evaluative (or normative)? The most natural answers to these two questions are discussed, and serious problems with these answers are stressed. Important in the discussion is consideration of different kinds of evaluative concepts – thin concepts, thick concepts and epithets. No particular positive view is defended. Instead two rather different positive views are highlighted: a view suggested by Ralph Wedgwood's recent work, and _presentationalism_, according to which evaluativeness is properly seen as a feature of our _representations_ of reality and not reality itself.

This chapter discusses the defence of metaphysical indeterminacy by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams and discusses a classical and bivalent theory of such indeterminacy. Even if metaphysical indeterminacy arguably is intelligible, Barnes and Williams argue in favour of it being so and this faces important problems. As for classical logic and bivalence, the chapter problematizes what exactly is at issue in this debate. Can reality not be adequately described using different languages, some classical and some not? Moreover, it is argued that the classical and bivalent theory of Barnes and Williams does not avoid the problems that arise for rival theories.

Many theorists of vagueness take vagueness to be bound up with indeterminacy in a way that conflicts with classical logic and bivalence. Others, epistemicists like Timothy Williamson, hold that the only indeterminacy bound up with vagueness is epistemic — vagueness is just bound up with a certain kind of ignorance — and that vagueness does not conflict with classical logic and bivalence. Both types of view face well-known problems. This chapter presents a view on vagueness that sidesteps them. Let a sentence be first-level indeterminate if there are acceptable assignments of semantic values under which it lacks a classical, determinate truth-value; and let a sentence be second-level indeterminate if it has different truth-values under different assignments of semantic values. What this chapter proposes is that vagueness is primarily bound up with second-level indeterminacy, rather than first-level indeterminacy. In the course of defending this proposal, the chapter compares it to supervaluationism, which superficially can appear similar.

In this paper, I explore the implications for ontology of what Jared Warren has dubbed a top-down approach to metasemantics, explaining semantic features of subsentential expressions in terms of semantic features of whole sentences. Among authors who have adopted such an approach to metasemantics are Gottlob Frege, Michael Dummett, Crispin Wright, Donald Davidson, W.V.O. Quine, Agustín Rayo, Oystein Linnebo, and Warren himself, and many of these authors have also taken this top-down approach to have ontological implications. I discuss what a top-down approach amounts to, the extent to which such an approach is plausible, and what its implications for ontology are, if any. Often a top-down approach is assumed to have broadly deflationary implications, and to provide a separate path to defending the view that abstract objects exist.

In this paper, I discuss what the consequences are of Carnap’s emphasis on frameworks, and on the distinction between internal and external questions, for questions about logic and rationality. Central to the discussion is a distinction between different interpretations of the talk of frameworks. I defend my interpretation of Carnap as what I call a language pluralist from recent criticisms. I further criticize recent work by Florian Steinberger, and argue that a puzzle which Steinberger thinks emanates from Carnap’s emphasis on frameworks is misconceived. Emphasis on frameworks can indeed be used to raise a deep puzzle regarding rationality, but not a puzzle of the kind Steinberger talks about.

The problem, or cluster of problems, of the unity of the proposition, along with the cluster of problems that tend to go under the name of Bradley’s regress, has recently again become a going concern for philosophers, after having for some time been regarded as primarily of historical interest. In this paper, I distinguish between the different problems that tend to be brought up under the heading of the unity of the proposition, and between different related regress arguments. I present my favored solutions to these problems.

In my book Alien Structure: Language and Reality (OUP, 2024) I discuss the possibility of what I call alien languages and alien metaphysical structure. An alien language is a language with alien semantic structure. It is semantically different from familiar languages, in a broadly structural way, and through having kinds of resources not found in familiar languages. The world has alien metaphysical structure if its structure is best represented by an alien language. Here I illustrate what is at issue, discussing different varieties of “alienness”. I also provide crucial distinctions and clarifications, and discuss how one can argue for the existence of alien languages and motivate the thesis that there is alien metaphysical structure.

Philosophers have defended many different views on what reality is like. But despite their differences, the views share the same basic structure. The world is basically a world of objects, having properties and standing in relations. This structure mirrors the structure of basic sentences of the languages we use. But what other kinds of languages can there be? And might the world be such that another kind of language best represents it? That is, can there be alien languages and alien metaphysical structure? This book sharpens these claims, and defends the possibility of alien languages and alien metaphysical structure. The book raises novel questions going to the heart of language and metaphysics, sharpens them, and proposes radical answers. Along the way, it discusses different kinds of work in contemporary philosophy of language, linguistics and metaphysics and the relevance of this work to the topic of the alien.

In Andreas Stokke (ed.), Festschrift for Matti Eklund, 2024. Replies to Katharina Felka and Nils Franzén, Eli Hirsch, Dan Korman, David Liebesman, Øystein Linnebo, Anna-Sofia Maurin and Debbie Roberts. Topics discussed concern metaethics, metaphysics and philosophy of language. More specifically, issues discussed are thick concepts (Felka and Franzén; Roberts), ontology (Hirsch, Linnebo), indifferentism and fictionalism (Korman), alien languages and alien metaphysics (Liebesman), and Bradley's regress (Maurin).

There is a vexed question in the literature on Marx of whether Marx was somehow anti-morality or if on the contrary he was instead defending a particular, perhaps rather radical, conception of morality. This question will be my starting point. But I will have nothing to contribute to the scholarly question of what Marx’s view was. Rather my aim will be this. Whatever in the end is the correct interpretation of Marx, it is undeniable that there are passages in Marx which if taken literally and straightforwardly give voice to an anti-morality stance. One reason not to read these passages straightforwardly is that it is unclear what it even can mean to be anti-morality, as opposed to merely being against one or other popular conception of morality. I will however see what sense can be made out of anti-moralism; and a positive suggestion will be presented. (My claim will however not be that what I suggest is what Marx had in mind.) The discussion of Marx and anti-moralism will serve as a springboard for bringing up certain other issues. I will discuss thick concepts, and how to resolve a particular problem concerning how best to understand the nature of thick concepts. Generally. I will discuss the semantics of moral terms. I will also present a new type of moral antirealism.

In contemporary debates about ontology, one prominent skeptical view emphasizes the existence of different possible languages for doing ontology. Eli Hirsch, in recent years the most prominent proponent of a view like this, has defended the claim that “many familiar questions about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal. Nothing is substantively at stake in these questions beyond the correct use of language” and the claim that “quantifier expressions can have different meaning in different languages”.1 Ted Sider, while critical of the type of view Hirsch defends, has in many places prominently singled it out for critical discussion. In his (2001), he associates with Carnap the view that “different frameworks employ different semantic rules for the quantifiers”, and says that a theorist in Carnap’s tradition would say that the stuff-ontologist and the thing-ontologist have different “frameworks” and that “[W]ithin these frameworks there are answers to what there is, but any question about which framework is the right framework is metaphysical in the pejorative sense of being a pseudo-question”.2 In his (forthcoming), Sider discusses at length the view that disputants in ontological disputes use the same sentences with different meaning and hence in fact each speak the truth, and what he describes as the attendant view that “there are multiple candidate meanings for the quantifiers”.3 In his (2005), Cian Dorr critically discusses “the idea that there are many different possible languages which differ systematically in the truth-values they assign to general ontological claims”.4..

We think of the world as consisting of objects, with properties and standing in relations. There are, to be sure, different views on what objects etc. there are, and on what their natures are. And some theorists want to subtract some elements from this picture. For example, the ontological nihilist says that there are no objects. But still, the view described is very much orthodoxy—so much orthodoxy that one may need to be reminded that the view that the world consists of objects, with properties and standing in relations is, precisely, a view. I here investigate the possibility that this view is false: that there is what may be called alien structure. And I investigate the relationship between alien structure and some important themes from the history of analytic philosophy.

Forthcoming in Darren Bradley (ed.), Carnap and Contemporary Philosophy. This paper is centered on Carnap’s views on rationality. More specifically, much of the focus is on a puzzle regarding Carnap’s view on rationality that Florian Steinberger has recently discussed. Not only is Steinberger’s discussion of significant intrinsic interest: his discussion also raises general questions about Carnap interpretation. As I have discussed in earlier work, there are two very different ways of interpreting Carnap’s talk of “frameworks” – and, relatedly, different ways of interpreting Carnap’s principle of tolerance. Carnap can be interpreted as either a relativist or as what I call a language pluralist. Steinberger’s puzzle arises given the relativist interpretation; I believe the language pluralist interpretation is correct. Most of the discussion will concern the correct interpretation of Carnap, and what this means for Steinberger’s puzzle. While I will not here mount a full defense of the language pluralist interpretation, I will pause to discuss Vera Flocke’s recent criticism of it. Towards the end, I will describe a puzzle regarding rationality different from Steinberger’s. The puzzle that I describe does arise already for the language pluralist