Date of Award
8-7-2018
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Dr. Eddy Nahmias
Second Advisor
Dr. Dan Weiskopf
Abstract
Metaethical contextualism is a form of moderate contextualism according to which the truth-conditions of normative utterances are sensitive to some salient standard, norm, or theory that is determined by the context of utterance. Metaethical contextualism implies that two speakers might utter grammatically contradictory normative sentences without expressing contradictory propositions, leaving the view vulnerable to the 'problem of lost disagreement'. The problem of lost disagreement occurs when two parties to a dispute disagree, but their utterances don't express exclusionary truth-conditional content: they might both be right. While metaethical contextualists have proposed plausible solutions to the problem of lost disagreement, these solutions are ultimately unsatisfying, at least in contexts where one would expect exclusionary truth-conditional content. In this paper, I develop a form of metaethical contextualism that predicts exclusionary truth-conditional content in some contexts of disagreement, thereby assuaging any concerns that metaethical contextualism fails to adequately account for normative disagreement.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/12129269
Recommended Citation
Loveall, Bradley, "Metaethical Contextualism and the Problem of Disagreement: When Somebody Must Be Wrong." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/12129269