Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS
Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS
Serena Corrao Dipartimento di Filosofia e SS. Sociali, Università di
Lecce
Moral realism
and
truth-conditional semantics: a vain marriage
In this paper I intend to draw attention to the
fundamental distinction -that in ordinary language mostly collapses-
between
genuine normative (or evaluative) sentences and sentences descriptive
of norms
(or values). The former express norms (or values); the latter state
that a
certain norm (or value) exists or is valid in a given normative (or
axiological) system. These two kinds of sentences are almost
systematically homophonic
(von Wright 1963), that is, the same string of words like ‘it is
obligatory to
keep promises’ or ‘lying is wrong’ can be used to express a norm/value
or to
state the existence of a norm/value (Ayer 1936; Bulygin 1982). Such
ambiguity
of deontic sentences in ordinary language has been largely acknowledged
and it
has represented a much-debated issue in contemporary legal philosophy
and deontic
logic, involving many distinguished philosophers like Kelsen, Hart, von
Wright,
Ross, Alchourron, Bulygin, Weinberger and Kalinowski. A fairly
established
conclusion of such debate affirms the importance of disambiguating the
meaning
of deontic expressions, since “one and the same expression cannot share
both
properties, i.e., be prescriptive and descriptive at the same time”:
norms lack
truth-values, while sentences descriptive of norms do have truth-values
and
they are mutually exclusive (Bulygin idem).
Despite the great prominence enjoyed by this issue within the above
mentioned
branches of philosophy, it seems it has had no echo in ethics. In fact,
the
defence of non-naturalist cognitivism (in particular, moral realism),
notoriously starts from the appeal to the descriptive
phenomenology of moral language. However, moral language -I will argue-
so
appears, just because of the systematic homophony of sentences expressing norms and values with the
corresponding sentences describing
them, which causes the former to be understood as truth-apt. As Bulygin
remarks
(1982), the idea that normative sentences could be true or false is
commonly
based on an analogy with the Tarskian theory of truth for descriptive
sentences. In particular, it is held that it is possible to extend to
normative
and evaluative sentences the T-conditions. Nevertheless, Bulygin points
out
that merely suggesting an analogy between the truth of descriptive
sentences
and the truth of normative sentences is not enough: it is necessary to
spell
out what it means for a normative sentence to be true in terms of the
Tarskian
theory, as well as what kind of reality would correspond to a true
normative
sentence.
The development of an extensional theory of
meaning à la Davidson has been
welcomed by moral realists as a response to this problem (Platts 1980;
McDowell
1980). A distinguished representative of contemporary moral realism has
recently nicely reaffirmed that “realists were in troubles until
Davidson came
along” (Dancy, Helsinki,
Dec.2005). As a matter of facts, by extending Davidson’s
truth-conditional
semantics to moral sentences one typically obtains meaning-giving
theorems,
patterned after Tarski’s ‘T-sentences’, that articulate the meaning of
sentences
by stating the conditions under which they are true.
However, such a solution incurs a serious
objection: it entirely disregards the distinction between normative or
evaluative sentences and sentences descriptive of norms and values. I
will show
that Tarskian semantics can be appropriately applied only to the latter
and
that its application to the former cannot but conflate the two kinds of
sentences.
I will also show that the same outcome results from
applying the possible worlds semantics.
All this supports the conclusion that moral sentences
cannot be cognitively understood as possessing truth-values without
them being
systematically conflated with their corresponding descriptive
sentences; that
is, no truth-conditional semantics can be applied to moral language on
pain of dissolving
the philosophically fundamental distinction between expression
and description
of norms/values.
