Results for 'descriptivism and nondescriptivism'

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  1. Nondescriptivist Cognitivism: Framework for a New Metaethic.Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons - 2000 - Philosophical Papers 29 (2):121-153.
    Abstract We propose a metaethical view that combines the cognitivist idea that moral judgments are genuine beliefs and moral utterances express genuine assertions with the idea that such beliefs and utterances are nondescriptive in their overall content. This sort of view has not been recognized among the standard metaethical options because it is generally assumed that all genuine beliefs and assertions must have descriptive content. We challenge this assumption and thereby open up conceptual space for a new kind of metaethical (...)
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  2.  84
    The relevance of moral disagreement. Some worries about nondescriptivist cognitivism.Josep E. Corbí - 2002 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1):217-233.
    Nondescriptivist Cognitivism vindicates the cognitive value of moral judgements despite their lack of descriptive content. In this paper,I raise a few worries about the proclaimed virtues of this new metaethical framework Firstly, I argue that Nondescriptivist Cognitivism tends to beg the question against descriptivism and, secondly, discuss Horgan and Timmons' case against Michael Smith's metaethical rationalism. Although I sympathise with their main critical claims against the latter, I am less enthusiastic about the arguments that they provide to support them.
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    Kevin Scharp.Wilfrid Sellars’S. Anti—Descriptivism - 2012 - In Leila Haaparanta & Heikki J. Koskinen, Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic. Oxford, England: OUP USA.
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  4. The conversational practicality of value judgement.Stephen Finlay - 2004 - The Journal of Ethics 8 (3):205-223.
    Analyses of moral value judgements must meet a practicality requirement: moral speech acts characteristically express pro- or con-attitudes, indicate that speakers are motivated in certain ways, and exert influence on others' motivations. Nondescriptivists including Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard claim that no descriptivist analysis can satisfy this requirement. I argue first that while the practicality requirement is defeasible, it indeed demands a connection between value judgement and motivation that resembles a semantic or conceptual rather than merely contingent psychological link. I (...)
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  5.  34
    (2 other versions)Descriptivism in Meta-Ontology of Music: A Plea for Reflective Equilibrium.Lisa Giombini - 2019 - Espes 9 (2):59-73.
    In this paper, I investigate one popular view in current methodological debate about musical ontology, namely, descriptivism. According to descriptivism, the task of musical ontology is to offer a description of the ‘structure of our thought’ about musical works, as it manifests itself in actual musical practices. In this regard, descriptivists often appeal to our pre-theoretical intuitions to ground ontological theories of musical works. This practice, however, is worrisome, as such intuitions are unstable and contradictory. For example, there (...)
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  6. Troubles with Horgan and Timmons' nondescriptivist cognitivism.Stephen J. Barker - 2002 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1):235-255.
    Emotivist, or non-descriptivist metaethical theories hold that value-statements do not function by describing special value-facts, but are the mere expressions of naturalistically describable motivational states of (valuing) agents. Non-descriptivism has typically been combined with the claim that value-statements are non-cognitive: they are not the manifestations of genuine belief states. However, all the linguistic, logical and phenomenological evidence indicates that value-statements are cognitive. Non-descriptivism then has a problem. Horgan and Timmons propose to solve it by boldly combining a non-descriptivist (...)
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  7. Subtracting “ought” from “is”: Descriptivism versus normativism in the study of human thinking.Shira Elqayam & Jonathan St B. T. Evans - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5):233-248.
    We propose a critique ofnormativism, defined as the idea that human thinking reflects a normative system against which it should be measured and judged. We analyze the methodological problems associated with normativism, proposing that it invites the controversial “is-ought” inference, much contested in the philosophical literature. This problem is triggered when there are competing normative accounts (the arbitration problem), as empirical evidence can help arbitrate between descriptive theories, but not between normative systems. Drawing on linguistics as a model, we propose (...)
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  8.  69
    Descriptivist Reference from Metaphysical Essence.Nigel Sabbarton-Leary - 2010 - Dialectica 64 (3):419-433.
    Scott Soames (2002) has recently developed and defended strategies for (i) accounting for the meaning of Millian terms, and (ii) extending Kripke's insights from proper names to natural kind terms. In this paper I argue that if we accept these strategies, and their implausible assumptions and consequences, then we can present a novel defence of descriptivism for at least some natural kind terms – those for substances – on that basis. The conclusion, then, will be that there is just (...)
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  9. Minimal Descriptivism.Aidan Gray - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2):343-364.
    Call an account of names satisfactionalist if it holds that object o is the referent of name a in virtue of o’s satisfaction of a descriptive condition associated with a. Call an account of names minimally descriptivistif it holds that if a competent speaker finds ‘a=b’ to be informative, then she must associate some information with ‘a’ which she does not associate with ‘b’. The rejection of both positions is part of the Kripkean orthodoxy, and is also built into extant (...)
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  10. A descriptivist theory of phenomenal concepts.Pascal Ludwig - manuscript
    The aim of this paper is to put forward an alternative to what I shall call "the received view on phenomenal concepts". According to this view, our concepts of phenomenal states directly refer to these states. I claim, on the contrary, that phenomenal concepts are _descriptive, indirect_ _and_ _relational_. More precisely, I endorse a descriptivist analysis according to which phenomenal concepts are descriptive concepts having perceptual demonstratives as constituents. I introduce and discuss two distinctions: the distinction between the perceptible properties (...)
     
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  11.  99
    Grounded rationality: Descriptivism in epistemic context.Shira Elqayam - 2012 - Synthese 189 (S1):39-49.
    Normativism, the approach that judges human rationality by comparison against normative standards, has recently come under intensive criticism as unsuitable for psychological enquiry, and it has been suggested that it should be replaced with a descriptivist paradigm. My goal in this paper is to outline and defend a meta-theoretical framework of such a paradigm, grounded rationality, based on the related principles of descriptivism and (moderate) epistemic relativism. Bounded rationality takes into account universal biological and cognitive limitations on human rationality. (...)
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  12.  32
    Descriptivism[REVIEW]E. J. A. - 1965 - Review of Metaphysics 19 (1):153-153.
    In the 1963 Philosophical Lecture, Henriette Hertz Trust, of the British Academy, Hare defends the distinction between descriptive and evaluative meaning. He attacks descriptivists on the grounds that they confuse a logical connection between the word "good" and other words with a logical connection between the word "good" and certain things. The paper presupposes an acquaintance with the debate over descriptivism, and it is never clear precisely what view Hare is attacking.—A. E. J.
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  13. A Kripkean argument for descriptivism.Jens Kipper & Zeynep Soysal - 2021 - Noûs 56 (3):654-669.
    In this paper, we offer a novel defense of descriptivism about reference. Our argument is based on principles about the relevance of speaker intentions to reference that are shared by many opponents of descriptivism, including Saul Kripke. We first show that two such principles that are plausibly endorsed by Kripke and other prominent externalists in fact entail descriptivism. The first principle states that when certain kinds of speaker intentions are present, they suffice to determine and explain reference. (...)
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  14. Singularism vs. Descriptivism?Rachel Goodman - 2023 - In Ernest Lepore & David Sosa, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, 3. Oxford University Press. pp. 33-66.
    This paper’s most general aim is to illuminate the disagreement between singularists about thought (who claim there are non-descriptive thoughts about ordinary external objects), and descriptivists about thought (who claim all thought about ordinary external objects is descriptive). It does this by clarifying the common claim that singular thoughts have an anchoring role with respect to thought in general and by making two further claims: 1) some of the putative disagreements between singularists and descriptivists are illusory once properly understood, and (...)
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  15.  38
    Fregean Descriptivism.Ian H. Dunbar & Stephen K. McLeod - 2020 - In Heimir Geirsson & Stephen Biggs, The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference. New York: Routledge. pp. 41–52.
    We begin by setting out the posision dubbed 'Fregean descriptivism', that Kripke attributed to Frege. We then set out various descriptivist theses. We proced to argue that Kripke’s interpretation of Frege as a reference-fixing descriptivist stems from his ascription of two other views, each logically weaker than reference-fixing descriptivism itself, to Frege. These are sense descriptivism and the view that sense fixes reference. The meaning descriptivism and the reference-fixing descriptivism of Kripke’s Frege have sense (...) as their common, logically weaker, core. Since we do not concur with Kripke’s view that Frege was a sense descriptivist, we do not share his reasons for thinking that Frege was a reference-fixing descriptivist. (shrink)
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  16. The Epistemological Argument Against Descriptivism.Robin Jeshion - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2):325-345.
    The epistemological argument against descriptivism about proper names is extremely simple. Fora proper name ‘N’ and definite description ‘F’, the proposition expressed by “If N exists, then N is F is not normally known a priori. But descriptivism about proper names entails otherwise. So descriptivism is false. The argument is widely regarded as sound. This paper aims to establish that the epistemological argument is highly unstable. The problem with the argument is that there seems to be no (...)
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  17.  48
    A Defense of Russellian Descriptivism.Brandt H. van der Gaast - unknown
    In this dissertation, I defend a Russellian form of descriptivism. The main supporting argument invokes a relation between meaning and thought. I argue that the meanings of sentences are the thoughts people use them to express. This is part of a Gricean outlook on meaning according to which psychological intentionality is prior to, and determinative of, linguistic intentionality. The right approach to thought, I argue in Chapter 1, is a type of functionalism on which thoughts have narrow contents. On (...)
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  18. On Jackson’s Descriptivism.Kai-Yee Wong - 2015 - Studies in Logic 8 (2):52-69.
    Through a series of writings, Frank Jackson has developed a new kind of descriptivism that he argues can resist all of the three major objections raised by the theorists of direct reference. In this article I articulate some doubts about Jackson’s replies to two of these objections, i.e., the modal argument and the semantic argument.
     
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  19. Analytical descriptivism revisited.Anthony Hatzimoysis - 2002 - Ratio 15 (1):10–22.
    Analytical descriptivism purports to identify the meaning of ethical sentences with that of the descriptive sentences that capture the clauses of mature folk morality. The paper questions the plausibility of analytical descriptivism by examining its implications for the semantics, epistemology and metaphysics of morals. The discussion identifies some of the reasons why the analytical descriptivist fails to deliver a reductionist account of normativity.
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  20. Metalinguistic Descriptivism for Millians.Alexis Burgess - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (3):443-457.
    Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ?Socrates? means ?the bearer of ?Socrates??). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nominal description theory. We can make significant progress (...)
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  21. Are cantonese speakers really descriptivists? Revisiting cross-cultural semantics.Barry Lam - 2010 - Cognition 115 (2):320–32.
    In an article in Cognition, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [Machery et al., 2004] present data which purports to show that “East Asian” native Cantonese speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while “Western” native English speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et (...)
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  22.  66
    Descriptivism Without Quotation.Dirk Franken - 2020 - Topoi 39 (2):367-379.
    Current descriptivist accounts of proper names entail two claims: that the expressions we know as different proper names are the bearers of different meanings and that the descriptions corresponding to these meanings contain quotations of the expressions whose meanings they are taken to be. While is the source of a number of intractable problems, descriptivists feel committed to it because it is the only available option to adhere to, which they use to take as a matter of course. In the (...)
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  23. Against causal descriptivism.Panu Raatikainen - 2006 - Mind and Society 5 (1):78-84.
    Causal descriptivism and its relative nominal descriptivism are critically examined. It is argued that they do not manage to undermine the principal conclusions of the new theory of reference.
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  24. From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism.Matthew Chrisman - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 135 (2):225-254.
    In this paper, I exploit the parallel between epistemic contextualism and metaethical speaker-relativism to argue that a promising way out of two of the primary problems facing contextualism is one already explored in some detail in the ethical case – viz. expressivism. The upshot is an argument for a form of epistemic expressivism modeled on a familiar form of ethical expressivism. This provides a new nondescriptivist option for understanding the meaning of knowledge attributions, which arguably better captures the normative nature (...)
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  25.  10
    Temporal externalist descriptivism on natural kind terms: beyond the causal–historical analysis.Haruka Iikawa & Go Sasaki - 2024 - Synthese 204 (4):1-14.
    The traditional debate over theories of reference of natural kind terms faces a serious dilemma. On the one hand, although direct reference theory, or the causal–historical analysis of reference to natural kinds, is still highly influential in the philosophy of language, there is a notorious “qua” problem: direct reference theory cannot uniquely determine the referents of natural kind terms. On the other hand, the standard descriptivism does not accommodate our externalist intuition. We propose temporal externalist descriptivism, where relevant (...)
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  26. Recent Defenses of Descriptivism.Anthony Everett - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (1):103-139.
    David Sosa, Michael Nelson, and Jason Stanley have recently offered a series of interesting and provocative challenges to Kripke's modal arguments against Descriptivism. In this paper I explore these challenges and some of the issues to which they give rise. I argue that, in the end, all three challenges fail.
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  27.  10
    Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective.Francesco Orilia - 2009 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Singular reference is the relation that a singular term has to a corresponding individual. For example, "Obama" singularly refer to the current US president. Descriptivism holds that all singular terms refer by means of a concept associated to the term. The current trend is against this. This book explains in detail why anti-descriptivism became dominant in spite of its weaknesses and how these weaknesses can be overcome by appropriately reviving descriptivism.
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  28. Actually-Rigidified Descriptivism Revisited.Jesper Kallestrup - 2012 - Dialectica 66 (1):5-21.
    In response to Kripke's modal argument contemporary descriptivists suggest that referring terms, e.g., ‘water’, are synonymous with actually-rigidified definite descriptions, e.g., ‘the actual watery stuff’. Following Scott Soames, this strategy has the counterintuitive consequence that possible speakers on Perfect Earth cannot be ascribed water-beliefs without beliefs about the actual world. Co-indexing the actuality and possibility operators has the equally untoward result that possible speakers on Twin Earth are ascribed water-beliefs. So, Soames's dilemma is that the descriptivist can account for either (...)
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  29. A Defense of Millian Descriptivism.Philip Atkins - 2013 - Dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara
    Taken together with other plausible theses, Millianism has the counterintuitive consequence that the following belief reports have the same semantic content. (1a) Lois Lane believes that Superman flies. (1b) Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent flies. It has been popular, at least since the publication of Salmon's Frege's Puzzle (1986), to explain the presence of anti-Millian intuitions in terms of pragmatic phenomena. According to Salmon's account, (1a) and (1b) can be used to communicate distinct propositions, and this leads to the (...)
     
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  30.  24
    Socio-historical Causal Descriptivism.Chen Bo - 2016 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1):45-67.
    This paper argues for a hybrid and alternative theory of names—Socio-historical Causal Descriptivism, which consists of six claims: (1) the referring relation between a name and an object originates from a generalized “initial baptism” of that object. (2) The causal chain of the name N firstly and mainly transmits informative descriptions of N’s bearer. (3) The meaning of N consists of an open-ended collection of informative descriptions of N’s bearer acknowledged by a linguistic community. (4) With respect to practical (...)
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  31. Kripke's Critique of Descriptivism Revisited.Pierre Baumann - 2010 - Princípios 17 (27):167-201.
    This paper has two purposes: the first is to critically examine Kripke’s well-known arguments against Descriptivism and suggest that they are not as decisive as many have thought; the second is to argue that proper names do encode descriptive information of various kinds, that such information may be truth-conditionally significant, and hence that a name’s truth-conditional contribution is not limited to its referent.
     
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  32. Essentialist arguments against descriptivism.Michael Mcglone - 2010 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (4):443-462.
    This paper considers Kripke's (1972, 1980) modal arguments against descriptivism about proper names, the descriptivist reply that the meaning of a name is given by a description involving the modifier ‘actually’, and Kit Fine's (1994) distinction between necessary and essential attributes. It explains how Kripke's modal arguments can be recast in essentialist terms by appealing to Fine's distinction, and it argues that the resulting essentialist arguments are immune to the abovementioned descriptivist reply to the original modal arguments.
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  33. Was Searle's Descriptivism Refuted?Karen Green - 1998 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 17 (1):109-13.
    It is generally thought that Searle 's cluster theory of the sense of a proper name was soundly refuted by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. This paper challenges this widespread belief and argues that the observations made by Kripke do not show that Searle 's version of descriptivism is false. Indeed, charitably interpreted, Searle 's theory retains considerable plausibility.
     
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  34. Wilfrid Sellars' Anti-Descriptivism.Kevin Scharp - 2012 - In Leila Haaparanta & Heikki J. Koskinen, Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic. Oxford, England: OUP USA.
    The work of Kripke, Putnam, Kaplan, and others initiated a tradition in philosophy that has come to be known as anti-descriptivism. I argue that when properly interpreted, Wilfrid Sellars is a staunch anti-descriptivist. Not only does he accept most of the conclusions drawn by the more famous anti-descriptivists, he goes beyond their critiques to reject the fundamental tenant of descriptivism—that understanding a linguistic expression consists in mentally grasping its meaning and associating that meaning with the expression. I show (...)
     
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  35.  19
    Wittgenstein's Descriptivist Approach to Understanding: Is There a Place for Explanation in Interpretive Accounts?David Henderson - 1988 - Dialectica 42 (2):105-115.
    SummaryIn his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Wittgenstein holds that in studying or interpreting a language and associated activities we should not attempt to explain what goes on, just describe, for description is able to give us everything we could ask for. He seems to presents two arguments for this descriptivist approach. I criticize both. Generally, I argue that Wittgenstein's position seems to presuppose a radical distinction between description and explanation that cannot be supported.Specifically, I show that Wittgenstein's first objection (...)
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  36.  7
    The Problem of Existence for Descriptivism About the Reference of Set-Theoretic Expressions.Zeynep Soysal - 2025 - In Carolin Antos, Neil Barton & Giorgio Venturi, The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophy of Set Theory. Palgrave. pp. 13-36.
    Descriptivism when applied to set-theoretic language says that the meanings and referents of set-theoretic expressions are implicitly defined by an associated theory. The problem of existence for descriptivism is that it doesn’t seem capable of explaining our set-theoretic knowledge, as it has often been promised to do: at best, descriptivism explains our knowledge of the truth of conditional sentences of the form ‘If there are sets, then sets are thus and so’, but it does nothing to explain (...)
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  37. The failure of pragmatic descriptivism.Samuel C. Rickless - manuscript
    There are two major semantic theories of proper names: Semantic Descriptivism and Direct Reference. According to Semantic Descriptivism, the semantic content of a proper name N for a speaker S is identical to the semantic content of a definite description “the F” that the speaker associates with the name. According to Direct Reference, the semantic content of a proper name is identical to its referent. As is well known, Semantic Descriptivism suffers from a number of drawbacks first (...)
     
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  38. The names of historical figures: A descriptivist reply.Luis Fernandez Moreno - 2007 - Acta Analytica 22 (2):155-168.
    Kripke’s most important arguments in Naming and Necessity against the description theory of reference of proper names are the arguments from ignorance and error concerning names of historical figures. The aim of this paper is to put forward a reply to these arguments. The answer to them is grounded on the development of one component of the version of the description theory proposed by the authors that are regarded as the classical contemporary advocates of this theory, namely Searle and Strawson; (...)
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  39.  60
    Anti-descriptivism 2.0. [REVIEW]Scott Soames - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):977-986.
    I first focus on Gomez-Torrente’s defense of a neo-Kripkean treatment of theoretical identification statements like “Water is H2O” against objections that ‘water’ is vague and that ‘H2O’ does not designate a genuine explanatory kind. On my reading, Gomez-Torrente accepts and while interpreting the identity statement as correctly attributing vague identity to the pair consisting of the vague natural kind water and the related kind H2O. My discussion sketches a framework for making sense talk of vague objects, properties, and identities that (...)
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  40. Russell-Names: An Introduction to Millian Descriptivism.Stefano Predelli - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 45 (5):603-622.
    This essay studies the semantic properties of what I call Russell-names. Russell-names bear intimate semantic relations with descriptive conditions, in consonance with the main tenets of descriptivism. Yet, they are endowed with the semantic properties attributed to ordinary proper names by Millianism: they are rigid and non-indexical devices of direct reference. This is not an essay in natural language semantics, and remains deliberately neutral with respect to the question whether any among the expressions we ordinarily classify as proper names (...)
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  41. Is the Descriptivist / Cluster Theory of Reference “Wrong from the Fundamentals”?David B. Boersema - 1988 - Philosophy Research Archives 14:517-538.
    In this paper I suggest that Searle’s theory of reference is immune to the specific criticisms that have been levelled against it. I first present an overview of Searle’s “cluster” theory, followed by an overview of the Kripkean critique. I then examine in detail Kripke’s objections and suggest that they are not sufficient for a rejection of Searle’s theory. Finally, I consider several general objections to the cluster theory and argue that they, too, do not suffice to reject it.
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  42. The Nature of Moral Judgments: Expressivism Vs. Descriptivism.Xiaomei Yang - 1999 - Dissertation, The University of Nebraska - Lincoln
    What is the nature of moral judgments? This question can be asked in a more specific way: When one sincerely utters a moral judgment, what does one express? A belief the content of which represents moral facts or properties, and is truth-apt, or a non-cognitive attitude the content of which does not represent moral facts or properties, and is not truth-apt? If moral judgments assert moral facts or properties, what are moral facts or properties? If moral judgments express beliefs, how (...)
     
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  43.  44
    Refutation of the Semantic Argument against Descriptivism.Chen Bo - 2014 - ProtoSociology 31:16-37.
    There are two problematic assumptions in Kripke’s semantic argument against descriptiv­ism. Assumption 1 is that the referential relation between a name and its bearer is only a metaphysical relation between language and the world; it has nothing to do with our public linguistic practice. Assumption 2 is that if name N has its meaning and the meaning is given by one description or a cluster of descriptions, the description(s) should supply the necessary and sufficient condition for determining what N designates; (...)
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    Kripke’s Epistemic Argument Against Descriptivism Revisited.Bo Chen - 2013 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40 (3-4):544-562.
    Kripke's epistemic argument against descriptivism is reconstructed as follows. Premise 1: if descriptivism is correct, then “N is the F” should be knowable a priori; Premise 2: in fact, “N is the F” is not knowable a priori; Conclusion: descriptivism is wrong. This article accepts P2 of the argument as true, but rejects P1 by arguing for the evolution of language and the growth of meaning; so it concludes that the argument fails. It also criticizes Kripke's conception (...)
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  45. Kripke’s Semantic Argument against Descriptivism Reconsidered.Chen Bo - 2013 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3):421-445.
    There are two problematic assumptions in Kripke’s semantic argument against descriptivism. Assumption 1 is that the referential relation of a name to an object is only an objective or metaphysical relation between language and the world; it has nothing to do with the understanding of the name by our linguistic community. Assumption 2 is that descriptivism has to hold that, if name a has its meaning and the meaning is given by one description or a cluster of descriptions, (...)
     
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  46.  18
    An Argument Against Any Form of Non-Descriptivism in Ethics.Toblas Chapman - 1974 - New Scholasticism 48 (3):360-364.
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  47. Describing Law.Raff Donelson - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 33 (1):85-106.
    Legal philosophers make a number of bold, contentious claims about the nature of law. For instance, some claim that law necessarily involves coercion, while others disagree. Some claim that all law enjoys presumptive moral validity, while others disagree. We can see these claims in at least three, mutually exclusive ways: (1) We can see them as descriptions of law’s nature (descriptivism), (2) we can see them as expressing non-descriptive attitudes of the legal philosophers in question (expressivism), or (3) we (...)
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  48. Normative benchmarks are useful for studying individual differences in reasoning.Edward Jn Stupple & Linden J. Ball - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5):270-271.
    We applaud many aspects of Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) call for a descriptivist research programme in studying reasoning. Nevertheless, we contend that normative benchmarks are vital for understanding individual differences in performance. We argue that the presence of normative responses to particular problems by certain individuals should inspire researchers to look for converging evidence for analytic processing that may have a normative basis.
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  49.  44
    A case for limited prescriptive normativism.Emmanuel M. Pothos & Jerome R. Busemeyer - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5):264-265.
    Understanding cognitive processes with a formal framework necessitates some limited, internal prescriptive normativism. This is because it is not possible to endorse the psychological relevance of some axioms in a formal framework, but reject that of others. The empirical challenge then becomes identifying the remit of different formal frameworks, an objective consistent with the descriptivism Elqayam & Evans (E&E) advocate.
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  50. Methodology in the ontology of artworks: exploring hermeneutic fictionalism.Elisa Caldarola - 2020 - In Concha Martinez Vidal & José Luis Falguera Lopez, Abstract Objects: For and Against.
    There is growing debate about what is the correct methodology for research in the ontology of artworks. In the first part of this essay, I introduce my view: I argue that semantic descriptivism is a semantic approach that has an impact on meta-ontological views and can be linked with a hermeneutic fictionalist proposal on the meta-ontology of artworks such as works of music. In the second part, I offer a synthetic presentation of the four main positive meta-ontological views that (...)
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