The Meaning of 'Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics

New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA (2015)
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Abstract

The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation of their meaning. But Chrisman argues that this leaves important metasemantic questions about what it is in virtue of which ought-sentences have the meanings that they have unanswered. His appeal to inferentialism aims to provide a viable anti-descriptivist but also anti-expressivist answer to these questions.

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Matthew Chrisman
University of Edinburgh

Citations of this work

On Scepticism About Ought Simpliciter.James L. D. Brown - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (2):497-511.
The Authority of Formality.Jack Woods - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13.
‘Ought’-contextualism beyond the parochial.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):3099-3119.
The Frege-Geach Problem.Jack Woods - 2017 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 226-242.

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References found in this work

Logic and Semantics for Imperatives.Nate Charlow - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (4):617-664.
What we know and what to do.Nate Charlow - 2013 - Synthese 190 (12):2291-2323.

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