Against Metasemantics-First Moral Epistemology

Moral metasemantic theories explain how our moral thought and talk are about certain properties. Given the connection between what our moral terms are about and which moral claims are true, it might be thought that metasemantic theorising can justify first-order ethical conclusions, thus providing a novel way of doing moral epistemology. In this paper, we spell out one kind of argument from metasemantic theories to normative ethical conclusions, and argue that it fails to transmit justification from premises to conclusion. We give three reasons for this transmission failure, which together pose a serious challenge to such metasemantic arguments

What people say : publicity without semanticity

When a speaker utters a declarative sentence, we may report her speech indirectly: ‘She said that p’. What determines the content reported as what is said (p in ‘she said that p’)? In this dissertation I argue in a novel way against semanticity, the view that what speakers say is linguistically determined. I focus first on demonstrative pronouns (‘this’, ‘that’), showing that attempts to construe their contributions to what is said as determined by a linguistic rule fail. Next I present properties of what is said which seem to support semanticity, notably the publicity of what is said. Publicity is the property of being independent from both the speaker’s intentions and the audience’s actual interpretation. I argue that the publicity of what is said is not best explained by semanticity. I go on to present a non-semantic explanation of the publicity of what is said, which leads me to a general view of the determination of the content of speech acts