
When Discussing Normative Reasons, Oughts, Requirements Of Rationality, Motivating Reasons, And So On, We Often Have To Use Verbs Like Believe And Want To Capture A Relevant Subject's Perspective. According To The Received View About Sentences Involving These Verbs, What They Do Is Describe The Subject's Mental States. Many Puzzles Concerning Normative Discourse Have To Do With The Role That Mental States Consequently Appear To Play In Normative Discourse. Tim Henning Uses Tools From Semantics And The Philosophy Of Language To Develop An Alternative Account Of Sentences Involving These Verbs. According To This View, Which Is Called Parentheticalism, We Very Commonly Use These Verbs In A Parenthetical Sense. These Verbs Themselves Express Backgrounded Side-remarks On The Contents They Embed, And These Latter, Embedded Contents Constitute The At-issue Contents. This Means That Instead Of Speaking About The Subject's Mental States, We Often Use Sentences Involving Believe And Want To Speak About The World From Her Point Of View. Henning Makes This Notion Precise, And Uses It To Solve Various Puzzles Concerning Normative Discourse. The Final Result Is A New, Unified Understanding Of Normative Discourse, Which Gets By Without Postulating Conceptual Breaks Between Objective And Subjective Normative Reasons, Or Normative Reasons And Rationality, Or Indeed Between The Reasons We Ascribe To An Agent And The Reasons She Herself Can Be Expected To Cite. Instead Of Being Connected To Either Subjective Mental States Or Objective Facts, All Of These Normative Statuses Are Can Be Adequately Articulated By Citing Worldly Considerations From A Subject's Point Of View.
This book investigates whether sentences involving verbs like 'believe' and 'want' should be interpreted as descriptions of mental states or as expressions of a subject's perspective on the world. Tim Henning, a philosopher specializing in normative discourse, challenges the received view that these verbs primarily report internal mental states. By applying tools from semantics and the philosophy of language, he proposes 'Parentheticalism,' an account where these verbs function as backgrounded side-remarks, allowing speakers to articulate normative reasons directly from a subject's point of view without relying on mental state attribution.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars in the philosophy of language and meta-ethics recognize this work as a rigorous contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the semantics of normative discourse. Readers frequently note the technical density of the prose, which requires a strong background in formal semantics to fully grasp the proposed linguistic mechanisms.
Page Count:
256
Publication Date:
2018-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0192517422
ISBN-13:
9780192517425
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