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This chapter challenges the so-called semantic assumption — according to which beliefs are necessarily descriptive in that they purport to represent or describe some state of affairs — by arguing that moral judgments share enough of the phenomenological and functional features that are central to the notion of belief, to count as genuine beliefs; a notion that does not require beliefs to be primarily descriptive. This opens the door to a cognitivist version of expressivism. The chapter sketches a version of cognitivist expressivism, including an account of logical embedding (meant to deal with the Frege–Geach problem), which it argued as prima facie more plausible than non-cognitivist and descriptivist alternatives in metaethics.

This chapter proposes a new framework for metaethical expressivism that involves a combination of several elements. First, it claims that evaluative sentences are used to make genuine assertions, and so there are at least two types of assertion: reportive and expressive. Second, and following from the first, assertions of both sorts are truth-apt. Third, it is argued that all assertions are representational in that they purport to represent or describe some state of affairs. So, how do merely reportive assertions differ from expressive assertions? In response, the chapter proposes a pragmatic conception of truth according to which truth-bearers are sentences with representational content that are also used with an assertoric purpose. The idea is that the essential difference between reportive and expressive assertions is the purposes or intentions for which they are asserted: ‘in reportive assertions, speakers defend commitments to representational intentions; in expressive assertions speakers defend commitments to states [cognitive or conative] whose possession they have in fact represented’. In uttering a value sentence, for instance, one is expressing a desire (or related motivational state) that one is prepared to defend. The chapter explains how his form of expressivism can make sense of the various objectivist trappings of moral discourse, including its truth-aptness, logical embedding, and being subject to rational debate.

This chapter raises some broad issues of tradition versus innovation in culture to place the discussion of realism in language into perspective. Topics covered include the meaning of the phrase, “bad language”; descriptive and prescriptive viewpoints of standard language, and ideas that underlie notions of good and bad language.

Thinking about names has exercised most of the leading figures in philosophy. However, Mill's work brought into focus what has remained perhaps the major issue, arising from his contention that names are ‘non-connotative’, i.e., lack sense, in the terminology of Chapter 3. Mill's view has been challenged by ‘descriptivists’, particularly in the form of the need for ‘descriptive backing’. Much of the criticism of Mill is misguided, especially in confusing sense with (co-)reference. Others have added to Mill's account an emphasis on the importance of ‘baptisms’ (nomination) in fixing reference; but the relevance of the sometimes associated notion of ‘rigid designation’ to the characterization of names is doubtful. As with ‘onymic’ reference, Recanati's account of direct reference underplays the categoriality of individual names; but is otherwise close to the views advocated in Chapter 9, which adopts a modified Millian position allowing for basic differences in sense (animacy) among names.

Hare explains what he means by ‘Ethical Theory’, and what he means by ‘Taxonomy’. Ethical theory, which Hare contrasts to ‘moral theory’, is a purely formal discipline that is concerned with the meaning and logical properties of moral words. Hare offers a ‘Taxonomy’ of ethical theories in the sense of a classification into genera and differentia, beginning with what he sees as the basic dichotomy in ethical theory between descriptivism and non‐descriptivism. The difference between descriptivist and non‐descriptivist ethical theories is that, according to the former, the meaning of moral statements is determined entirely by their truth conditions; the latter deny that this is so. Hare divides descriptivism into ‘Naturalism’ (Ch. 4) and ‘Intuitionism’ (Ch. 5), and non‐descriptivism into ‘Emotivism’ (Ch. 6) and ‘Rationalism’ (Ch. 7).

This chapter focuses on relations between second-family Individual Representationalism and other standpoints that either reinforced it or began to undermine it. Sense-data theory was the prevailing form of Individual Representationalism in mainstream philosophy during the first half of the 20th century. By the early 1950s, the influence of sense-data theory was fast evaporating. Sense-data theories did not influence subsequent philosophizing except negatively. Apart from their departures from common sense, sense-data approaches were rejected on two main grounds: they were criticized as subjectivistic and atomistic. Philosophical work at mid-century took on a more realist, more objectivist flavour. It emphasized dependence on context, public availability of expression, and interlocking psychological capacities that make cognition and language use possible. Many philosophers insisted on a role for language even in perception and the simplest perception-based thought.

This chapter is an expanded version of a review of Frank Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics that the author wrote for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. It attempts to sketch the essence of Jackson's approach to metaphysics and ethics, and to indicate some of the places where it is surprising and, inevitably, controversial. It focuses on the ‘analytic descriptivism’, or the ‘a priori passage principle’ that Jackson stands by, generating ‘the view that for each true statement concerning our world, there is a statement in physical terms that a priori entails that statement’ (Jackson 2003).

The work of Kripke, Putnam, Kaplan, and others initiated a tradition that has come to be known as anti-descriptivism. This chapter argues that when properly interpreted, Sellars is a staunch anti-descriptivist. Not only does it accept most of the conclusions drawn by the anti-descriptivists, it 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. The chapter shows that Sellars' accounts of language and the mind provide novel justifications for the anti-descriptivists' conclusions. It presents what he takes to be a Sellarsian analysis of the relation between metaphysical modal and epistemic modal notions. The chapter's account involves extension of the strategy Sellars uses to explain both the relation between physical object concepts and sensation concepts, and the relation between concepts that apply to linguistic activity and those that apply to conceptual activity.

In chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. This chapter argues that this metaethical position, referred to as ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. It does this by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that has been used against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain natural properties — a recipe that is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario called Moral Twin Earth.

This chapter argues that singular thought about an object involves nondescriptive or de re ways of thinking of that object, that is, modes of presentation resting on contextual relations of ‘acquaintance’ to the object. Such modes of presentation are analysed as mental files in which the subject can store information gained through the acquaintance relations in question. The paper shows that the mental‐file approach provides an answer to the objection from ‘acquaintanceless de re thought’ (to the effect that tokening a singular thought does not require being actually acquainted with the object the thought is about), as well as a solution to a vexing problem regarding the communication of singular thoughts: if singular thoughts depend upon contextual relations to the objects of thought, how can they be communicated across contexts ? What makes communication possible when the speaker and the addressee do not stand in the same contextual relations to the objects the speaker's thought is about?

The chapter explains the idea that names are rigid designators, and how it is used in Kripke's modal argument against the view that names are synonymous with descriptions associated with them by speakers. The modal argument is defended against the two leading attempts to circumvent it and reinstate descriptivism – one which claims that names are rigidified descriptions, and the other which claims that they are descriptions that are required to take wide scope when embedded in modal (but not epistemic) constructions. These views are refuted, with the result that Kripke's original modal argument is strengthened and extended so as to constitute a decisive objection to all standard forms of descriptivism. However, this result is shown to be compatible with the possibility that there may be a class of linguistically complex, partially descriptive proper names, like Princeton University, the meanings of which include some descriptive elements.

This chapter gives more detail on how to identify ethical properties with descriptive ones using the roles the former play in folk morality. The construction uses the Lewis–Carnap–Ramsey way of defining theoretical terms and implies that ethical terms are analyzable in descriptive terms. This approach is contrasted with Cornell Realism, and there is discussion of the open‐question argument and how belief about ethical properties connects with motivation on the version of analytical descriptivism being defended.

Naturalism is a species of descriptivism, and is described as the proposal to specify the truth conditions of moral statements without reference to moral words, i.e. without reference to the attitudes of the speakers. Hence, the truth conditions of moral statements are non‐moral properties. Hare subdivides Naturalism into ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ varieties. The variety of Naturalism that interests Hare in this chapter is objectivist naturalism, according to which the non‐moral properties are objective. Naturalism, Hare argues, results inevitably in relativism, and any ethical theory that implies relativism must be rejected.

The thesis of Emotivism, a species of non‐descriptivism, is that there is more to the meaning of moral statements than syntax and truth conditions; in particular, moral statements have an expressive, and a causative aspect. Drawing upon J. L. Austin's distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, Hare argues that emotivists try to explain the meaning of moral statements, which they assimilate to imperatives, in terms of their perlocutionary effect. The difficulty with this is that, firstly, the emotivists hold a false theory of imperatives, and secondly, perlocutionary effect cannot explain meaning. Furthermore, emotivists deny the possibility of rational moral argument, and therefore embrace irrationalism. Towards the end of this chapter, Hare identifies six essential features of moral language, and its logic, that must be recognized and accounted for by an adequate moral theory: (1) Neutrality, (2) Practicality, (3) Incompatibility, (4) Logicality, (5) Arguability, and (6) Conciliation.

In this chapter, it is argued that the distinction defended in chapter 1 is a genuine rigid — nonrigid distinction because it assigns the right role to rigidity and nonrigidity. Rigidity performs the right duties: principally supporting the necessity and contingency of identity statements containing the right combination of rigid and nonrigid designators. Several other alleged duties have been said to belong to rigidity's role: these are rejected as not properly belonging to rigidity. They include securing essential property attributions, like ‘white is a color’, securing externalism, securing aposteriority, refuting descriptivism, and securing linguistic stability. None of these are really central to rigidity's role so it does not matter that rigidity does not perform them or perform them well.

Ontological theories of musical works fall into two broad classes, according to whether they take musical works to be abstract objects of some sort. The chapter uses the terms ‘Platonism’ and ‘nominalism’ to refer to these two kinds of theory. It first considers recent debates within Platonism about musical works—the theory that musical works are abstract objects. It then considers reasons to be suspicious of such a view, motivating a consideration of nominalist theories of musical works. The chapter argues for two conclusions: first, that there are no compelling reasons to be a nominalist about musical works in particular, i.e. that nominalism about musical works rests on arguments for thoroughgoing nominalism, and, second, that if Platonism fails, fictionalism about musical works is to be preferred to other nominalist ontologies of musical works.