Abstract
This paper argues against Boydian synthetic moral naturalism by way of a critical examination at metasemantic issues. I first show that the Boydian metasemantics delivers determinate but wrong reference, building on an analysis by Schroeter and Schroeter. I then propose a diagnosis which says that the problem occurs due to an overly simple way of understanding externalist metasemantics, and that a proper understanding requires us to pay heed to the higher-level constraints set by the speakers’ deferring pattern. That in turn is restricted by what I call reference defeaters, which are essentially some central beliefs held by the speakers and are so called because they have the power to defeat reference of a term to certain things. Applying the notion to moral discourse, I argue that the entrenched is/ought distinction held by the ordinary speakers defeats the reference of the moral predicates to natural properties, that is, synthetic moral naturalism is not true.
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Notes
This may or may not require that the references of the predicates have been fixed independently, a problem I will ignore.
Boyd himself does not add the eliteness or naturalness requirement, but it is frequently appealed to by those who find his metasemantics plausible while inspired by Lewis’ works. How to understand eliteness, though, is a topic for debate on its own. Lewis’ (1984) proposes a unified hierarchy of eliteness with microphysical properties being the most elite and other properties having different degrees of eliteness depending on the length of definition from the most elite properties. Van Roojen (2006) proposes that eliteness be understood in discipline-relative terms. Dunaway and McPherson (2016) favor what Schroeter and Schroeter dub the ‘multipolar’ view of eliteness, according to which perfect eliteness need not be the privilege of microphysics and different branches of natural science are equally entitled. In the present context, we do not need to take a stance on this issue, as long as we allow that eliteness is sufficient for ruling out the gerrymandered properties like the gruesome ones.
Note that the disjunctive properties we discussed above need not be gruesome ones. For example, the disjunctive property being a natural number greater than 5 or being a natural number no greater than 5 just is the property of being a natural number, which is certainly not gruesome.
Of course, if there are arguments that show this is not the case, then so much the better for proponents of the causal regulation account.
Note that the relevant species of internalism/externalism in philosophy of language must not be confused with those discussed in metaethics, such as reason internalism/externalism, motivational internalism/externalism, etc., despite the labels.
Sometimes the distinction between meta- and first-order semantics is dubbed the distinction between foundational and descriptive semantics.
In their original account, a further distinction between radical meta-internalism, cast in terms of the speaker’s subconscious representations, and moderate meta-internalism, where the determinant is the speaker’s dispositional states to apply and interpret terms. Here I ignore the radical version and focus only on the moderate version, which is the one they favor.
The original wording of Cohnitz and Haukioja (2013, p. 482) in characterizing meta-externalism is unclear, since they leave the modification of ‘at least in part’ unsaid, unlike when they characterize first-order externalism (2013, p. 476), where the modification is made explicit in parentheses. But the modification is required if the distinction is to be exhaustive.
Note that this latter scenario is parallel to Burge’s original ‘arthritis’ case: if for some similar obsession, the counterfactual speakers just would not defer to experts who apply the term to thigh ailments as well as joint ailments, then ‘arthritis’ in the counterfactual community would not refer to the pathological kind that also afflicts the thigh.
Here I assume that entertaining a belief is like privately assenting to a sentence, so the ‘belief that …’ context is an oblique one, where, for example, ‘water’-beliefs are not to be simply equated with ‘H2O’-beliefs.
Metasemantic internalists seem less affected by the problem since they usually take descriptions or platitudes to decisively determine reference in the first place. The problem for them is rather that the competence threshold for ordinary speakers seems set too high.
Of course, they might give a supernaturalist explanation, appealing to the divine, but the non-identity between the moral and the natural remains intact.
As we can see, the case here is quite parallel to the ‘witch’ case.
I thank an anonymous referee for making me aware of the possibility to confuse their arguments with mine.
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I thank the anonymous referees of this journal for very helpful comments and suggestions.
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Zhao, X. Metasemantics and boydian synthetic moral naturalism. Synthese 199, 11161–11178 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03283-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03283-5