Moral-Realism on To Be Decided

A Proof for Moral Realism: Part B

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:47:55 +1000

Introduction #

In the last chapter we were concerned to argue that if moral facts did not exist, then epistemic facts did not exist. This is the first premise in Cuneo’s Argument for moral realism. Let us recount Cuneo’s Argument:

If moral facts do not exist, epistemic facts do not exist.
Epistemic facts exist.
So, moral facts exist.
Therefore, moral realism is true.

We were concerned to define exactly what Cuneo takes moral realism and epistemic realism to mean, and we argued that there are four important similarities between moral facts and epistemic facts so defined, and that this establishes the first premise of Cuneo’s Argument.

Cuneo also adds an extra premise to his argument in Chapter 3 of The Normative Web. It is called the Parity Premise. It is concerned to argue that if moral facts do not have several kinds of objectionable features that moral antirealists point out that they have, then nothing in nature can have them. Therefore moral facts do not exist, because they are argued to have the features. The consequence of this argument is that because epistemic facts also share these objectionable features with moral facts, as shown in Defending the Parallel, then epistemic facts do not exist either.

Because recounting Cuneo’s argument throughout another chapter would be laborious and a waste of time, considering it has been done in Cuneo’s book already, we will very quickly describe what the various antirealist objections to moral facts are, and assume that Cuneo has successfully established this final argumentation in establishing that if moral facts did not exist, neither would epistemic facts.

The various features of moral facts to which antirealists object are the following:

Moral facts are ‘queer’ entities;
Moral facts are intrinsically motivating;
Moral facts are categorical in nature, or imply categorical reasons;
Moral facts require a magical story about how we gain cognitive access to them;
Moral facts ‘don’t explain anything’, or fail to play a wide range of explanatory roles in nature;
Specific moral facts are the subject and foundation of great disagreement. Only facts that everyone agree about can be objective.

As I said above, I will not rehearse Cuneo’s arguments against these three objections about moral facts. These arguments are not relevant for this thesis. The point of these first two chapters of this thesis is to present the substance of Cuneo’s Argument for moral realism. The first chapter of this thesis, where we recounted Cuneo’s Defending the Parallel, gives us enough reason to reject these arguments. We established that moral facts and epistemic facts are virtually identical entities. Therefore if moral facts supposedly have these features, so do epistemic facts.

As Cuneo shows, these objections are either not troubling, as in the case of categorical reasons, or premised on unsound arguments, such as objection 4, about cognitive access, and objection 5, about explanatory roles. For reference, please see Chapter 3 of The Normative Web for Cuneo’s actual arguments.

In this chapter we will perform an argument by elimination that epistemic facts do irreducibly exist. By examining and rejecting the most popular types of epistemic antirealism, I hope to prove that epistemic realism must be accepted. There are broadly three kinds of epistemic antirealism: epistemic nihilism, epistemic expressivism, and epistemic reductionism. Epistemic antirealism is an unpopular position in analytic philosophy, but the purpose of this chapter is not so much to reject epistemic nihilism but argue from analogy that if one was committed to moral antirealism, they would also have to be committed to epistemic antirealism. Therefore, what we are really discussing are analogues to moral antirealism reflected into epistemic realism.

Epistemic anti-realism is the position that claims or propositions that aim to describe or explain knowledge about the world do not successfully achieve this aim. By contrast, epistemic realism maintains that it is possible to make successful claims—have proper knowledge—about the world. The flow-on commitment to which epistemic anti-realism commits the anti-realist is that one must be sceptical about the external world. Epistemic anti-realism might commit one to a kind of subjectivism about knowledge about the external world. It might also commit one to projectivism, just as some have embraced this position with respect to moral propositions. As we will see below, if one were to adopt a non-traditional expressivist attitude towards epistemic facts, one would say that there are quasi-facts about the external world, but not full-blooded facts.

In this chapter we will consider the most popular form of anti-realism about moral entities in its epistemic analogue—expressivism. There also exists epistemic reductionism as a kind of anti-realism about knowledge, but that is not the chief focus of this thesis. In any case, the most popular moral anti-realist position adopted when analytic philosophers embrace bald naturalism is expressivism about morality. Focusing closely on this position will aid our discussion of John McDowell’s philosophy in the next part of this thesis greatly. This is because McDowell is concerned to address the very popular position of moral expressivism.

The point of this chapter is to show that opponents of moral antirealism don’t have a case: we should reject their position. The overall purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to finish the second part of Cuneo’s Argument, which will prove the conclusion that moral realism is true. By proving the conclusion of Cuneo’s Argument, we will prove the key premise of the Core Argument of first chapter. This will in turn prove the conclusion of the Core Argument. The conclusion is that bald naturalism is false and should be rejected.

Cuneo achieves this aim by showing that epistemic expressivism, be it in the form of traditional, strong expressivism, or weaker, non-traditional expressivism, fails to meet the Expressivist’s Challenge. This is position that starts off by claiming that realism about certain types of proposition are ontologically unparsimonious. They commit one to too much. It is awkward and undesirable to be committed to holding that there are entities and relations in the world that do particular things. Take moral facts for instance. Moral realists take it that certain speech acts or other kinds of behaviour commit scholars to holding that certain kinds of entities exist in the world. If they didn’t exist, the speech acts that people commit would not work properly, and human behaviour would be inexplicable.

The expressivist says we do not need to be commited to entities such as epistemic facts or moral facts, or any other kind of entity, abstract or inexplicable by science or otherwise. They argue that we can give full explanations of everything that people do in epistemic or moral discourse, just as realism tries to do, while not be committed to any of the same ontologies that realism is. The upshot of all of this is that expressivism maintains that the appearance that we may be engaging in a realist form of discourse about knowledge or morality is not massively in error. Expressivists argue that the correct analysis of, say, speech acts about knowledge is not epistemic nihilism, which holds that epistemic facts do not obtain and therefore certain kinds of speech acts are necessarily false. They argue that it is just fine to say that the human discourse has a realist appearance, although it is in fact not realist at all.

The challenge, therefore, is to give an account of how types of human discourse appear realist, but in reality are not. The whole manouver requires the expressivist to carefully avoid nihilism—which claims that there is even something massively false about the realist appearance of human discourse.

We will begin this chapter by outlining and carefully analysing epistemic nihilism. We will show that it is a highly undesirable position to hold with respect to discourse about knowledge. Then, in the rest of this chapter, we will systematically demonstrate how every kind of expressivism does not meet the Expressivist’s Challenge. We will show, following Cuneo, that every kind of epistemic expressivism collapses into nihilism. Expressivism of this kind cannot successfully avoid the conclusion that because certain types of discourse in reality fail to be realist, therefore their surface realist-seeming appearance must therefore be massively in error.

Epistemic Nihilism #

The purpose of this part of the chapter is to outline and explain the terrible pitfull of anti-realism that every kind of anti-realist about certain kinds of discourse wants to avoid: nihilism. The anti-realist conclusion of nihilism about a certain kind of human discourse is that that discourse is massively in error in both appearance and reality. The prescriptive implication of nihilism is any discourses it admits of being massively in error should be cut out of human discourse completely. If this was moral discourse, nihilists would say there should be no more discourse about morality. If it was normativity, they would say there should be no more discourse about values.

In this part of the thesis we look at epistemic nihilism. The point of explaining epistemic nihilism is that if one is committed to moral nihilism, one should be commited to epistemic nihilism. This is because of the special effort we put into the first chapter of this thesis. Epistemic and moral discourse are so similar that if one is committed to a certain kind of anti-realism about one, they should be commited to anti-realism of the other.

By analysing nihilism carefully, we will be able to show how expressivism about epistemic discourse can’t avoid collapsing into it. Just as a great many philosophers commit themselves to moral expressivism, we can show that the corresponding epistemic expressivism they should be committed to actually commits them to a kind of global nihilism—and no-one would commit themselves to this position because it would say all of human rationality is massively in error and everything we know is nonsense.

Let’s begin our analysis of epistemic nihilism.

Epistemic nihilism is encompassed by a Speech Act Thesis, an Alethic Thesis, and an Ontic Thesis just like any form of epistemic realism. In fact this is how we will be dealing with every type of epistemic realism and antirealism. Every type of epistemic antirealism can be defined using these three types of theses, and our analysis will proceed by defining each type of epistemic antirealism like this.

Epistemic nihilists adopt the follow three theses:

The Epistemic Realist’s Speech Act Thesis: Some epistemic discourse is assertoric.

The Epistemic Nihilist’s Alethic Thesis: If the content of a predicative epistemic claim is true, then it is true in the realist sense, and no such content is true.

The Nihilist’s Alethic Thesis is explained by the Nihilist’s Ontic Thesis:

The Epistemic Nihilist’s Ontic Thesis: If there are any particular epistemic facts, then they are as the realist says, and there are no such facts (Cuneo, 2007: 116).

As one can observe, epistemic nihilists do not try to offer any sort of expressivist or deflationary account or reinterpretation of epistemic discourse. Epistemic discourse is, according to the nihilist’s account, generally as it seems: robustly assertoric. Further to this, as Cuneo explains, epistemic nihilists agree with epistemic realists insofar as they hold that deflationary and epistemic theories of truth should be rejected in favour of the realist conception of truth.

The First Undesirable Result #

Cuneo says that analysing epistemic nihilism is important because the objections to which nihilism is vulnerable also apply to the other species of epistemic antirealism. These other types of epistemic antirealism attempt to avoid the pitfalls of epistemic nihilism, but as we shall see in the chapter, they also apply. Our analysis of every kind of epistemic antirealism is furthered a great deal if we carefully analyse and work out what is wrong with epistemic nihilism. So, being very thorough at looking at epistemic nihilism will help our overall task in this chapter greatly. The point of performing the discussion below is that each of the undesirable results of epistemic nihilism are so unattractive that any minimally adequate philosophical theory would try their best to avoid having such results.

The thesis that Cuneo develops is that epistemic nihilism is deeply unattractive because it implies what he calls ’the three undesirable results’ (Cuneo, 2007: 117).

The first undesirable result of epistemic nihilism is that it results in a higher-order version of the ’liars paradox’. If we hold to the epistemic nihilist’s ontic thesis, we have no reason to believe anything. But if this is the case, we have no reason to believe the epistemic nihilist’s ontic thesis either. This circularity results in one holding to a paradoxical belief, if one believes epistemic nihilism. This is a very undesirable result (Cuneo, 2007: 117).

If epistemic nihilists do hold that there are no epistemic reasons to believe their position, then their position is, as Cuneo says, “polemically toothless”: “no one would make a rational mistake in rejecting it and no one would be epistemically praiseworthy in accepting it” (Cuneo, 2007: 117). This leads to the First Undesirable Result:

The First Undesirable Result: Either epistemic nihilism is self-defeating and, hence, we have no (sufficient) reason to believe it, or, it implies that there are no epistemic reasons, and a fortiori, that we have no reason to believe it (Cuneo, 2007: 118).

The Second Undesirable Result #

The second undesirable result emerges from looking at the second horn of the dilemma we found in the First Undesirable Result. Cuneo says that if we grasp the second horn of the dilemma above, we may not be committed to consequences as severe as grasping the first. Cuneo says, “at worst, it might seem to imply that epistemic nihilists are only committed to accepting a Moorean paradox of the following sort”:

(1) Epistemic nihilism is true, but there is no reason to believe it (Cuneo, 2007: 118).

Cuneo explains propositions such as (1) are not benign paradoxes but indeed real absurdities. He shows how this is true. He argues that what is happening in this apparent paradox is that the epistemic nihilist is not necessarily committing themselves to accepting both conjuncts of this proposition. They, Cuneo says, merely appear to be committed to a paradox because we ordinarily think we must accept both conjuncts of the proposition. What is actually happening when we assert this proposition is that the acceptance of the proposition expressed in its second conjunct undercuts the justification or warrant we might have for accepting the proposition in its first conjunct. And the type of justification or warrant in question seems to be epistemic in character—justification or warrant from the perspective of gaining truth. So, Cuneo argues, “if epistemic nihilists grasp the second horn of the dilemma, they appear committed to accepting a proposition, the mere acceptance of which guarantees that is is unjustified or unwarranted” (Cuneo, 2007: 118).

Cuneo argues that if this is the correct analysis of why accepting such a claim as (1) is absurd, we should not attribute to nihilists a benign paradoxical position. This is because nihilists who grasp the second horn of the dilemma deny that anything could have the property of being epistemically justified or warranted. If nihilism is true, a claim such as (1) cannot even rise to the level of a paradox. This may seem laborious and slightly absurd, but this is because a person accepting the claim that there is no reason to believe epistemic nihilism in no way serves as a justification for accepting epistemic nihilism (Cuneo, 2007: 119).

Cuneo concludes, however, that even if this analysis is correct,

[it] does not follow from this that (1) is not an instance of a Moorean paradox. Epistemic nihilism may be false, in which case the position would have the unenviable status of both being false and committing those who accept it to accepting Moorean paradoxical propositions (Cuneo, 2007: 119).

Cuneo will examine whether epistemic nihilism is false in virtue of the second horn of the dilemma in the Third Undesirable Result. For the time being, we have done enough analysis to work out the Second Undesirable Result. The second horn of the dilemma at the current stage of discussion implies a sweeping form of epistemological scepticism is true. Cuneo argues that

[for] if there are no epistemic facts or reasons, then none of our propositional attitudes can exhibit epistemic merits or demerits; none of our propositional attitudes can be justified, warranted, entitled, irrational, a case of knowledge, based on reasons, or the like (Cuneo, 2007: 119).

We can state the Second Undesirable Result formally:

The Second Undesirable Result: Either epistemic nihilism is self-defeating or it implies a radical version of epistemological scepticism according to which no entity can display an epistemic merit or demerit (Cuneo, 2007: 119).

The Third Undesirable Result #

Cuneo takes it that it would be impossible to prove that epistemic nihilism is false, because any attempt to reject nihilism would lead to question-begging arguments. One would have to assume some facet of reality was true, and this would lead to endless question-begging claims.

This inability to produce non-question-begging arguments in favour of rejecting nihilism leads to its third undesirable result. This is that engaging with epistemic nihilism on its own terms implies that there are no arguments for anything at all. Take for instance the following argument Cuneo produces as an example of the question-begging nature of arguments against epistemic nihilism. Cuneo says that the position captured in the second horn of the dilemma discovered in the First Undesirable Result is that there are no epistemic reasons. He asks us to call this position ’nihilism’, for short for the time being. Then, consider this argument:

(2) If nihilism is true, then radical scepticism is true. (3) Radical scepticism is false. (4) So, nihilism is false (Cuneo, 2007: 120).

Cuneo says we can consider this a sound argument, but that it fails as a non-question-begging argument. We can ask, quite rightly, how we could argue for these claims, against ’nihilism’, that there are epistemic reasons, without being question-begging. Cuneo explains that

… suppose we accept the plausible view that, in the paradigmatic case, the premises of an argument are offered in support of its conclusion. … A statement’s being offered as evidential support for a conclusion, however, is just a matter of its being offered as a reason for accepting that conclusion. And, when all goes well, premises are reasons to accept a conclusion. This has two implications.

The first is that there are no non-question-begging arguments that could establish that nihilism is false. Were a person to press such an argument against nihilism, she would endeavour to establish that there are reasons by tacitly assuming that some statements provide evidential support to believe others. But—and this is the second implication—if nihilism were true, it would be impossible that there were premises of an argument that provide evidential support for its conclusion (Cuneo, 2007: 121).

So we have the Third Undesirable Result:

The Third Undesirable Result: Either epistemic nihilism is self-defeating or it implies that there could be no arguments for anything.

Epistemic Nihilism: Rationality Must Be False #

The combination of these three undesirable results is that it would be impossible for what Cuneo calls a ‘minimally rational agent’ to exist. A minimally rational agent is what Cuneo refers to as an agent who at least takes themselves to have reasons for believing what they do (Cuneo, 2007: 123). Epistemic nihilism doesn’t just imply that agents cannot be minimally rational, but that agents cannot be rational at all. There is no reason to believe, know, assert, contend, argue, conclude, or justify anything, according to an epistemic nihilist. The undesirable results of epistemic nihilism should be so incredibly unattractive that no philosopher would ever construct a system that caused that system to have these results. If such a system were to exist, it would mean that everything, even the theory putting forward this view, was necessarily utter nonsense. On the assumption that “ordinary agents have strong reason to be at least minimally rational”, Cuneo argues that it follows that such agents have strong reason to reject epistemic nihilism (Cuneo, 2007: 123).

Epistemic Expressivism: Traditional Views #

Now we move on to the major part of this chapter. In the rest of the chapter I will demonstrate that epistemic expressivism collapses into epistemic nihilism. Performing this discussion is they keystone in the argument of this part of the thesis that being commited to moral anti-realism commits one to epistemic anti-realism.

Expressivism about moral discourse is the most popular and the most innovative position for so-called naturalists to hold. This part of the thesis should not only show that expressivism with respect to moral discourse collapses into nihilism, but that it also terminates in being commited to epistemic nihilism as well.

Cuneo divides the next type of epistemic antirealism into two categories. These are traditional and nontraditional epistemic expressivism. Expressivism is a difficult position with which to engage because it has been developed in incredibly varied ways, and as a result has become a very resourceful position for antirealists. Cuneo opts to trace the position through a series of permutations divided into two camps, traditional and nontraditional expressivism. He starts with the types of expressivism least accommodating of realist appearances of ordinary epistemic thought, right through to those types which are the most accommodating of realism.

In this section of this chapter we will rehearse Cuneo’s arguments for the former type of expressivism: those most hostile to realism, traditional expressivism.

The next section of the chapter turns to consider nontraditional expressivism, which is divided into minimalism and maximalism. Every permutation of expressivism we consider in the rest of this chapter closer and closer resembles epistemic realism. In order to better complete the Expressivist’s Challenge, expressivism borrows more from moral realism, and comes to closer resemble it. In this way, maximalism is the most realist-seeming form of anti-realism about epistemic discourse.

In any case, let us begin our discussion with the expressivism that is the most hostile to realism: what Cuneo calls traditional expressivism. Cuneo outlines traditional expressivism as being comprised of the following four commitments:

The Expressivist’s Ontic Thesis: There are no epistemic facts.

The Expressivist’s Alethic Thesis: The contents of none of our epistemic claims are true in the realist sense.

The Expressivist’s Speech Act Thesis: When an agent sincerely utters a predicative epistemic sentence, that agent does not thereby assert an epistemic proposition, but rather (at least) performs some other speech act as expressing an attitude of endorsement, approval, condemnation, disapproval, or the like toward a non-epistemic state of affairs.

The Expressivist’s Guiding Rationale: Avoid an error-theoretic account of ordinary epistemic discourse (while also avoiding a commitment to epistemic realism).

It can be observed that the Ontic and Alethic theses of traditional epistemic expressivism are identical to those of epistemic nihilism. On the subject of the expressivist’s ontic thesis, Cuneo says expressivists themselves are divided on what the thesis actually implies. Some expressivists maintain that there are no epistemic facts whatsoever, while others claim that there are epistemic ‘facts’ in some more minimal sense of the term.

While the first two theses are identical with epistemic nihilism, expressivism differs with nihilism with its speech act thesis. To expressivists, ordinary epistemic discourse looks like proper assertoric discourse. The difference between realism and expressivism, however, is that expressivism denies that epistemic discourse is truth-apt. As Cuneo says,

expressivists deny that the surface form of epistemic discourse gives us very good reason to believe that it is genuinely assertoric epistemic discourse. We cannot, say expressivists, read off the linguistic function of some area of discourse simply by gazing at its surface syntax (Cuneo, 2007: 127).

The first three commitments, at this stage, encompass a wide range of epistemic expressivist positions such as emotivism, prescriptivism, norm-expressivism, quasi-realism, and assertoric nondescriptivism. What makes all of these positions expressivist is the fourth commitment of expressivism: their guiding rationale. The fourth commitment of expressivism is central to the position when it says that any view that implies that ordinary folk are massively in error about epistemic matters is unacceptable.

This, therefore, is the strategy of epistemic expressivism: Expressivists concede that epistemic realists are correct to say that, if expressivism were true, then there would be no proposition that there is a reason to believe in the sense that realists think of reasons. There is a second stage to their strategy however. In this second stage, expressivists deny that this conceding has any negative results on the grounds that expressivism captures everything we could plausibly mean when we say that a belief is rational, or that we have a reason to accept a proposition, or that a normative judgment is correct (Cuneo, 2007: 130).

Cuneo says this strategy amounts to what he calls ‘The Expressivist’s Challenge’. Expressivism aims to uproot and replace epistemic realism with a less problematic ontology. Expressivism considers the realist’s commitment to epistemic and moral facts is fantastic and magical, and tries to do away with any commitment to these entities, while trying to keep the every appearance of epistemic discourse intact. They have no problem with the fact epistemic discourse seems assertoric, but they admit that epistemic nihilism is an entirely unattractive and problematic position. So the Expressivist’s Challenge is to

Offer a construal of epistemic discourse consistent with expressivism that captures everything that we could plausibly mean by the standard and sincere use of epistemic locutions, but does not imply that ordinary epistemic discourse is systematically in error (Cuneo, 2007: 131).

Following Cuneo, I will argue that traditional expressivism fails to succeed in fulfilling this challenge. Traditional expressivism cannot offer a construal of epistemic discourse that captures everything a realist construal could mean. Since expressivism fails to succeed in its challenge, Cuneo says “the view implies a version of epistemological scepticism that is no less objectionable than that implies by epistemic nihilism” (Cuneo, 2007: 131). This is the central thesis of this part of the chapter in rejecting traditional epistemic expressivism.

The arguments that Cuneo make are as follows: Cuneo presents a version of traditional expressivism, contending hat this view falls afoul of two very plausible claims about epistemic concept-application (Cuneo, 2007: 131). Then, in particular, Cuneo argues that traditional expressivism has a difficult time handling the phenomenon of second-order epistemic judgments (Cuneo, 2007: 131). If these two arguments are right, we will have to reject traditional expressivism as a successful epistemic antirealist position. If expressivism needs to successfully meet its challenge against realism, we will have to consider a nontraditional form of it to see if it fairs any better.

Norm-Expressivism #

Traditional epistemic expressivism can be distinguished from other kinds of expressivism by understanding the Expressivist’s Ontic and Alethic Theses in a robust fashion. As Cuneo says, according to the traditional expressivist views, there are no epistemic facts of any sort, and the content of our epistemic discourse neither purports to represent epistemic reality, nor is truth-apt in any sense (Cuneo, 2007: 132).

We can develop Cuneo’s first objection to traditional expressivism by discussing what Cuneo considers to be the most sophisticated version of traditional expressivism, the norm-expressivist view developed by Gibbard in his Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.

Cuneo says Gibbard’s norm-expressivism is a version of traditional expressivism because it accepts a robust interpretation of the expressivist’s ontic and alethic theses, “while also championing the claim that epistemic discourse is not assertoric but expressive in character” (Cuneo, 2007: 132). Cuneo claimed earlier that a central rationale for embracing these positions is that expressivists want to avoid committing themselves to an error-theoretic account of epistemic discourse like epistemic nihilism does. But Gibbard goes further. He also offers an independent rationale in favour of the speech act thesis.

Gibbard argues that to claim that something is ‘rational’ is to endorse it in some way. The problem for Gibbard with epistemic realism, then, is that he views the assertoric nature of speech to be unable to properly fulfil this ability to endorse a claim as ‘rational’:

What, though, is the special element that makes normative thought and language normative? There is such an element, I am claiming, and it involves a kind of endorsement—and endorsement that any descriptivistic analysis treats inadequately. The problem is not merely that every time one loophole in the analysis is closed, others remain. It is that a single loophole remains unpluggable by descriptivistic analysis (Gibbard, 1990, 33).

Gibbard says that endorsing something as that which ‘makes sense’ is to accept a system of norms that permit that we do that thing. Cuneo says that to accept a system of norms of this kind is for an agent to make a rational ‘judgment’. But “what, though, does Gibbard mean by a ’norm’?” Cuneo asks. Cuneo further asks, “what does he mean when he says that to make a normative judgment is to ‘accept’ a system of norms?” (Cuneo, 2007: 133).

Cuneo explains Gibbard’s answers to these questions. Gibbard doesn’t say much at all about what a norm is, but he does say a great deal about what it is to accept a norm:

For a person to accept a norm, in Gibbard’s view, is for that person to avow that norm and be governed by it. (Gibbard, 1990, 75). When a person accepts a norm, that acceptance plays a psychological role of a certain kind: That person is reliably motivated in certain ways in certain situations, tends to take particular stances in discussions of certain kinds, feels emotions of various sorts in certain kinds of circumstance, and so forth (Cuneo, 133-134).

Gibbard’s account of norms and norm acceptance says a lot about the subjective processes of epistemic discourse, but not a lot about what Cuneo calls the ‘objective pretensions’ of normative discourse. We have already seen that to accept a norm is to be psychologically governed by it, according to Gibbard, so that partially accounts for how normative discourse might seem ‘objective’. Gibbard adds three further qualifications to his theory of norm acceptance to help further account for how normative discourse might seem objective.

First, accepting a norm in epistemic discourse is supposed to be attitude-independent: “Anyone who takes a norm to constitute a requirement of rationality takes a norm to apply independently of his own accepting it” (Gibbard, 1990, 155). Second, norm acceptance is a multi-leveled phenomenon. When one accepts a norm as a requirement of rationality, one is also forced to accept norms of higher orders that require that norm’s acceptance. Third, and finally, accepting a norm is to make conversational demands of others. When someone accepts a norm, they demand that others accept what they are saying, and adopt the same state of mind that that agent espouses.

Further, Gibbard suggests that his argument about ‘rationality’ being the most primitive concept also bolsters his thickening of his expressivist account of the seeming objectivity of normative epistemic discourse. Gibbard says that for an agent to think that a judgment is ‘subjectively rational’ is for her to think its formation or maintenance makes sense in light of her limited information—in light of “what she knows, what she has reason to believe, and the degrees of plausibility she should ascribe to various eventualities given her information (Gibbard, 1990, 89). Cuneo says that

[by] contrast, for an agent to think that a judgment is ‘objectively rational’ is for her to think that it is advisable; it is what makes sense to believe in light of all the facts, whether or not she has any way of knowing them (Gibbard, 1990, 90; Cuneo, 2007: 136).

The Problem of Second-Order Epistemic Judgments #

Cuneo argues that, never mind the fact that this theory of traditional epistemic expressivism does away with a realist conception of epistemic facts, and the content of our judgments about such facts, this paradigmatic case of traditional expressivism doesn’t adequately capture everything we could mean within a realist conception of assertoric discourse about epistemic facts. This is because traditional expressivism cannot adequately account for second-order epistemic judgments.

Cuneo argues that our ordinary epistemic discourse contains platitudes about epistemic facts that encourage a distinction between derivative and non-derivative epistemic merits. Something can be a ‘case of knowledge’, or can ‘rationally entitle someone’ to believe a fact even if it is derivative of some other piece of evidence. Cuneo formalises these platitudes in the following way:

The Prime Epistemic Platitude: Epistemic merit concepts properly apply to a mental state non-derivatively only if it expresses representational content.

The Prime Alethic Platitude: Alethic merit concepts properly apply to a mental state non-derivatively only if it is truth apt (Cuneo, 137).

Cuneo defines the concept of derivative and non-derivative epistemic merits in the following way:

x displays an epistemic merit F non-derivatively if an only if x is F, but not simply because x’s being F is evidence that there is some other entity y that displays an epistemic merit (or x’s being F is otherwise conducive to y’s displaying an epistemic merit).

x displays an epistemic merit F derivatively if and only if x if F, but not non-derivatively (Cuneo, 2007: 140).

Now Cuneo develops their point in the following way: suppose we take a judgment concerning a general epistemic norm—for example, a judgment that one ought to form one’s belief on the basis of adequate evidence. Suppose we call any judgment of this type a ‘first-order E-judgment’ (‘E’ for epistemic). Now, Cuneo says, take a second-order judgment of the following form:

S* judges of S’s first-order E-judgment,
	that it is a case of knowledge,
	that it is warranted,
	that it is justified,
	that it is rational,
	that it is entitled,
	that it (epistemically) ought to be accepted,
	etc.

Call any such judgment a ‘second-order E-judgment’. A first-order E-judgment carries with it non-derivative epistemic merit, because it presumably carries alethic content which is truth apt, and robustly represents some truth-maker in the world. A second-order E-judgment is a type of derivative epistemic merit. That is because it refers and makes judgment derivatively on S’s first-order E-judgment. A second-order judgment applies the non-derivative merit to the first-order judgment with its formation.

There is a fundamental problem with the way traditional expressivism attempts to account for the way second order epistemic judgements. For example, the traditional expressivist says that to make a second-order E-judgment is just to accept higher-order norms which permit the holding of some first-order E-judgment. There is a problem with this construal of the content platitudes of Prime Epistemic Merit, and Prime Alethic Merit. Expressivism does not imply that first-order E-judgments carry alethic merit at all. Expressivism asserts that judgments are not in the business of representing reality. If this is the case, first-order E-judgments cannot be cases of non-derivative epistemic merit. If we follow traditional expressivism in construing the expressivist’s alethic and ontic theses robustly, it seems impossible that we could ever have second-order epistemic judgments. If we were a traditional epistemic expressivist, and we took second-order E-judgments to apply non-derivative alethic merit to first-order judgments, we could be committing a category error (Cuneo, 2007: 141). We would be systematically in error in our ordinary everyday epistemic discourse. The content platitudes we take for granted in our everyday doings and knowings would be systematically wrong, because expressivism explains that second-order E-judgments are wrong to attribute any kind of alethic merit to first-order E-judgments.

But traditional expressivism is not supposed to challenge the surface syntax of our everyday assertoric-seeming discourse. It is simply supposed to redescribe what we are doing without reference to the supposedly problematic ontology of realism. Expressivism says we are not systematically in error when we engage in everyday discourse, we really just don’t represent or refer to facts at all. But if we took second-order E-judgments not to apply non-derivative alethic merit to first-order E-judgments, like expressivism says we should not, then we cannot speak of second-order E-judgments as being epistemic judgments at all (Cuneo, 2007: 142-143). If we follow traditional expressivism’s assumptions to their logical conclusions, we can only speak of first-order E-judgments that have no alethic merit whatsoever.

The consequence of traditional expressivism not being able to accommodate second-order epistemic judgments is that it doesn’t capture everything we can mean when we engage in realist assertoric epistemic discourse. Traditional expressivism concludes we are in systematic error when we talk about second-order epistemic judgments, because they don’t exist according to what its alethic and ontic theses imply.

Cuneo says the problem traditional expressivism has with second-order epistemic judgments generalises to first order epistemic judgments (Cuneo, 2007: 136). Cuneo argues norm-expressivist first-order judgments can depend on second-order judgments. If an agent’s ‘subjective circumstances’ were to include second-order E-judgments of various kinds—such as ‘it is rational to judge that one ought to form one’s belief on the basis of adequate evidence’, that ‘one is rationally entitled to bring one’s knowledge to bear on the formation of judgments’, etc—then it is plausible to believe that norm-expressivist analysis of first-order judgments depends on second-order judgments. Therefore whatever problems attend to second-order E-judgments above applies to the norm-expressivist analysis of first-order judgments.

Therefore traditional expressivism terminates in a strong form of epistemological scepticism. The consequence of traditional scepticism is that there are no reasons for knowing anything in the realist sense, or any other sense acceptable to traditional expressivists. Traditional expressivism thus has a great deal in common with epistemic nihilism, in arguing that normal realist-seeming assertoric discourse is massively in error, which means it fails to meet the Expressivist’s Challenge.

Epistemic Expressivism: Nontraditional Views #

While traditional epistemic expressivism is much closer to epistemic nihilism as a kind of epistemic antirealism, nontraditional expressivism is closer to realism. As Cuneo says, nontraditional expressivist views concede large amounts of conceptual territory to realism. Nontraditional forms of expressivism, for instance, concede epistemic thought and discourse are both truth-apt and representative (Cuneo, 2007: 146).

Nontraditional expressivism does this by embracing what Cuneo calls the ‘deflationary package’. Cuneo says that

[the] deflationary package is a set of claims about the character of epistemic discourse, truth, representation, and facthood, which offers a deflationary account of these notions (Cuneo, 2007: 127).

Deflationism with respect to some sorts of entities is a degreed phenomenon, with some positions being more deflationary, and others being less. For this reason Cuneo divides nontraditional expressivism into two types: minimalist and maximalist types of expressivism. Minimalist types of nontraditional expressivism are closer to their traditional expressivist cousins. They are the least realist-like expressivist of the nontraditional types. Maximalist nontraditional expressivism is much closer to realism than any other type of expressivism, and seems much more like a kind of realism than any other. Cuneo says quasi-realist views, such as those defended by Simon Blackburn, can easily fit into either category.

In this part of the chapter we will rehearse Terence Cuneo’s chapter on nontraditional expressivism, and why we should reject it as a kind of epistemic antirealism. We will first outline what the minimalist and maximalist types of nontraditional expressivism are. We will then discuss and argue against minimalist expressivism. The two objections Cuneo performs are the ‘modal’ and ‘perspective’ objections. Both of these objections charge that minimalist expressivism cannot meet the Expressivist’s Challenge. We then turn to maximalist expressivism. While neither of these objections apply to maximalism, we will argue that the position in nevertheless incoherent. At the end of this part of the chapter we will be able to conclude that none of the forms of epistemic expressivism are acceptable as a kind of epistemic antirealism.

Common Commitments of Nontraditional Expressivism #

The above four commitments of traditional expressivism apply also nontraditional expressivism, albeit in modified form. Each of the three theses of traditional expressivism are modified for the nontraditional form, and the Guiding Rationale stays the same:

The Expressivist’s Modified Ontic Thesis: There are no epistemic facts, only epistemic quasi-facts.

The Expressivist’s Modified Alethic Thesis: The contents of some epistemic claims are true, but only in a deflationary sense.

The Expressivist’s Modified Speech Act Thesis: When an agent sincerely utters a predicative epistemic sentence, that agent does not thereby assert an epistemic proposition, but rather ‘asserts’ an epistemic quasi-proposition.

The Expressivist’s Guiding Rationale: Avoid an error-theoretic account of ordinary epistemic discourse (while also avoiding a commitment to epistemic realism) (Cuneo, 2007: 147).

Minimalism Stated #

Cuneo then discusses what each of these four elements of expressivism amount to in the case of minimalist nontraditional expressivism.

The First Component: Epistemic Discourse #

Minimalist nontraditional expressivism holds that epistemic discourse is assertoric only in the sense that it consists in an agent’s performing speech acts that express epistemic quasi-propositions. These entities are the ’non-descriptive’ content of these speech acts. Cuneo explains what this means. Cuneo writes:

In his Morality without Foundations, Mark Timmons notes that at the heart of the realist polemic against moral expressivism lies a simple but attractive argument that rests on three assumptions. The first assumption—what Timmons calls the ‘semantic assumption’—tells us that moral assertions and beliefs (if any there be) are such that their content aims to represent moral reality. The second assumption—what Timmons dubs the ’thesis of semantic unity’—tells us that the grammatical and logical trappings that constitute a discourse are indicative of the real semantics of that discourse. The third assumption—call it the ’empirical thesis’—says that moral discourse does in fact manifest the grammatical and logical trappings of assertoric discourse. Since these three assumptions are jointly incompatible with traditional expressivism, expressivists have been forced to reject at least one of them. And almost without exception, expressivists have opted to reject the second assumption, thereby committing themselves to the view that the grammatical and logical trappings of moral discourse function not to reveal, but to mask its deep expressive structure (Cuneo, 2007: 148-149).

Timmons proposes a different form of expressivism. Timmons suggests we reject the semantic assumption, the first assumption, and retain the second and third assumptions. He therefore argues that expressivists can hold that moral discourse is assertoric, but isn’t actually in the business of representing reality.

This kind of expressivism claims that epistemic expressivism isn’t trying to represent or describe reality at all. Expressivists of this kind argue that there are two different kinds of content that assertions are supposed to express: descriptive and non-descriptive content. As Cuneo says, descriptive content aims to represent reality. For an agent to to assertively express some descriptive content p is for her to purpose to represent the fact that p. In this way, descriptive content is propositional content as it is ordinarily understood.

Cuneo explains, on the other hand, that non-descriptive content resembled descriptive content because it manifests some of the features of descriptive content, like “[embedding] in propositional attitude ascriptions and conditionals, being truth-apt (in a deflationary sense), and being irreducible to what is expressed in non-declarative sentences such as imperatives and questions” (Cuneo, 2007: 149-150).

However, non-descriptive content neither attempts to represent, or successfully represents what the world is like:

To perform a speech act that expresses some non-descriptive content p, then, is not thereby to purport to represent the fact that p; it is rather to do something different such as ’evaluate’ a state of affairs. Nondescriptive content, as we might put it, is quasi-propositional content—where quasi-propositions are entities whose job description includes mimicking propositions in certain important respects, but which do not purport to represent the world (Cuneo, 2007: 149-150).

The Second Component: Truth #

The second component of the deflationary package in the minimalist nontraditional expressivist context is that the contents of some epistemic claims are true, albeit only in a deflationary sense. Cuneo takes this to mean that the contents of some epistemic claims are true, but their being true consists simply in their having a non-robust truth property. Cuneo further explains that to predicate truth of the content of an epistemic claim is not to say that it has some robust truth property, but to do something else such as commend that claim, repeat it, predicate of it a non-robust truth property, or the like (Cuneo, 2007: 155).

Cuneo writes that, according to deflationists, the function of the truth term is is not to pick out some property or relation whose underlying structure will be revealed by philosophical or scientific analysis (Cuneo, 2007: 150-151). We can understand the truth term as the predicate ‘is true’ in the following proposition:

P is true, if and only if p.

Epistemic realists interpret the truth term in propositions such as the above as holding to a robust truth property. This means that realists take the predicate is true to imply some interesting and substantial meaning. The way Cuneo puts it is that a robust truth property is one which is amenable to a certain kind of conceptual analysis, what he calls ‘accounting for analysis’ (Cuneo, 2007: 153).

Cuneo asks us to suppose that a truth property is amenable to accounting for analysis if and only if it can be analysed by the following schema:

For all p, if p is true, then p is true simply in virtue of C.

This is where ‘p’ ranges over the content of either mental states or sentences. Cuneo explains why we would entertain this kind of schema in defining what a robust truth property is. Accounting for analysis is a process of discovering the necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of the truth property:

So, for example, assuming that ‘p’ stands for the content of an atomic claim, ‘C’ might be something such as its being a fact that p, p’s obtaining in the actual world, p’s being ideally justifiable, p’s being pragmatically useful, and so forth. As such, the ‘in virtue’ locution as it is used in this schema designates the truth-making relation. … The ‘in virtue’ relation is an asymmetrical dependence relation—a supervenience or ‘accounting for’ relation, as I’ve called it—that in this case obtains between the content of claims, on the one hand, and states of affairs, facts, situations, or propositions on the other (Cuneo, 2007: 153).

Expressivists of the kind we are discussing disagree that one can use accounting for analysis to understand truth as a property. They hold that there is no kind of conceptual analysis we can perform that helps us explain the meaning of truth as a property. They resist the idea that one can give any kind of detailed informative explanation for what a truth property or truth term is. Deflationists about truth in this sense hold that there is not one common feature true propositions have in common, because there is nothing informative to say about what it means for something to be true. As such, Cuneo says we can state the minimal core of deflationary views in the following way:

The Minimal Core Regarding Truth: (i) The truth term is not a robust truth predicate, and (ii) there is a property of being true, but it is non-robust (Cuneo, 2007: 154).

The Third Component: Representation #

The third component of the deflationary package tells us that epistemic thought and discourse are representational, but this is to be understood only in a deflationary sense. Expressivists of the kind we are discussing hold representation relations to only hold in a non-robust sense.

Much of what we said about the truth term in propositions applies to what expressivists think about the representation relation. Realists hold that both the truth predicate making the truth and the representation relation describing the bearing of the truth hold in a robust way. Cuneo takes this to mean that they are amenable to accounting for analysis. That means we can analyse in an interesting and substantial sense what representation means.

We might hold to a correspondence or identity theory of truth, for instance, and these theories of truth could account for analysis of what the representation relation bearing truth is, and what it means. Expressivists of the nontraditional sort hold that this is not true, and that representation does not amount to anything interesting or substantial. Cuneo therefore describes the minimal core of the deflationary package as being thus:

The Minimal Core Regarding Representation: (i) Representation terms are not robust representation predicates, and (ii) there are representation relations, but they are non-robust (Cuneo, 2007: 156).

The Fourth Component: Facts #

The fourth component of minimalist nontraditional epistemic expressivism is that there are not epistemic facts, but epistemic ‘quasi-facts’. Quasi-facts are to be understood as virtual objects. Realists hold that epistemic facts are what make epistemic claims true, and what are represented by such claims. Epistemic quasi-facts, according to expressivists, are also facts of a certain kind. But, they are neither truth-makers nor what is represented by epistemic claims. Cuneo explains

[that] epistemic quasi-facts are not truth-makers is implied by what minimalist expressivists say about epistemic discourse and truth; for according to expressivists, there is nothing that accounts for the fact that a quasi-proposition is true. That epistemic quasi-facts are not represented by epistemic claims is also implied by what minimalist expressivists say about epistemic discourse; for according to what minimalists say, epistemic claims are not in the business of representing epistemic states of affairs (Cuneo, 2007: 158).

However, if quasi-facts aren’t in the business of being truth-makers for claims, or being the content of anything representational, what’s the point of having an ontology that talks about quasi-facts at all? Cuneo explains that expressivists hold that once we admit epistemic claims are true, then epistemic ‘facts’ come ‘for free’ (Cuneo, 2007: 158). Cuneo argues that minimalist expressivists hold to an account of epistemic facts are ‘virtual facts’, or what Cuneo says Bertrand Russell called ’logical fictions’ (Cuneo, 2007: 159).

These virtual facts are not real facts, and they really have no existence. We can just license such talk about them because, as Cuneo says, if we work backwards and establish quasi-propositions, and quasi-representational relations, we get quasi-facts ‘for free’. These virtual facts which are not the content of any proposition, and are not truth-makers either, necessarily come along with the deflationary package.

Against Minimalism #

We have now rehearsed Cuneo’s definition of the ‘deflationary package’, which explains what minimalist expressivists mean by the modified theses of nontraditional expressivism. We can now rehearse Cuneo’s rejection of this type of expressivism. Like we have said above, realists hold that epistemic discourse is assertoric, that some such discourse is true and representative, and that there are epistemic facts—minimalist expressivists agree with all of this, but they construe these claims in a deflationary sense. Speech acts only establish quasi-propositions, which establish mere quasi-representation relations using quasi-truth predicates, which refer to mere quasi-facts, virtual facts.

Cuneo makes two objections against minimalist expressivism: the first is the modal objection, and the second is the perspective objection. The two objections attempt to prove that minimalist expressivism does not succeed in the Expressivist’s Challenge: minimalist expressivism does not capture everything we could plausibly mean when we engage in ordinary epistemic thought and discourse without implying such thought and discourse is massively in error.

There are two parts to Cuneo’s modal objection to minimalist expressivism. The first is that we should reject minimalism because it is committed to two incompatible claims: first, that possibly epistemic quasi-facts exist, and second, that necessarily such facts do not exist.

The second is very similar to the rejection from Cuneo that we rehearsed about traditional expressivism. This is that we can’t seem to capture everything we could plausibly mean in our ordinary epistemic discourse about non-derivative epistemic merit.

Let’s consider the first part of the argument of this objection. Cuneo says that if we assume that there are quasi-propositions that establish quasi-representational relations, we must be committed to the existence of quasi-facts (Cuneo, 164). The quasi-representational relation established by the deflationary account of propositions must have some sort of content, and that content has to be quasi-facts. Cuneo says it doesn’t make any sense to be committed to propositions or representationalism in any form, be it realist or deflationary, without being committed to some sort of representational content (Cuneo, 164).

But expressivists are only committed to representational content in virtual terms only. They are not serious about the existence of any form of representational content in their deflationary account of epistemic discourse because they firmly hold that epistemic discourse doesn’t represent anything at all. Cuneo argues, however, that this flatly contradicts the entire system that they have set up. The deflationary quasi-fact that p has to exist in an deflationary account of epistemic representational discourse because otherwise there would be no representational content to represent. It doesn’t make sense to be committed to representationalism without any representational content.

Now let’s consider the second part of Cuneo’s argument. Cuneo writes:

Consider the following plausible claim: Epistemic merit concepts such as being a case of knowledge properly apply non-derivatively to only those (predicative) claims that represent or represent in some deflationary sense some correlative fact. The plausibility of this claim is underscored by connections we assume to hold between knowledge and representation. Assume that there is no other sense of the term ‘represent’ that that captured by substantive or deflationary accounts of representation terms. It would be paradoxical to say that I know some state of affairs that p, but there is no sense in which my judgment that p is about this state of affairs (Cuneo, 165).

If we were correct in the first part of our argument, and there is no sense in which we can talk about epistemic quasi-facts, then we can’t assign epistemic merit to propositions. If this is the case we end up with a flatly contradictory account of epistemic discourse. We can know things, but we flatly deny they have anything to do with the supposed facts about which that knowledge is to be assigned.

Cuneo says there might be two ways of getting out of this contradiction, but they both end up showing that minimalist expressivism cannot meet the Expressivist’s Challenge. Let’s consider the first escape from the contradiction. The first attempt to fix the problem is just to go along assume we normally assign epistemic merit to epistemic claims anyway in our everyday discourse. But if we do this, then we commit ourselves to concluding our normal epistemic discourse is systematically in error. Because there is necessarily no representational content, on the minimalist’s story of epistemic discourse, we have no grounds to assign any kind of merit at all. Our application of norms to discourse is therefore necessarily false and massively in error, because in ordinary discourse we are in no way entitled to assign any epistemic merit to any representation.

The second attempt to fix the problem is to deny that ordinary discourse actually applies epistemic merit concepts to claims at all. We could attempt to be revisionists about what we mean about ordinary epistemic discourse. I follow Cuneo in saying we should reject this supposed solution as well. If we follow this route, we are not actually capturing everything we plausibly mean about ordinary epistemic discourse. Minimalism therefore fails the other horn of the Expressivist’s Challenge.

Let’s turn to the perspective objection.

The Perspective Objection #

Cuneo’s perspective objection argues that we cannot talk about the external/internal distinction of epistemic discourse that minimalist expressivists make without being incoherent.

Many philosophers embrace epistemic expressivism because they first accept bald naturalism. Bald naturalism excludes the existence of normative entities in the universe, so philosophers who accept bald naturalism easily find themselves turning to moral and epistemic antirealism. However, as we have seen above, either epistemic nihilism or moral nihilism is an incredibly unattractive position to which to hold, so expressivism has become, correspondingly, a very attractive way to have everything you could want about anti-realism about certain discourses, while avoiding the very dangerous conclusions of nihilism—hence scholars commit themselves to the Expressivist’s Challenge.

Expressivists like Blackburn and Crispin Wright adopt a metaphor that the discourse that people engage in, in their everyday lives, sits in either an internal or external perspective about the world. This is is a convenient metaphor to explain how antirealism can be committed to admitting that epistemic discourse certainly seems realist on the surface of its semantics, even though the truth is that there are no epistemic facts as the realist conceives them. In this way expressivists aim to say everything that nihilism wants to say about realism, without being commited to an error-theoretic analysis of epistemic or moral discourse.

The idea is that discourse we opt to treat in an anti-realist fashion is located in an internal perspective of agents engaged in speech acts, and that true, full-blooded, representational discourse obtains in an external perspective. The trouble, Cuneo says, is that expressivists privilege the external perspective of epistemic discourse over the internal. The expressivist says that the external perspective is the true explanation for the mere appearance of what seems to be going on in the internal perspective. What is really going on, the minimalist expressivist says, is the natural scientific ‘metaphysical speculation’ or ’theoretical inquiry’ of the external perspective, to use Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’s words (Timmons, 1999: 152; Horgan, 2001: 90). The nature of natural scientific intelligibility, they say, is that it is not committed to the existence of epistemic reasons or facts. The natural scientific intelligibility of the external perspective is the foundation for the internal perspective.

The idea is that the external perspective that people are supposed to inhabit when they do natural scientific inquiry is completely devoid of normativity. No facts obtain in this area of discourse, no ‘strange entities’ that admit of warrantability or justifiability exist in this connection, and agents are not accountable or open to assessment when they make certain claims or represent anything to be true. In fact agents represent nothing in this space of discourse. This external perspective is governed completely by efficient causation. It is what McDowell calls ‘Givenness’. We shall see that this kind of external persepective about how we relate ourselves to the world generates a ‘Myth’ about how our minds work—the ‘Myth of the Given’.

I agree with Cuneo when he argues that it seems impossible that anyone could ever inhabit such an external perspective. It seems very difficult to accept that anyone could ever engage in any kind of scientific inquiry without first believing that there are epistemic reasons or facts. What the minimalist expressivist seems to be saying is that natural science is committed to epistemic nihilism, even though it appears prima facie to entertain realist epistemic discourse.

Put simply, I agree with Cuneo that the ’external’ perspective minimalist epistemic expressivists imagine is not a perspective at all. No human could ever inhabit it, and it would never make any sense. Very simply, we would have absolutely no intentionality whatsoever if this external perspective were to exist. Our sayings and doings would not be ‘about’ anything. We would fail to be human at all—we would be the most empty and austere kind of automata, merely following our neurological punch-cards along their path, with no consciousness whatsoever.

Maximalism Stated #

Now that we have dealt with minimalist expressivism, let’s turn to maximalism. Maximalist expressivism about epistemic discourse is almost identical to minimalism, except that it concedes more ground to realism than minimalism. What maximalism concedes specifically is that treats of a more realist-seeming conception of quasi-facts. Recall earlier how we outlined how minimalists only admitted of ‘virtual’ epistemic quasi-facts, entities which were not entities at all. Maximalists are prepared to deal with quasi-facts in a more realist way. Let’s see what that means.

Cuneo writes that Crispin Wright transposes the following passage from Michael Dummett:

The states of affairs which (merely) minimally true sentences represent are no more than reflections on those sentences, sentences which behave, by simple formal criteria, in a manner analogous to sentences which are apt to depict real states of affairs, but whose senses cannot be represented as consisting in our capacity to identify states of affairs necessary and sufficient for their truth (Cuneo, 177; Wright, 1992: 181-182).

Wright continues by pointing out that

the concluding part of … [this] thought might naturally be taken as an expression of (or kind of) irrealism. … But, again, that is not the only possible meaning. The thought can be that understanding such a sentence should not be seen as consisting in a capacity appropriately to respond to the relevant type of truth-conferring states of affairs. For, in parallel to the situation with abstract objects, there seems to be no question of such a state of affairs … directly influencing the thought of someone who lacks the conceptual wherewithal to characterise it, or directly producing any other kind of effect on our consciousness, or on our bodies or non-human objects of any kind. … Like pure abstract objects, the states of affairs purportedly depicted by merely minimally true sentences do not seem to do anything except answer to the demands of our minimally true thoughts. The irresistible metaphor is that … the states of affairs to which … merely minimally true sentences correspond, are no more than shadows cast by the syntax of our discourse. And the aptness of the metaphor is merely enhanced by the reflection that shadows are, after their own fashion, real (Cuneo, Ibid; Wright, Ibid).

Cuneo writes that Wright seems to be distinguishing between two different types of representation. The first kind of representation Wright labels ‘serious’ representation (Wright, 1992: 200). Cuneo says this kind of representation obtains only when a claim represents a state of affairs in virtue of its being a ‘response’ to that state of affairs. The second kind of representation is called ‘weak representation’. Weak representation obtains when and only when a claim ‘depicts’ a state of affairs, but not in virtue of its being a response to it (Cuneo, 178).

The idea behind maximalist expressivism is that quasi-facts are the shadows of the syntax of our epistemic discourse. Our quasi-propositions only weakly represent these quasi-facts. Cuneo goes on to explain that there are some further qualifications to this system that we need to be aware about:

Several conditions, in Wright’s view, must be met if an attitude seriously represents a state of affairs, among which is that it exerts what Wright calls ‘cognitive command’. Roughly, the idea here is that if a statement seriously represents a fact, then any dispute about the truth of that statement must involve a cognitive shortcoming on the part of at least one of the participants in that dispute (Wright, 1992: 92-3, 144). Wright emphasises that this idea tries to capture two intuitions.

The first is that there is a link between realist truth, or genuine facts, and objectivity. If we are really dealing with an objective matter of fact, says Wright, then,

the opinions which we form are in no sense optional or variable as a function of permissible idiosyncrasy, but are commanded of us—that there will be a robust sense in which a particular point of view ought to be held, and a failure to hold which can be understood only as a rational/cognitive failure (Wright, 1992: 146).

So, to use Wright’s example, statements about what is funny do not intuitively exert cognitive command. If two persons were to sit down to watch Abbott and Costello, and if one person were to claim that their dialogue is highly amusing, while the other were to assert that it is tiresome and juvenile, neither would (all else being equal) suffer from a cognitive shortcoming. Either claim would be rationally acceptable.

The second intuition that cognitive command tries to capture is one concerning the nature of representation. Wright puts it thus:

For to think of oneself as functioning in purely cognitive mode, as it were, is, when the products of that function are to be beliefs, to think of oneself a functioning in representational mode; and that idea is then subject to a truism connecting representation and convergence—that representationally functioning systems, targeted on the same subject matter, can produce divergent output only if working on divergent input or if they function less than perfectly. The nerve of the Cognitive Command constraint is a specialisation of that idea to the case where the representational system is a thinking subject engaged in the formation of belief (Wright, 1992: Ibid).

It therefore follows that Wright does not consider moral representation as a ‘serious’ mode of representation, because it does not exert ‘cognitive command’ on agents. Moral representation is not in the business of ‘responding’ to states of affairs, but merely weakly represent states of affairs. As such moral claims do not force agents to think alike, at the cost of being branded cognitively deficient. Wright seems to think moral representation categorically cannot give ‘cognitive command’ to agent’s representational systems.

Against Maximalism #

Maximalism improves on the deficiencies of minimalism. It holds that quasi-facts actually exist, and are not mere virtual entities. It holds that epistemic discourse weakly represents these quasi-facts, and is not a ‘serious’ manifestation of representation. This is the maximalist’s understanding of the modified ontic, alethic and speech act theses.

Cuneo points out that the doctrine of cognitive command is a normative thesis. It tells us that if there is a fundamental dispute between two agents ‘seriously’ representing some fact about the world, then there must be some sort of rational deficiency or cognitive shortcoming with at least one of the the agents, and at least one of the agents ought to view the matter or represent the matter differently.

Cuneo invites us to distinguish between two different types of epistemic norms: robust and weak epistemic norms (Cuneo, 180). A robust epistemic norm is a norm that stipulates that if one does not conform to it, one thereby suffers from a rational failure. Weak epistemic norms are the opposite. If you don’t conform to a weak epistemic norm: no matter. You do not suffer from a rational or cognitive failure. If maximalist expressivism is true about epistemic discourse, then norms about epistemic claims can only be weak in character. This is because all epistemic discourse to the maximalist expressivist is constituted by weak representation and not serious representation.

If our above discussion is correct, then there are two serious problems for maximalist expressivism. These problems should entitle us to reject it as a kind of epistemic antirealism.

The first problem is that maximalism denies that there are strong epistemic norms. All epistemic discourse is governed by weak epistemic norms. But it is given that we do engage in serious representation. As Cuneo points out, Blackburn clearly thinks serious representation applies to physical facts about objects which are cubic and solid. It follows that maximalism doesn’t capture everything we plausibly mean in our everyday epistemic discourse. Maximalism holds that there is no such thing as serious representation, because all epistemic discourse is weak representation. This is not true, so maximalism must be false (Cuneo, 181).

The second problem is that maximalism collapses into a universal epistemological scepticism. If every particular instance of representation is always weak representation, then it follows that strong epistemic norms can never arise. Therefore cognitive command never arises. If this is true, no-one can ever exhibit a rational deficiency or cognitive shortcoming. No-one can ever be wrong about anything in epistemic discourse. It follows that anything can be true in epistemic discourse. Maximalism should therefore present itself as a very unattractive form of epistemic antirealism. Not only does it not meet the Expressivist’s Challenge, but it fairs no better than epistemic nihilism.

Conclusion #

In this chapter we took on a very big task, and this was to analyse and reject the most popular kind of epistemic antirealism, epistemic expressivism. The purpose of doing this was to prove the second key premise in Cuneo’s Argument, that epistemic realism is true. It was my aim to argue that if epistemic expressivism was false or highly unattractive, then epistemic realism must be true. It follows that if we were correct in all of our arguments, then it necessarily follows that moral realism is true, because moral and epistemic discourse are so similar that if one was false, the other one must be false too. If moral realism is true, then bald naturalism must be false. Bald naturalism is false because normativity is a feature that entities of the universe can exhibit.

Since we cannot reject the existence of epistemic facts, construed in the sense of paradigmatic realism as Cuneo defines it, we cannot reject the existence of moral facts. We rejected the validity of epistemic nihilism because it is incredibly unattractive. It is unattractive because it implies that nothing can ever make any sense, or terminates in a very strong form of epistemological scepticism.

We rejected epistemic expressivism of all variants: traditional and nontraditional (of which minimalism and maximalism were species). We rejected these kinds of epistemic antirealism because they could not meet the Expressivist’s Challenge: all kinds of expressivism either implies that ordinary epistemic discourse, despite appearances, was massively and systematically in error, or that epistemic expressivism cannot actually capture everything we could plausibly mean in our ordinary everyday realist-seeming epistemic discourse, and redescribe it in a way what was ’less ontologically problematic’.

A Proof for Moral Realism: Part A

Mon, 28 May 2018 21:40:56 +1000

I Introduction #

This thesis aims to construct a theory of what Richard Hamilton calls a “naturalistic normativism” (Hamilton, 2010). This thesis aims to present arguments for rejecting the current orthodoxy of naturalism in analytic philosophy, what John McDowell calls “bald naturalism” (McDowell, 1996), and what others have termed “Scientific Naturalism” (De Caro and Macarthur, 2004: 1). The theory of naturalism that this thesis aims to present has elsewhere been called Liberal Naturalism (De Caro and Macarthur, 2010: 1).

Naturalism is the orthodox position in analytic philosophy, and is the position that only what is natural is real. This might seem like a fairly innocuous position to hold but it has been transformed into an incredibly imperialistic system. The orthodox interpretation of naturalism in analytic philosophy is that (a) there is no such thing as a First Philosophy; (b) only the ontology and/or methodology of the natural sciences (i.e. the “hard” sciences, physics, chemistry, and biology) describes and explains what it natural; and (c) philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences. I follow John McDowell in labeling this orthodoxy of naturalism “bald naturalism”.

II The Meaning of Bald Naturalism #

Let’s unpack what these three elements of bald naturalism mean.

A No First Philosophy #

The dominant philosophical tradition in the Anglo-American academic sphere before analytic philosophy was Idealism. F. H. Bradley, Josiah Royce, and John McTaggart are all archetypal examples of this tradition. This tradition took great inspiration from German Idealism, and argued that there was a systematic a priori foundation to reality. They firmly believed that in order to make sense of everything, one had to construct a First Philosophy to ground any kind of investigation into the universe. Any kind of ontology or methodology one tried to fashion in the natural sciences needed to be grounded in a rigorously “rational” First Philosophy.

Contemporaneous to Idealism was Positivism. Mario de Caro and David Macarthur argue that this competing philosophical tradition was the first naturalist tradition (De Caro and Macarthur, 2004: 8). De Caro and Macarthur explain that

[the] nineteenth-century positivism of Comte, Mill, Spencer, Mach, and other was a commitment to the idea that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge there is and that philosophical method is nothing other that scientific method. Although science and philosophy of science had been growing in importance since the scientific revolution, the positivists were, in effect, the first fully fledged [bald] naturalist movement (Ibid).

The the beginnings of analytic philosophy saw its inauguration as a kind of hybrid of both Positivism and Idealism. De Caro and Macarthur further explain that

[it] is an important fact about analytic philosophy that its founders strongly attacked [bald] naturalism, even as they called for a scientific philosophy. Frege and Wittgenstein notoriously rejected the positivists’ psychologism in the philosophy of logic. And togher with Russell and the Logical Positivists, they believed that “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” by way of logical or conceptual analysis. Early analytic philosophers believed that philosophy could investigate logic, or elucidate the structure of knowledge or the nature of our concepts, a priori without any help from the empirical sciences (Ibid).

De Caro and Macarthur continue:

Russell’s hopes for a “scientific philosophy” must be understood in the light of a widespread confidence that philosophy is fundamentally distinct from science and that philosophy is authoritative over its own domain of logic. Analytic philosophers followed Russell in hoping that by employing modern methods of logical analysis “philosophy would thus achieve something like the status of a science”, not in becoming science but in adopting a method that, like science, is “co-operative and cumulative” (Ibid).

Early analytic philosophy was thus anti-naturalist in the sense that it posited a First Philosophy. The Logical Positivism of early analytic philosophy argued that there must be a single unified a priori conceptual system into which all knowledge about the universe had to be organised into in order to be truthful.

The transition of analytic philosophy into naturalism as the dominant philosophical tradition radically rejected this position. As Macarthur and de Caro say,

[no] one is more important in undermining this early analytic conception of the relation of philosophy and science that W. V. Quine. His attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction and the possibility of traditional a priori truths dismantled the presuppositions of the logical analysis of language or concepts that was central to the “Linguistic Turn”. Quine’s naturalisation of epistemology undermined the last vestiges of First Philosophy and strongly endorsed the continuity between philosophy and science (Ibid).

The rejection of First Philosophy claims that there is no a priori rationalist foundation to any coherent, sound, or valid system of knowledge anymore. Only the contingent empirical methods of natural science explain what is real or not. Any system is potentially revisable at any time based on new empirical “scientific” observations. There is no conceptual system which is true which avoids incorporating empirical methods anymore, the rejection of First Philosophy claims.

B The Ontology and Methodology of the Natural Sciences #

Bald naturalism argues that the only ontology and methodology which anyone can ever use in any “rational” discourse about anything can be that of the natural sciences, the “hard” sciences. De Caro and Macarthur explains that in this way bald naturalism amounts to a “scientism”: the only valid discourse anyone can ever enter into to make any sense when talking about something, or talking with or to someone else is the discourses of the hard sciences: this scientism says

… not only that modern natural science provides a true picture of nature but, more contentiously that it is the only true picture. Wilfrid Sellars expresses its animating spirit in his remark that “science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” (Ibid: 4).

Ontologically, then, naturalists who advocate a metpahysical picture of nature that amounts to a strong physicalism are bald naturalists, because they argue that only the objects explained in the most up-to-date system of physics are real. The same goes for all the other hard sciences, chemistry and reductive and determinist forms of biology.

Methodologically, bald naturalists don’t just argue against the existence of a First Philosophy, but they claim that philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences. This doesn’t mean they consider philosophy to be a kind of science. Bald naturalists mean that natural science dominates and dictates what is acceptable philosophical discourse. For bald naturalism, only the discourses of the hard sciences are up for analysis and discussion in philosophy. The only kind of philosophy which is valid is the philosophy of the hard sciences.

III Why We Should Reject Bald Naturalism #

It follows from above that bald naturalism argues that nature is a physically and causally closed system. Nature is governed by a causal order of efficient causation, and nothing intervenes in this order. The first argument of this thesis is that we should reject Bald Naturalism. I argue that we should reject Bald Naturalism because it rejects the existence of normativity in its picture of nature. The reductive picture of the natural sciences that bald naturalism advocates rejects the reality of human value and normativity. The methodologies and ontologies of these supposed reductionist hard sciences for instance exclude the existence of moral entities, like moral facts, moral properties, or moral states of affairs from valid kinds of discourse.

A The Core Argument of This Chapter #

As Terence Cuneo, David Macarthur, and Mario de Caro explain normativity is something like the following example:

We normally say, for example,that one ought to keep one’s promises, and that if one accepts p and “If p, then q”, one ought to accept q, or that Mozart was a better musician than Salieri (De Caro and Macarthur, 2010: 4; Cuneo, 2007).

I want to argue that this “oughtness” of normative facts, or “evaluativeness” of normative facts is a real feature of nature, and that bald naturalism ought to be rejected because it refuses the existence of these facts. In this chapter, in order to argue that bald naturalism is false, I want to put forward the following argument:

If bald naturalism is true, then moral realism is false and normativity is not part of the universe.
If moral realism is true, then normativity must be a part of the universe.
Moral realism is true.
Therefore bald naturalism is false, and normativity is indeed part of the universe.

The above is a deductive argument, and virtually the entire argument turns on the third premise. If the third premise is false, then it turns out that the disjunctive premises 1 and 2 will render the conclusion unsound. I will call the above argument the Core Argument of Chapter One.

I will prove the above third premise of the Core Argument is true by making another argument. I will call this argument Cuneo’s argument, because it is the main argument of Terence Cuneo’s book The Normative Web (2007). This is Cuneo’s argument:

1. If moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist.
2. Epistemic facts exist.
3. So, moral facts exist.
4. If moral facts exist, then moral realism is true.
5. So, moral realism is true (Ibid: 6).

The two premises which require significant argument are premises one and two. In this chapter I will rehearse Cuneo’s arguments as to why moral facts must exist if epistemic facts exist. Cuneo calls it “defending the parallel”. The second chapter of this thesis will perform an argument by elimination to show that epistemic anti-realism must be false. I will rehearse Cuneo’s arguments as to why epistemic nihilism and epistemic expressivism should both be rejected.

The idea behind this strategy is called a ‘Companions in Guilt’ argument. We will show in this chapter than moral and epistemic realism are incredibly similar positions. We will show that they are in fact so similar, that to adopt one type of realism, say, epistemic realism, forces one to adopt the other kind—moral realism. The same goes the other way—to reject moral realism would be to reject epistemic realism. And that is the purpose of the next chapter. I will demonstrate that epistemic anti-realism is such an undesirable position that any reasonable person would be forced to reject it. Rejecting epistemic anti-realism would therefore force one to reject moral anti-realism.

Many anti-realists about moral discourse would find the consequence of embracing epistemic anti-realism very undesirable, so the purpose of this part of the thesis is to construct this equivalence between accepting both types of realism in order to open a space for the rest of the thesis. The purpose of this part of the thesis therefore is to open a space for discussion predicated on the possibility or probability that moral realism is true, because we will show in this chapter and the next that epistemic and moral realism stand or fall together.

The rest of the thesis after this part is therefore constructive. Attempting to force moral anti-realists into a corner, this admittedly defensive first part of the thesis will lay the groundwork for attempting to build a naturalistic philosophy which is compatible with moral realism.

Terence Cuneo’s argument for his first premise of his argument for moral realism is that moral and epistemic facts are so similar that to reject moral facts would force one to have to reject epistemic facts. Moral and epistemic facts are similar in the following ways:

First, They both instantiate some categorical reasons for agents to behave in certain ways; and
Second, they are structurally isomorphic, that is to say there rational structure is completely identical; and
Third, the behavioural responses that moral and epistemic facts favour are completely identical. Behaviour based on both kinds of facts is the same. To phrase this in another way, we can say that moral and epistemic facts do not favour different kinds of behaviour in their two different rational contexts; and
Moral and epistemic facts are not just coextensive, and share a single normative context, but mutually entail, support, indicate, and refer to one another. Cuneo refers to this mutual interdependence as the normative web of realism. This is the reason why his book is this metaphor.

Before we deal with Cuneo’s argument regarding the four types of similarity between moral and epistemic facts, let us get clear about what we mean about “realism”. What does Cuneo mean by the term “realism”? He means the following:

A realist conception of moral and epistemic features is something that, all else being equal, ordinary mature human agents whose cognitive faculties are functioning adequately in a world such as ours take for granted in their everyday doings and believings (Ibid: 11).

This explains why Cuneo takes the path that he does in arguing for moral realism. He feels that

[it] is because this way of viewing things is rather firmly entrenched in our shared world picture that it is difficult to formulate arguments for moral or epistemic realism that appeal to premises more obvious than the positions themselves. (Imagine trying to make sense of our ordinary moral and epistemic practices while also assuming that those who sincerely engage in these practices do not think that there are moral or epistemic reasons or that such reasons can be shrugged off if we fail to have appropriate desires.) This, or so it is suggested, is why positive arguments for realism regarding moral or epistemic facts are … difficult to come by. And it is also why, when arguments are offered for moral and epistemic realism, they generally have the form of eliciting the implausible implications of their rivals rather than citing the theoretically positive characteristics of the realist views themselves (Ibid).

I will adopt Cuneo’s defensive position in this chapter, but this strategy of arguing for moral realism will not be the main strategy of my thesis. I want to construct an inflationary account of naturalist normativism: an account of naturalist normativism which gives a specific account of naturalist normativism. I want to explain precisely how moral realism is true, even when naturalism is true.

IV Defending the Parallel: If Moral Facts Do Not Exist, Then Epistemic Facts Do Not Exist #

Cuneo sets the stage for arguing that if moral facts do not exist if epistemic facts do not exist by introducing the view he calls ‘epistemic realism of a paradigmatic sort’. From there he finds four similarities between epistemic facts and moral facts which establish the truth of the first premise of Cuneo’s Argument.

A The Epistemic Realist’s Speech Act Thesis #

Cuneo writes that in the first place, the epistemic realist defends:

The Epistemic Realist’s Speech Act Thesis: Some epistemic discourse is assertoric.

Suppose we assume that an ‘epistemic sentence’ is any sentence whose surface logical form is that of either (i) predicating a simple (i.e non-compound) epistemic property of an particular entity or (ii) a universal generalisation to the effect that, if something has a given feature, then it has a simple epistemic property. According to this account, sentences such as ‘Sam’s belief about UFOs is irrational’ and ‘Beliefs based on good evidence are justified’ are examples of epistemic sentences. Call sentences of the first type ‘predicative epistemic sentences’ and those of the latter sort ‘general epistemic sentences’. Epistemic discourse, as I shall understand it, is discourse that consists only in the sincere utterances of epistemic sentences (Cuneo, 2007: 53-54).

Cuneo then says an ‘epistemic claim’ or ‘epistemic judgment’ is whatever mental state that is expressed by the sincere utterance of an epistemic sentence (Ibid: 54). Following on from this, an ‘epistemic proposition’ is the content (Cuneo says, ‘if you like, the object’) of an epistemic claim that purports (Cuneo: ‘in some cases at least’) to represent an epistemic fact (Ibid). Propositions of this type can be divided into two kinds. ‘Predicative epistemic propositions’ are those whose logical form corresponds to the (surface) semantic components of predicative epistemic sentences: ‘That Sam’s belief about UFOs is irrational is an example of such a proposition (Ibid: 19). Cuneo says ‘general epistemic propositions’ are those propositions whose logical form corresponds to the (surface) semantic components of general epistemic sentences (Ibid). That beliefs based on good evidence are justified is an example of a general epistemic proposition. Cuneo further says that

a speech act counts as a case of assertoric epistemic discourse, I will assume, just in case it consists in the explicit presentation of an epistemic proposition by way of the sincere utterance of an epistemic sentence (Ibid).

Let us bring all these claims together. The Epistemic Realist’s Speech Act Thesis tells us that discourse of this kind consists only in the sincere utterance of epistemic sentences and at least one such sentence is used explicitly to present an epistemic proposition.

There is also a moral analogue to this Epistemic Speech Act Thesis. It is called the Moral Realist’s Speech Act Thesis. This thesis forms part of the view called ‘Moral Realism of a Paradigmatic Sort’. It turns out that the Moral equivalent of the Epistemic Realist’s Speech Act Thesis is exactly the same, with all the same clarifications applying to both the Moral and Epistemic Realist Speech Act Theses.

The Moral Realist’s Speech Act Thesis: Some moral discourse is assertoric.

These clarifications are the following:

I will simply assume, following Cuneo, that there is a stock of simple predicative expressions that (in a wide range of common usage) we commonly recognise as moral and epistemic. For instance in moral discourse, I assume that evaluative expressions such as ‘is wrong’, ‘is just’, ‘is kind’, ‘is vicious’, ‘is evil’, and deontic expressions such as ‘is (morally) forbidden’, ‘is (morally) required’, is (morally) obligatory’ or ‘is a (moral) reason’ are good examples of simple predicative moral expressions. As such, I will follow Cuneo in assuming that discourse that consists only in the sincere utterance of well-formed predicative or general sentences that contain such predicative expressions count as moral discourse (Ibid: 23). See page 55 of The Normative Web for the epistemic analogue of these predicative expressions.

Cuneo explains that we must reject assertoric deflationism because it contradicts the realist’s speech act thesis. The realist’s speech act thesis asserts that when someone utters a proposition, they commit themselves to representing that the world exists in such a way. We are to understand the speech act thesis as being ‘robustly’ realist, committing an agent of the utterance of a proposition to picturing the world in a certain way ‘as it is anyway’. However assertoric deflationism is not compatible with this position. Assertoric deflationism is more compatible with a robust form of expressivism, where the utterance of a sentence-type such as

‘Genocide is wrong’

is always used merely to express the attitude:

No! to genocide.

What the above sentence expresses is not a proposition. In uttering it, someone does not express something truth-evaluable, neither does the person purport to predicate a moral property of anything. So it completely contradicts the realist’s speech act thesis.

B The Epistemic Realist’s Alethic Thesis #

There is a second element to Cuneo’s description of Epistemic Realism of a Paradigmatic Sort: the Realist’s Alethic Thesis.

The Epistemic Realist’s Alethic Thesis: The contents of some predicative epistemic claims are true, and if the contents of such claims are true, then they are true in the realist sense.

The idea with this element of Epistemic Realism of a Paradigmatic sort, is that in some cases in which we say such things as ‘Sam’s belief about UFOs is irrational’ or ‘Sam ought to consider carefully the available evidence for Margaret’s claim’, we are saying something true. As Cuneo says:

These claims are true, according to the realist conception of truth, just in case there are facts such as that Sam’s belief about UFOs is irrational and that Sam ought to consider carefully the available evidence for Margaret’s claim (Cuneo, 2007: 55).

There is also a moral analogue to this alethic thesis. There is a Moral Realist’s Alethic Thesis. It expresses exactly the same structure as the epistemic thesis, only with the word ‘moral’ in place of the word epistemic.

The Moral Realist’s Alethic Thesis: The contents of some predicative moral claims are true, and if the contents of such claims are true, then they are true in the realist sense.

All the same qualifications Cuneo makes about the moral realist’s alethic thesis apply to the epistemic alethic thesis:

Cuneo says there are several ways to misread the two realist alethic theses. They can be broadly categorised into deflationary and inflationary readings of the realist’s claim. Let’s begin with deflationary readings.

1 Deflationary Readings of the Realist’s Alethic Thesis #

Cuneo writes:

One potentially deflationary reading of the realist’s alethic thesis is to say that it does not imply that truth is a genuine or ‘substantial’ property. That is, it might be claimed that the realist’s alethic thesis is compatible with the vie according to which the apparently predicative expression ‘is true’ fails to refer to the property being true or refers only to a ‘non-substantial’ property—that is, a property that fails to admit of any type of informative elucidation (Ibid: 26-27).

I follow Cuneo in precluding any such reading of the alethic theses. I shall assume along with Cuneo that truth—at least as it is predicated of moral and epistemic propositions—is a substantive property picked out (when all goes well) by the predicative expression ‘is true’. I follow Cuneo’s reasoning. The realist’s alethic says that the content of some moral claims is true. It is, however, a platitude accepted by both deflationists and realists that truth claims represent or correspond to reality. Deflationists gloss this platitude that it amounts to no more than that p is true if and only if p. But if we hold to the realist’s speech act thesis, we find the deflationary gloss on this correspondence platitude unattractive. Fundamental to the realist’s speech act thesis is the claim that the content of some moral claims purports to represent moral and epistemic reality—where ‘representation’ in this case is understood in a fairly robust sense. This (together with the alethic thesis) entails that some predicative moral claims are true and that they represent reality correctly—represent reality correctly in a fairly robust sense of ‘represent’ (Ibid: 27).

Cuneo continues, talking about the nature of truth-bearers in realist moral and epistemic discourse:

Admittedly, it doesn’t follow from this that the truth property consists in a truth-bearer’s representing reality aright. Nevertheless, to deny this claim would be peculiar, for it is difficult to see why, if true predicative claims do not consist in representing reality aright, they are nonetheless such that they necessarily accurately represent reality. If deflationism were true, the coincidence, as David Lewis says in another context, would be magical; there would be no accounting for why it obtains. How best, then, to explain the coincidence? (Ibid).

Cuneo answers that we should assume that the following is the most promising explanation: Truth is a genuine property such that when it is exemplified by a predicative claim (or its content), it consists in that claim’s (or its content) representing a correlative fact. If this is right, it follows that truth is also a ‘substantial’ property in the sense that we can give an informative account f that in which its instantiation by a predicative claim (or its content) consists (Ibid).

2 Inflationary Readings of the Realist’s Alethic Thesis #

An inflationary reading differs from a deflationary reading in that instead of denying that truth is a property or a ‘substantial’ property of assertoric discourse, inflationism tries to give a very specific account of the nature of the truth property in the speech act thesis.

Cuneo wishes to dismiss inflationary readings of the alethic thesis, but I wish to give an inflationary account of the truth-property in Chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis. I will be adopting John McDowell’s epistemological and moral realism from his work in Mind and World (1996) and Two Sorts of Naturalism (1998: 167).

The only reason Cuneo wishes to dismiss inflationism is that he argues that such an inflationary account is not needed in order to prove the truthfulness of the realist’s alethic thesis. Because I am interested in giving a much more specific account of the reality of normativity, a naturalist account, I must resort to a much more specific account of epistemic and moral realism. A proper constructive account of how human normativity is compatible with a robust naturalism requires more than just to say normativity (say, moral realism) does not refute or contradict the sciences. They must be compatible in a more metaphysical sense, and I wish to construct an account of how this is so.

C Epistemic Realist’s Ontic Thesis #

The third and final element of Cuneo’s realism of a paradigmatic sort for both moral and epistemic realism is the ontic thesis. The ontic thesis is the following:

The Epistemic Realist’s Ontic Thesis: There are irreducible epistemic facts.

The same as above, there is an exact moral analogue:

The Moral Realist’s Ontic Thesis: There are irreducible moral facts.

Cuneo explains what he means by this by first referring to what reductionism in the case of epistemic and moral facts.

1 Reductionism #

Suppose we think of antirealist views of kind K as falling into two basic types. The first type is what we call ‘nihilist’ views. To be a nihilist with respect to ks is simply to deny that Ks exist. Cuneo gives an example: “For instance, to be a nihilist about beliefs is just to deny that there are beliefs” (Cuneo, 2007: 29). On the other hand there are ‘reductionist’ positions:

The reductionist concerning Ks does not outright deny that Ks exist. Rather, she claims that Ks exist, though, contrary to appearances, Ks are really Ys—where Ys are supposed to be less ‘ontologically problematic’ than, and significantly different from, what we intuitively or commonsensically assume Ks to be. Consider (psychological) behaviourism concerning beliefs in this regard. Behaviourists find our ordinary supposition that beliefs are mental states deeply problematic. They cannot see how a mental state could possess such mysterious qualities as being about the world or having a qualitative ‘feel’. Still, behaviourists do not simply deny that there are beliefs. Rather, they maintain that there are entities such as beliefs, but that contrary to the appearances, beliefs are not mental states. Beliefs, say behaviourists, are really just certain complex behavioural dispositions: The belief that it is snowing, for example, is just a complex behavioural disposition to do such things as put on gloves when venturing outside, answer ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Is it snowing?’ and so on. Behaviourists, in effect, ‘reduce’ beliefs to complex behavioural dispositions (Ibid: 29-30).

Cuneo asks us to suppose that we use schematic letter ‘C’ to stand for our ordinary or commonsensical conception of Ks. For the present purposes we can take a commonsensical conception of an entity to be a way of thinking about that entity which incorporates (or is constituted) a cluster of platitudes or truisms regarding the character of that entity. For example, a platitude regarding colours is that we usually can’t detect them simply by smell. The account of reduction Cuneo is proposing is that:

The Ks reduce to the Ys if and only if the Ks are identical with the Ys and the Ys fail to satisfy C (Ibid: 30).

As Cuneo thinks of them, then, reductions are always a species of so-called type-type reductions. As Cuneo says, classic behaviourists are reductionists about beliefs inasmuch as they identify beliefs with complex behavioural dispositions (Ibid).

Cuneo then goes on to make two qualifications. Although he spoke of metaphysical antirealisms as falling into two different kinds, he does not suppose that the distinction between these two types of antirealisms is a sharp one. He writes that it might be that, in some cases, it is unclear whether a view is best categorised as a nihilist view or a reductionist one. It may be the case that, for example, a proponent of a given view claims that Ks exist. On reflection, however, it might become apparent that this person is using the term ‘exist’ in less than its strict and proper sense “(perhaps she is a Meinongian of a certain kind)”. And, thus, rhetoric aside, it might be more illuminating to classify this view as a species of nihilism rather than reductionism (Ibid: 30-31).

The second qualification is that Cuneo pictures reductionism as existing on a spectrum between nihilism and realism. It may be the case that some reductionisms better satisfy the platitudes regarding some entities than others. The more a reductionist does violence, and revisionism, to our commonsensical, intuitive picture of our view of Ks, then the more antirealist and potentially nihilistic it may be. The less violence, the more of a realist account it is. In this chapter, we will only talk about reductionisms which are robustly antirealist.

Now this this work has been done, we can explain what it means for an entity to ‘irreducibly’ exist. To say that Ks irreducibly exist is to claim, first, that there is a commonsensical conception of Ks, fundamental to which are platitudes that concern the nature of Ks. Second, it is to claim that Ks exist if and only if they satisfy these platitudes. As such, Ks cannot be reduced to facts of a type that fail to satisfy platitudes central to our commonsensical conception of Ks (Ibid: 31).

2 On Common Sense #

This concept of reduction presupposes that, with respect to entities of some kinds, there is something like an ‘ordinary’ or ‘commonsensical’ idea of what those entities are like. Cuneo is right to sign-post that this is bound to raise suspicion about his account of reductionism. So we need to do more work. We need to explain how this idea of commonsensical or ordinary ideas about the nature of entities is not problematic.

Two questions arise when trying to introduce this idea of commonsensical ideas: What, after all, could we mean by the claim that there is an ordinary or commonsensical conception of a kind? And what could be meant by the claim that there is an ordinary or commonsensical conception of specifically moral and epistemic features? There are two answers offered up by Cuneo, a less determinate answer, and a more determinate answer.

The less determinate response to the question is that a commonsensical conception of a moral or epistemic feature refers to a platitude that embodies

the content and objectivity of that feature that are sufficiently entrenched in the beliefs and practices of ordinary folk that moral realists and antirealists ordinarily attempt to accommodate them in their respective theories (Ibid: 32).

A reductionist account of a putatively epistemic or moral feature is then one which claims that the moral or epistemic feature is instantiated, but offers an account of the feature without genuinely honouring these platitudes. The more determinate reply is as follows. Cuneo says it takes its inspiration from an unlikely pair of philosophers—David Lewis and Thomas Reid. The proponent of this reply maintains that there are what we might call ‘commonly conceived kinds’:

Commonly conceived kinds are kinds of which most properly functioning, paradigmatically situated adults (e.g. those who live in social groups) at some time have the concept. Fundamental to our concepts of at least some commonly conceived kinds are various platitudes. For example: Most adults of this sort have the concept of being a coloured thing. And constitutive of our concept of being a coloured thing are platitudes such as ‘(nearly) all objects that we see appear to be coloured’, ‘things don’t usually look the colour they are in the dark’, ‘one usually cannot tell what colour an object is just by touching and smelling it’, and so forth. If a person were not explicitly to believe or take for granted these platitudes in her ordinary activities of judging, questioning, blaming, praising, inquiring, predicting, and so forth, that would be prima facie grounds that the person lacks the concept of being a coloured thing, or suffers from some cognitive malfunction, or occupies (or has occupied) some highly unfavourable epistemic situation (Perhaps, for example, she has been massively deceived about the nature of colours) (Ibid: 33).

What is the point of this more determinate reply? The reply tells us that some putatively moral and epistemic features are commonly conceived kinds. They are the sorts of thing of which most properly functioning, paradigmatically situated adults have the concept. It further claims that fundamental to our concept of certain moral features are platitudes of various sorts. If we discovered a person who did not also share these platitudes in her ordinary activities of judging, questioning, blaming, praising, inquiring, predicting, and so forth, this would be prima facie grounds for believing that this person lacks the concept of that putatively moral or epistemic feature, “or suffers from some cognitive malfunction, or is the victim of some highly unfavourable epistemic situation” (Ibid: 33-34). Cuneo explains further:

For example, it is plausible to believe that kinds such as being a just action or being a wicked action are commonly conceived kinds. It is also plausible to believe that fundamental to our concepts of these kinds are various platitudes. It seems to be constitutive of our concept of justice hat no action could be just that simply randomly discriminates against some group of persons. Accordingly, if a person were not to believe or take for granted that this platitude in her ordinary activities … this would be prima facie grounds for believing that this person lacks the concept of justice, or suffers from some cognitive malfunction, or has been misled by her teachers about the nature of justice (Ibid: 34).

3 Commonsensical Moral and Epistemic Realism #

Let’s suppose, then, that there is a commonsensical conception of moral and epistemic features such as justice, kindness, and benevolence, in the case of moral features, and features such as warrantability, verifiability, and relevance, in the epistemic case. Our commonsensical conception of these features, as we have seen above, is comprised of various platitudes that, when all goes well, are indicative of the nature of these features. Cuneo writes that,

these platitudes are pregnant with important implications for what might be called our ‘commonsensical conception of moral facts’. The idea is that, if anything is a genuinely moral fact, then we have prima facie reason to believe that it would have to be such that it satisfies a certain set of platitudes. … I submit that lying at the heart of our commonsensical conception of moral facts are platitudes of two sorts—platitudes that concern the content and the authority of morality. I want now to elucidate these platitudes, and then say why I believe we have good reason to maintain that they are fundamental to our commonsensical conception of moral facts (Ibid: 35-36).

4 The Content and Authority Platitudes #

Cuneo writes that to understand the platitudes that concern the content of morality, it it useful to return to some considerations that Philippa Foot pressed against emotivist and prescriptivist views several decades ago. Foot argued that not just any action could count as wicked, benevolent, compassionate, or wrong; that there are conceptual limits to what sorts of action could admit of these moral predicates. And though it was not her aim to offer a comprehensive account of what should fall under the concept of ‘moral’, Foot contended that acts that have one or another positive moral status are generally concerned to promote, sustain, or contribute in some fashion to genuine human well-being or the states and activities that are components thereof (Ibid: 36). Likewise, acts that have one or another negative moral status are typically concerned to frustrate, undercut, or destroy authentic human flourishing or the states and activities that are components thereof. In the case of moral facts, conceived in a realist sense, we might add that some actions have such an intimate connection to causing serious harm—e.g. torturing others for mere pleasure—that they are plausibly viewed as being necessarily wrong (Ibid: 37).

I agree with Cuneo that Foot’s contention regarding the conceptual limits as to what could count as a moral fact are correct. And if we add the qualification that there are conceptual limits on what could plausibly count as authentic human flourishing, there appear to be substantial restrictions on both what could count as a moral fact, and what could count as particular types of say a moral property such as justice, mercy, benevolence, etc.

Cuneo also claimed above that, in addition to there being platitudes concerning the content of morality, there are various platitudes that concern the authority of morality. He divides these platitudes concerning the authority of morality into two sorts: prescriptiveness and those that inescapably govern our conduct.

On the first type of platitudes on the authority of morality, Cuneo writes:

First of all, there are various platitudes to the effect that moral features of the world are prescriptive insofar as they are, imply, or indicate reasons for us to behave in certain ways. Consider the fact that an action is wicked. It is an apparent platitude to claim that, necessarily, the fact that an action is wicked provides persons in the appropriate circumstances with a reason to despise it, attempt to stop it, or the like. The truth of this platitude is guaranteed by what appears to be a conceptual truth about reasons and evaluative moral facts, viz., that if an entity has some evaluative moral property, (e.g. wickedness), then (all other things being equal) there is a reason for persons in the relevant circumstances to respond to that entity in the appropriate fashion. To which we should add that moral facts (or the reasons they indicate) on some occasions appear to provide persons with a decisive reason to act as they direct (Ibid).

Regarding the second type of platitude, Cuneo explains:

… there are platitudes that tell us that moral features are authoritative insofar as they inescapably govern our conduct. The idea here is twofold.

In the first place, the claim is that, necessarily, some moral reasons apply to persons and thereby give persons reasons to act (or indicate such reasons) regardless of whether they want to act in a morally upright fashion, or whether they belong to a certain social group, or whether they have entered into certain agreements with others, and so forth. … As such, some moral reasons are categorical and stand in contrast to so-called hypothetical and institutional reasons, which apply to persons only insofar as they have certain goals or are committed to institutions or social practices of certain kinds. (Think of the norms of etiquette as a contrast).

In the second place, moral reasons are authoritative inasmuch as the decisiveness of some such reasons for appropriately situated agents is not a function of whether such agents want to act in a morally upright fashion, or belong to a certain social group, or have entered into certain agreements with others, and so forth (Ibid: 37-38).

Cuneo concludes on the topic of the content and authority platitudes of moral realism:

Definitive of moral realism of a paradigmatic sort is the thesis that there is a commonsensical conception of moral facts. Moral facts irreducibly exist just in case such facts exist that satisfy the content and authority platitudes fundamental to our commonsensical conception of moral facts. They cannot be reduced to the sorts of fact that lack these characteristics (Ibid: 39).

Epistemic realism possesses some slightly different content and authority platitudes that need to be satisfied by a commonsensical conception of epistemic facts. Cuneo argues that there are three types of content and authority platitudes that are satisfied by a commonsensical conception of epistemic facts. First, regarding content platitudes, there is representativeness. Second, regarding authoritativeness, there is the platitude that epistemic facts (a) are prescriptive; and (b) inescapably govern our conduct.

Cuneo says that the content platitudes regarding epistemic facts are the same in form as those regarding moral facts. There are conceptual limits to what an epistemic fact can be. They can only be a particular type, and they cannot wantonly be any kind of fact. These three content and authority platitudes he argues for explain what ‘epistemic realism of a paradigmatic sort’ takes an epistemic fact to be.

In the first case, regarding content platitudes, an epistemic fact must be representational. Cuneo asks us to suppose that we say an entity x is representational with respect to y just in case x purports to represent y. Further, he asks us to support we say than an entity x represents y if and only if x is representational with respect to y and in fact is about, true of, or refers to y. Finally, Cuneo asks us to suppose that an entity x is representative only insofar as it is representational and represents that which it purports to represent, or is likely to do so, or is the product of an agent’s having done a sufficiently adequate job of trying to ensure that it represents reality correctly (Ibid: 56-57).

Cuneo comments on the similarities between this content platitude and that of moral facts:

… the content platitudes with respect to epistemic facts cluster around the notion of accurate representation in a similar fashion to the way in which the content platitudes with respect to moral facts congregate around the notion of human well-being. In the interests of ensuring that the content platitudes are indeed platitudinous, I shall not adopt any particular account of what it is that representation consists in. So while I assume for the moment that representation is a genuine ‘substantive’ relation that obtains between entities of various kinds, I aim to remain neutral on the question of how best to analyse this relation (or whether it can be analysed) (Ibid).

I would like to comment on this last stance by Cuneo. While Cuneo aims to be neutral about what epistemic facts are with respect to representation platitudes, I will not be. In the next chapter I will spell out a specific account I find persuasive for constructing a naturalist account of normativity. This is what is called John McDowell’s epistemological argument. This argument is McDowell’s account of the mind and how it establishes epistemic facts. McDowell’s philosophy of epistemic facts is that they are representative, but not in a way which makes them correspond or mirror the world. McDowell’s philosophy of mind is an identity theory of mind, and he establishes that we directly think epistemic facts in our minds, instead of representing them. As McDowell himself says, we directly think the content of the world, we don’t just represent it. We can think of McDowell’s philosophy of empirical experience as satisfying the representation content platitude, but in an unorthodox way. It is still a paradigmatic case of epistemic realism, even though it is an unorthodox one. This is how I will build my inflationary account of moral and epistemic realism.

The second two platitudes regarding epistemic facts concern the authoritativeness of epistemic facts. There are two senses in which epistemic facts are authoritative: that they are prescriptive, and that they inescapably govern our conduct—just like the platitudes regarding moral facts.

Regarding prescriptiveness, Cuneo says:

epistemic facts are, imply, or indicate reasons for properly situated agents to behave in certain ways. It appears, for example, to be a conceptual truth that, if a certain plan of inquiry is manifestly irrational, then its being irrational provides appropriately situated persons with an epistemic reason not to engage in it. It is similarly platitudinous to say that, if a person investigates a matter with appropriate care and thoroughness, then she is deserving of approbation of a certain kind—approbation that we express by saying she is conscientious or scrupulous.

On the topic of the platitude about inescapable governing of conduct, Cuneo argues:

The fundamental idea in this case is that some epistemic facts are, imply, or indicate categorical reasons for agents to behave in certain ways. As such, these facts are, imply, or indicate reasons for agents to behave in certain ways regardless of whether these agents care about conducting their behaviour in a rational way, whether they belong to a social group of a certain kind, or whether they have entered into social agreements with others.

Cuneo calls these content and authority platitudes of epistemic facts ‘the central platitudes concerning epistemic facts’. They are fundamental to the epistemic realist’s ontic thesis. The purpose of the platitudes is to describe what kinds of facts epistemic facts are. If a fact is to be an epistemic fact, it just satisfy these platitudes. The commonsensical nature of the platitudes we have about epistemic facts and epistemic reasons rely on these central platitudes in outlining just what an epistemic fact is.

D The First Similarity #

It is easily observed that there is a close structural similarity between moral realism of a paradigmatic sort, and epistemic realism of a paradigmatic sort. Cuneo highlights the first main area of similarity between moral and epistemic facts:

On the assumption that we understand moral and epistemic facts to be those entities that our commonsensical conceptions of moral and epistemic facts purport to pick out, then facts of both kinds are authoritative. If such facts exist, then some facts of each kind are, imply, or indicate categorical reasons for properly situated agents to behave themselves in certain ways (Ibid: 62).

E A Framework For Thinking About Normative Facts: The Isomorphism of Moral and Epistemic Facts #

There is a second similarity between moral and epistemic facts which further bolsters the premise that if moral facts do not exist, epistemic facts do not exist. The further argument for this premise is that moral and epistemic facts are both structurally isomorphic. Their structure mirrors each other. Epistemic and moral facts are both structurally isomorphic in that they can be either deontic or evaluative. A deontic fact is one which favours behavioural or verbal responses of certain kinds, and an evaluative fact is one where the reasons accompanying a specific fact are accompanied by an appropriate or inappropriate mode of response (Ibid: 70).

Let us have a look at Cuneo’s argument.

Cuneo says he requires to “thicken” the account of what a moral and epistemic fact is. At the moment we have hopefully established that moral and epistemic facts establish categorical reasons for agents to behave in certain ways. But we need a much more comprehensive account of moral and epistemic facts in order to securely establish the first premise of Cuneo’s Argument that if moral facts do not exist, epistemic facts do not exist.

So, Cuneo sets out to make a sketch of a conceptual framework through which we can better understand the nature of moral and epistemic facts.

1 Facts and Reasons #

First, Cuneo introduces a two-fold distinction between different types of normative fact. He uses the appellation ‘normative’ here in a restricted sense to range over only moral and epistemic features. First, he introduces a distinction between general and particular normative facts. Cuneo asks us to employ the concept of a state of affairs to explicate the notion of a normative fact, in a moment he will address the distinction between states of affairs that exist, and those that obtain. In the schemata below, he will use the term ‘states of affairs’ to refer to a state of affairs that obtains. He also assumes that talk of states of affairs can be translated into different idioms that others may prefer.

In the first place, let’s say that:

X is a particular normative fact if and only if X is a state of affairs that is comprised of a particular entity’s having a simple normative property.

That Sam’s humiliating Margaret is wrong or that Sam’s belief regarding UFOs is irrational are examples of particular normative facts. Facts such as these are represented by true predicative normative claims.17

By contrast, Cuneo asks us to define general normative facts as:

X is a general normative fact if and only if X is a state of affairs that specifies that if a particular entity were instantiated, then it would have a simple normative property.

That humiliating others for mere pleasure is wrong or that believing in UFOs is unjustified are cases of putative general normative facts. Facts such as these correspond to true normative claims.18

Cuneo now proceeds to distinguish between deontic and evaluative normative facts. He asks us to suppose we use the term ‘response’ in a fairly loose way to refer to either a single type of response or a range of such responses, and also what we would also consider failures to respond). Also, we need to suppose we similarly use the term ‘agent’ to refer to a particular agent or group thereof (Ibid: 63).

In this context, deontic normative facts can be thought of disjunctively:

X is a deontic normative fact if and only if X is a state of affairs that (i) consists in an entity’s morally or epistemically favouring a response of a properly situated agent or (ii) specifies that an entity would, if instantiated, normally or epistemically favour that response of a properly situated agent.

For example, that Sam ought to apologise to Margaret and that agents should exercise care when forming and maintaining their beliefs of certain kinds are deontic normative facts (Ibid).

Evaluative normative facts can also be thought of disjunctively. Cuneo stipulates that:

X is an evaluative normative fact if and only if X is a state of affairs that (i) consists in an agent’s responding at some time (or being reliably disposed to respond) in an appropriate or inappropriate fashion to an entity that morally or epistemically favours a given response or (ii) specifies that an agent would respond at some time (or would be reliably be disposed to respond) in a appropriate or inappropriate fashion to an entity that morally or epistemically favours a given response, were it to be instantiated.

That Margaret is kind and that believing that UFOs exist is unjustified are evaluative normative facts (Ibid: 64).

Deontic and normative evaluative facts can be either particular or general in character (Ibid).

Cuneo then goes on to define what he takes a reason to be. He says:

For the present purposes, let us think of a reason as a consideration that counts in favour of a given type of response of an agent. … And when I say that a consideration ‘counts in favour of’ a given response, I mean this to cover a rather wide swath of conceptual territory. Something can count in favour of a response insofar as the thing commends a given response. But it can also count in favour of a response insofar as it demands or requires or dictates that one ought to have that response. However, to this I should add that I will not assume that something’s being demanded of one just is for it to be most favoured.

Lying just beneath the surface of this account of a reason is the thesis that reasons are relational entities of a sort. A reason ascription always has as its components the following quartet:

Consideration G → | Favours → | Response R of S | in Circumstance C #

I. | II. | III. | IV.

Suppose that we call the consideration that favours the ‘ground’. And suppose we call that which is favoured the ‘response’. Reasons, as I shall think of them, are grounds that favour responses of certain kinds of properly situated agents. Let it be noted that I have claimed that it is the grounds themselves that are reasons. I have not said that reasons are the favouring relation or that they are the grounds in addition to the favouring relation (Ibid: 65-66).

Given this definition of a reason, we can now illuminate, Cuneo says, the different types of normative facts in terms of this definition of what a reason is. To begin with the most obvious case, Cuneo argues, particular deontic facts (or particular ‘norms’, if you like) are simply facts that consist in a ground’s favouring a certain type of response. If the type of response falls under a positive moral concept such as being compassionate or being just, then the fact in question is a deontic moral fact and the ground that favours this type of response is a moral reason. By contrast, particular evaluative facts are the reasons that constitute deontic facts. Cuneo also does not deny that the reverse is also the case. Cuneo says that ‘non-dispositional’ facts of this kind ‘consist in agent’s responding in an appropriate or inappropriate way to reasons’ (Ibid: 66):

For example, the fact that Sam’s behaviour toward Margaret is unjust consists in an item of behaviour’s being an inappropriate response of a certain kind to considerations that morally favour Sam’s not behaving in that fashion. Similarly, the fact that Sam’s belief about UFOs is irrational consists in Sam’s belief’s being an inappropriate response of a certain kind to considerations that epistemically favour its being formed or maintained in a certain way. ‘Dispositional’ evaluative facts, by contrast, consist in Margaret’s being reliably disposed to respond in certain types of appropriate ways to moral reasons of a certain range. Likewise, the fact that Sam is irrational consists in Sam’s being reliably disposed to respond in certain types of inappropriate fashion to reasons of certain kinds (Ibid).

Then there are general normative facts, and their combination with the above definition of what a reason is. Cuneo says general deontic facts (or ‘general’ norms) are ‘distributive functions from possible or actual instantiations of reasons to types of appropriate response. In other words, the schema for a general deontic fact is that some agent should ‘do, or be X’ when ‘doing or being Y’—Cuneo’s example is the following fact is a general deontic one: ‘that agents should exercise care when forming and maintaining beliefs of certain kinds’ (Ibid: 67).

Similarly, a general evaluative fact is a function from possible or actual instantiations of reasons to types of appropriate or inappropriate response. The putative fact that believe in UFOs is unjustified is the conditional state of affairs that, if something is a belief that UFOs exist, then it is unjustified (Ibid).

A general deontic fact is like a guideline for acting, whereas a general evaluative fact is a fact just in case some state of affairs obtains.

F The Second Similarity #

I agree with Cuneo that the above definitions and argumentation establish a second similarity between epistemic facts and moral facts. Both epistemic and moral facts are supported by a common conception of reasons, and they are structurally isomorphic insofar as they both contain the same conceptions of normative facts. They both contain particular and general normative facts. They also both contain conceptions of deontic and evaluative normative facts. This structural isomorphism means if one were to reject the existence of moral facts, they would very well have to be committed to rejecting the existence of epistemic facts, because a “thick” explication of their structure and nature is absolutely identical.

The same goes for the first similarity: Moral and epistemic facts both establish the existence of some categorical reasons for agents to behave themselves in certain ways. If a moral antirealist were to take issue with moral facts establishing categorical reasons, they would also have to take issue with epistemic reasons doing the same. If they were to reject moral facts on this ground, they would have to also reject epistemic facts.

G The Third Similarity #

We do not need to rehearse a great deal of Cuneo’s argumentation to establish Cuneo’s third argued similarity between moral and epistemic facts. For the time being, we only need to quote some text from his concluding remarks upon establishing the third similarity:

Suppose we use the term ‘normatively appraisable entity’ to stand for any entity that is open to moral or epistemic assessment—any entity that can bear a moral or epistemic property. The first sense in which moral and epistemic facts are similar is that they are constituted by normatively appraisable entities of the same types. Now suppose we use the term ‘mode of response’ to refer to the types of response a reason can favour, such as the formation of propositional attitudes, the formation of motivational states, the implementation of action plans, and so on. And suppose we assume that moral and epistemic reasons are such that, for each type of reason, there is a class consisting in all and only the modes of response reasons of that type favour. Call the first classes of response ‘the moral set’, and the second ‘the epistemic set’. Then we can say that the second sense in which moral and epistemic reasons are similar is that there is considerable overlap between the members of the moral and epistemic sets. Indeed, in light of the fact that it is difficult to identify some mode of response favoured by a moral and not epistemic reasons or vice versa, we are arguably entitled to a stronger conclusion than this: namely, that the members of the moral and epistemic sets are identical. It follows that deontic and evaluative moral and epistemic facts consist in (or indicate) moral and epistemic reasons that favour identical modes of response (Ibid: 76).

We saw above in Cuneo’s schemata of a reason ascription that the first stage of the ascription was ‘Consideration G’, the ‘ground’ of the ascription, which was the ‘reason’ for a behavioural response to a situation. Cuneo above argues rightly that this ‘ground’, this ‘reason’, is identical to either an epistemic or moral fact. It turns out that not only do moral and epistemic facts rely on the same conception of what a ground of a reason ascription is, they also rely on the same definition of the third stage of the reason ascription. This is the ‘Response R of S’ stage.

It turns out that epistemic and moral facts rely on the same behavioural responses to reasons. This is the third similarity between epistemic and moral facts. Epistemic and moral facts range over the same kind of normatively appraisable entities. This means that every type of entity which can possess epistemic properties can also possess moral properties. The entities Cuneo discusses in this section are agents, but we could also talk about books, weapons, speeches, government policies, tax returns, classroom lessons, offensives by guerrilla fighters in the mountains, decisions by the DMV, etc, in the exact same way. Each of these example entities can have moral epistemic properties. Each of the behavioural responses an agent could make to any of these entities is the exact same, no matter if it is a response that relies on moral or epistemic reasons.

The same goes above for the second stage of the reason ascription process in Cuneo’s schemata. This is the ‘favouring’ relation. The deontic and evaluative normativity of epistemic and moral facts is completely structurally isomorphic. They share an identical structure. Epistemic and moral facts favour the exact same mode of response to their ‘ground’ reason in the exact same way. Apart from the fact that epistemic facts feature a different content platitude in describing their nature, epistemic facts are more or less identical to moral facts. The content platitude of an epistemic fact is the only difference between it and a moral fact.

H The Fourth Similarity #

The fourth similarity between moral and epistemic facts is that they are (i) necessarily coextensive; and (ii) there is no way to (ontologically, at least) disentangle their different dimensions from one another.

This is the reasoning. Frequently, and in some contexts most of the time, epistemic and moral facts entail each other. As Cuneo says (Ibid: 80) some failings are necessarily both epistemic and moral failings. ‘Think of failing to treat the testimony of another with sufficient care and attention’ (Ibid).

I, like Cuneo, subscribe to a broadly a Aristotelian view of meta-ethics. I will discuss this position in great detail in the second chapter of John McDowell’s philosophy, his metaphysical argument. Aristotelian meta-ethics is popularly called ‘virtue ethics’, and it holds that quite a lot of the time moral reasons depend on epistemic reasons, that moral facts have an epistemic dimension. Further, although we spoke of the content platitudes of epistemic facts as being constituted only by platitudes that spoke of representation, it may very well be the case that both moral and epistemic facts have intertwined content platitudes describing and outlining their nature.

In this way both moral and epistemic facts are concerned to promote human well-being by honouring, protecting, and promoting humanity, as well as advancing human well-being. Cuneo speaks of moral and epistemic facts as forming a normative web, constituting our entire universe of human experience and action, both theoretical and practical. This is the reason why the title of his book takes the name of this metaphor. Moral and epistemic realism form a web of interrelated, mutually supportive and mutually entailing facts which build up and give an ontology to our commonsensical picture of our world.

I can provide a thought-experiment of my own as an example to illustrate the argument I am trying to make. Suppose Sam is the top sales manager of a company retailing some commodity, say pots and pans. This sales manager has been parachuted into their position due to nepotism, and they are woefully inexperienced to perform such a senior role. After a few weeks, Sam understands he has no idea how to discharge his role, but he really enjoys the salary and fringe benefits, so he decides to ignore the performance of the sales managers below him, and allows them to have autonomy over decision-making in the field. As a consequence, the company’s sales performance plummets. But Sam decided before this state of affairs came about that he wouldn’t bother himself with finding out about this, because he considered it not his fault.

In this thought experiment, Sam abrogates his responsibilities for his retail company and puts everyone’s jobs in danger. The company may go under. But Sam chooses to not pay attention to the poor performance of the company, so he never finds out until the very last moment that he company is in a bad financial state. He doesn’t know that the company is doing badly. He has no knowledge of this. He may have made the assumption to willfully close his eyes to the truth because he has worked under many incompetent senior managers for whom sales performance results ended up being good anyway.

There is a reason here that counts in favour of Sam’s responding with diligence, attention, and carefulness about managing the retail company’s sales. That reason is the sales performance of the company is poor. His deliberate ignorance of the truth is not just an epistemic demerit: he hasn’t been careful at all about the results of his lack of efforts; his response to this reason is also a moral demerit: he has been reckless and negligent in the performance of his duties, and is in danger putting many people in economic harm. If he had not been negligent and reckless, he would know about the company’s sales performance. His moral demerit is the cause of his epistemic demerit.

The point of this thought experiment is that Sam’s behaviour is not just morally reprehensible, but also epistemically demeritous. He picked and chose the information he has decided to bring to his attention. Let’s assume that he did this because he was arrogant and bred in a wealthy family who taught him to believe that he was born to rule over people.

Law reports are replete with examples of people in civil negligence cases willfully closing their eyes to the truth about dangers to other people. This is not just a moral failing but an epistemic failing.

V Conclusion #

This chapter has been concerned to argue, following Terence Cuneo, that moral and epistemic facts are so similar that to reject the existence of moral facts would force one to reject the existence of epistemic facts. I argue that the four different types of similarity between moral and epistemic facts prove that they are so similar that to reject one would be to reject the other. Whatever antirealists find objectionable about moral facts they would also have to find objectionable about epistemic facts. Both instantiate some categorical reasons for behaving in certain ways. Both share the same normative structure. Both favour the same kinds of behaviour: moral behaviour is not in any way different from rational epistemic behaviour. Both mutually depend on and support one-another in building up a comprehensive ontological explanation for our realist-seeming commonsensical everyday discourse.

Given our definitions of what we take the paradigmatic cases of moral realism and epistemic realism to be, it necessarily follows that to reject the existence of moral facts would be to commit oneself to rejecting the existence of epistemic facts.

Our task in the next chapter is to show that epistemic facts do irreducibly exist. Doing this will prove that moral realism is true, which will in turn prove that bald naturalism must be false, and that if we take it that there are good reasons to be naturalists, we must turn to a different sort of naturalism.

References #

Richard Hamilton, ‘The Concept of Health: Beyond Normativism and Naturalism’ (2010) 16(2) Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 323.

John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1996).

Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, ‘Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism’ in Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds), Naturalism in Question (Harvard University Press, 2004) 1.

Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, ‘Introduction: Science, Naturalism, and the Problem of Normativity’ in Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (eds), Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia University Press, 2010) 1.

Terence Cuneo, The Normative Web (Oxford University Press, 1st ed, 2007).

John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard University Press, 1998) 167.