Abstract
Moral metasemantic theories explain how our moral thought and talk are about certain properties. Given the connection between what our moral terms are about and which moral claims are true, it might be thought that metasemantic theorising can justify first-order ethical conclusions, thus providing a novel way of doing moral epistemology. In this paper, we spell out one kind of argument from metasemantic theories to normative ethical conclusions, and argue that it fails to transmit justification from premises to conclusion. We give three reasons for this transmission failure, which together pose a serious challenge to such metasemantic arguments.
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Notes
Metasemantic theories tell us about (1) what makes it the case that terms or sentences are about a certain property/object, or (2) what makes it the case that concepts or beliefs (psychological representations) are about a property/object. Our discussion is largely framed around (1) but everything we say could be put in terms of (2). We will remain neutral in this paper between referentialist (Braun 2016; Edwards 2014) and non-referentialist (Chalmers 2011; Segal 2000) views of content, which differ on whether the content of a term or concept is exhausted by its referent.
Internalist metasemantic theories hold that semantic content supervenes on the internal features of agents. Externalist metasemantic theories deny this supervenience thesis (Farkas 2008: 362–368; cf. Wikforss 2008: 161). Some theorists hold that there is both internalist and externalist content. See Chalmers (2003) and Jackson (2003). Views which recognize both kinds of content are usually classed as internalist (Brown 2016, Sec. 3.2; Segal 2009: 369).
To make this a little more concrete, consider Boyd’s own suggestion about the referent of ‘good’. Boyd suggests that the term ‘good’ might be causally regulated in the appropriate way by a ‘homeostatic property cluster’ consisting of things which satisfy various human needs like love, friendship, health, control over one’s own life, physical recreation, intellectual and artistic appreciation, etc. (1988: 203–205). Boyd tells us that whether this proposal succeeds depends on whether it is “plausible that the homeostatic cluster of fundamental human goods has, to a significant extent, regulated the use of the term 'good' so that there is a general tendency… for what we say about the good to be true of that cluster”. He contends that “we can observe [this tendency] in the way in which our concept of the good has changed in the light of new evidence concerning human needs and potential” (Boyd 1988: 210).
Note that d may be a conjunctive, disjunctive, or higher-order property.
Dickie (2016: 102–104) proposes a similar principle ranging over objects and beliefs.
Nothing in this metasemantic argument is special to ethics—we could, in principle, attempt a metasemantics-to-substantive argument of this kind in any domain. However, some of our later replies turn on considerations that might be idiosyncratic to ethics—for this reason, we focus on ethics, but acknowledge that some of what we say might apply to other domains too. Thanks here to an anonymous referee for suggesting the potential generality of our arguments.
It might be argued instead that the Boydian Metasemantic Argument fails because we just aren’t justified in believing Boyd’s Metasemantic Theory—perhaps because the epistemic standing of metasemantics is generally quite poor (Cappelen 2018: 72–74). This undermines the metasemantic argument as it currently stands, but it leaves open the possibility of the argument working in principle, once we have acquired better justification for our metasemantic theories. In contrast, we prefer our challenges of transmission failure because they target the very structure of the metasemantic argument, and would work even when we have good justification for Boyd’s theory. Thanks here to an anonymous referee.
Schroeter and Schroeter (2014: 14) goes as far as to claim that “In effect, we can build our semantic determination theory from the first person reflective epistemology of the topic in question”.
Nye (2015) argues that ethical theorising should directly evaluate the ethical relevance of descriptive properties, and only use cases to clarify and illustrate claims about such properties. Many contemporary debunking arguments appear to rely on direct judgements about the ethical (ir)relevance of certain descriptive properties. For discussion see Huemer (2008: 372–374) and Konigs (2020).
Boyd’s theory does impose an epistemic constraint on the assignment of a referent to moral terms, since it dictates that the referent of a term be assigned such that subjects’ beliefs about the term become truer over time (van Roojen 2006: 170). However, this constraint does not involve checking as we've explained the idea here. We expect that some philosophers will dispute our interpretation of Boyd’s view. For instance, Väyrynen (2019: 208) appears to suggest that Boyd’s metasemantic theory might include something like a check for moral relevance in its reference-determining conditions. We disagree with this interpretation of Boyd, but in any case there exist moral metasemantic theories that clearly don’t do this – for instance, the theories which result when we apply Kripke’s (1980) metasemantics for names or Fodor’s (1994b) asymmetric dependence theory to ethical terms. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing us to clarify this issue.
Our discussion has assumed that this defeater is a high-order defeater for the Boydian Metasemantic Argument. This is our official position, but we could alternatively hold that the defeater is an undercutting defeater for the Boydian Metasemantic Theory. That is to say, we might hold that the fact that the Boydian Metasemantic Theory licences the Boydian Metasemantic Argument counts against believing the theory. The defeater would still threaten the Boydian Metasemantic Argument because arguments with premises which are unjustified obviously fail to transmit justification to their conclusions.
It’s instructive to contrast our argument here with a recent discussion of Boyd’s Metasemantic Theory in Zhao (2021). Zhao suggests that the primary problem with Boyd’s view is that it delivers referents for our moral terms which are inconsistent with a ‘reference defeater’—where, roughly speaking, a reference defeater is a non-negotiable commitment about the features of the referent of a term t. (An example Zhao gives in the case of the term ‘witch’ is the belief that witches have supernatural powers.) The reference defeater that Zhao identifies in the case of moral terms is the belief that moral properties are not identical to descriptive properties (Zhao 2021: 1174–1175). Our focus is on the commitments of ordinary speakers with respect to moral epistemology rather than their commitments with respect to moral metaphysics. Also, we don’t take the epistemic commitment that we’ve identified to conclusively defeat Boyd’s Metasemantic Theory.
We are primarily concerned with first-order moral judgments like these, which use terms like 'is right' and are hence more akin to ordinary speakers’ use of expressions. We leave open the possibility that extensional fit with other kinds of evidence is not required—for instance, our extensional adequacy desideratum is compatible with Dowell’s (2016) conclusion that higher-order semantic intuitions (for instance about whether we genuinely disagree with a hypothetical community that speaks a different language) have no probative value in metasemantic theorising. Thanks here to two anonymous referees.
Charity can be interpreted in a variety of strengths: for instance as saying that an interpreter should maximise the number of truths a subject believes (Quine and Orman 1960), or as saying that the interpreter should make some (possibly very minimal) part of a subject’s total understanding come out true (Schroeter and Schroeter 2019: 198–199). Proponents of charity agree, however, that it is better for a metasemantic theory to assign referents that make our object-level judgments come out true, other things being equal. Charity features prominently in Turner’s (2013) metasemantic argument for free will, a non-moral example of metasemantics-first epistemology.
To motivate the extensional adequacy desideratum, we haven't assumed that we have first-order beliefs which are justified independently of metasemantic theorising. However, if this assumption is made, it would supply a separate and straightforward justification for extensional adequacy.
Could the metasemantic argument still transmit justification to those entailments of (C3) that do not overlap with the claims in Truth? We think the prospects of this objection are weak, so long as metasemantic theorising presupposes the truth of moral claims, rather than supplying any independent justification for them. Moreover, even if this objection works, our argument will still have reduced the amount of justification transmitted—justification still does not transmit to the entailments of C3 that do overlap with Truth.
Note that the criticism from information dependence applies only to a specific class of metasemantic arguments—namely those where the metasemantic theory is justified by appeal to extensional adequacy. This criticism might not apply when the theory is justified in a different way. This specificity is recognised in the transmission failure literature—Pryor (2001: n. 5) points out that in the zebra case, if we justified Actual Zebras on the basis of how the animal sounds (rather than what it looks like), then this justification could transmit to No Illusion.
Wright (2002: 334, 335) proposes, quite plausibly, that White Posts counts as evidence simultaneously for both Goal and Soccer, but not because it is a justification for Goal which then transmits through to Soccer.
It may be inaccurate to describe Moral Functionalism as a metasemantic view (although cf. Schroeter and Schroeter (2018: 524) and Werner (2020: 147)). Jackson and Pettit themselves characterise the position as a view about the meaning of moral terms (Jackson 1998: 131; Jackson and Pettit 1995: 22). What matters for our purposes is that Jackson and Pettit’s theory allows one to construct the sort of argument from the theory plus the reference facts to a first-order ethical conclusion sketched in Sect. 2. Instead of calling our paper ‘Against Metasemantics-First Moral Epistemology’ we could have equally titled it ‘Against Reference Determination Theory-First Moral Epistemology’.
It might be objected that you are among the folk, so you bring to bear your own judgments about what falls into the extension of ‘right’ when inquiring into the reference of ‘right’—and that might count as a check. However, the sense in which you are bringing to bear such judgements is that you are taking as an input the fact that some agent (i.e., you) thinks something is right, rather than directly considering what is right.
This other version of Moral Functionalism draws on Jackson and Pettit’s (1995: 26, 27) discussion of moral disagreement, where they distinguish between moral disagreement as disagreement about which descriptive property fulfils some fixed rightness role, versus disagreement about which commonplaces specify the rightness role.
Another way that Moral Functionalism could require a check is through the internal role clauses that form part of the rightness role. These concern the relationships between rightness and other moral properties (Jackson 1998: 130, 131). Suppose ‘If x is right, then it would be wrong not to choose x’ is one such clause. Assessing whether descriptive property d satisfies this clause might require judging whether it is wrong to choose options which don’t have d, which in turn might require something like a check for moral relevance.
For instance, this might happen if the input clauses of folk morality were argued to be irrelevant to assigning a referent.
A representational tradition doesn’t require that every thought element bears de jure sameness to every other, they just need to be connected by overlapping chains of de jure sameness (Schroeter and Schroeter 2014: 11, 12). Also, Schroeter and Schroeter build into their theory of concept-identity that two token thought elements express the same concept only if the understanding and historical context associated with them does not diverge so radically as to undermine a univocal interpretation. This condition rules out, for instance, that the concept an ordinary British speaker expresses with ‘corn’ and the concept an ordinary American speaker expresses with ‘corn’ count as the same concept—given that ‘corn’ is generally applied by British speakers to any type of grain, while American speakers use the term exclusively for maize (Schroeter and Schroeter 2014: 16, 17).
Werner (2020: 156–157) is unsure whether to define the proprietary means of justification as generally trumping other pieces of evidence, but we read him as specifying a necessary but insufficient condition for a proprietary means. The specifics of how these proprietary means are defined does not matter for our later arguments—all we need is for these means to involve a check for moral relevance.
These objections all concern the necessary and sufficient conditions for checking moral relevance, and can be replaced with analogous objections about the necessary and sufficient conditions for establishing (rather than merely presupposing) justification for a moral claim.
We assume here a weak version of the Transmission View in the epistemology of testimony (Leonard 2021: sec. 2.1); a hearer has justification on the basis of a speaker’s testimony only if the speaker has justification too.
These same points apply against the objection that once we have the oracle’s testimony, we don’t need to appeal to extensional adequacy to support a moral metasemantic theory (thus undermining the information dependence and indirectness challenges).
See Bengson et al. (2022: chaps. 2–3) for discussion of philosophical data.
The claims in this overlap are first-order moral claims rather than higher-order claims about the existence of genuine disagreement, so our argument doesn’t clash with Dowell’s (2016) conclusion that semantic intuitions about disagreement with a hypothetical community have no probative value. Moreover, we only require that this overlap be large enough to support assessment of reliable methods and conditions for checking—this is compatible with significantly revisionary first-order ethical implications, and thus does not necessarily conflict with Silverstein’s (2019) arguments. Thanks here to an anonymous referee.
Conversely, we can also deduce that certain methods and conditions are unreliable if they consistently yield verdicts that are agreed to be wrong by all metasemantic theories. This requires assuming the falsity of a simple subjectivism, which says that the moral truth is what our actual moral judgments say they are (or, put in terms of the darts analogy, that the target’s contours are not drawn exactly around where the darts actually land).
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous referees for the Journal of Ethics for their perceptive and generous comments, which have improved this paper greatly. We would also like to thank Garrett Cullity, Frank Jackson, Neil Sinhababu, Zachary Swindlehurst, Daniel Stoljar, Hezki Symonds, Alexander Sandgren, James Willoughby, and an audience at the ANU Philosophy of Mind Work-In-Progress Group, for their comments and questions. The two authors contributed equally to this paper. This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
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Hambly, J., Yeo, S.L. Against Metasemantics-First Moral Epistemology. J Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09443-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09443-8