Unbelievable Errors
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Unbelievable Errors
Author: Bart Streumer
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2017-08-11
In Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer defends an error theory about all normative judgements: not just moral judgements, but also judgements about reasons for action, judgements about reasons for belief, and instrumental normative judgements. This theory says that these judgements are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, but that these properties do not exist. It therefore entails that all normative judgements are false. Streumer also argues, however, that we cannot believe this error theory. This may seem to be a problem for the theory, but he argues that it is not. Instead, he argues, our inability to believe this error theory makes the theory more likely to be true, since it undermines objections to the theory, it makes it harder to reject the arguments for the theory, and it undermines revisionary alternatives to the theory. Streumer then sketches how certain other philosophical views can be defended in a similar way, and how philosophers should modify their method if there can be true theories that we cannot believe. He concludes that to make philosophical progress, we should sharply distinguish the truth of a theory from our ability to believe it
Metaepistemology
Author: Conor McHugh
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2018-12-06
Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions. What does it mean to claim that someone ought to do or believe something? Do such claims express beliefs about independently existing facts, or only attitudes of approval and disapproval towards certain pieces of conduct? How do putative facts about what people ought to do or believe fit in to the natural world? In the case of ethics, such questions have been subject to extensive and systematic investigation, yielding the thriving subdiscipline of metaethics. Yet the corresponding questions have been largely ignored in epistemology; there is no serious subdiscipline of metaepistemology. This surprising state of affairs reflects a more general tendency for ethics and epistemology to be carried out largely in isolation from each other, despite the important substantive and structural connections between them. A movement to overturn the general tendency has only recently gained serious momentum, and has yet to tackle metanormative questions in a sustained way. This edited collection aims to stimulate this project and thus advance the new subdiscipline of metaepistemology. Its original essays draw on the sophisticated theories and frameworks that have been developed in metaethics concerning practical normativity, examine whether they can be applied to epistemic normativity, and consider what this might tell us about both.
Moral Articulation
This book explores historical changes in the words and concepts we use to describe morally significant experiences and events. Focusing on cases like the invention of the term "genocide" in 1942 and the development of the concept of "sexual harassment" in 1975, Moral Articulation offers a philosophical account of the historical process of moral concept formation. Author Matthew Congdon calls this process "moral articulation." The book explores two philosophical questions raised by such examples. First: are morally meaningful experiences always capturable in words or do they sometimes extend beyond what we can make linguistically explicit? Congdon answers this by defending a theory of moral meaningfulness as extending beyond what we can express in language. Second: do new developments in moral language simply label pre-existing phenomena, or do they have transformative effects upon the experiences and situations they newly describe? Congdon answers this by defending a theory of moral truth as a complex historical result of collective efforts of articulation.