top of page

Advice for Noncognitivists

  • Writer: Malte Willer
    Malte Willer
  • Aug 3, 2016
  • 1 min read

My unsolicited advice to noncognitivsts is forthcoming in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (available online here). Here is the abstract:

Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this paper is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognitivism, including disjunctions. The resulting proposal preserves some of the key insights from recent work on the semantics of expressivism while highlighting the widely neglected early noncognitivists’ sympathies to the kind of dynamic story I intend to tell here. A comparison between the advertised dynamic semantic story and current proposals that treat expressivism as a pragmatic rather than semantic theory about moral language is provided.

Recent Posts

See All
Subjectivity

My overview article on subjectivity has now appeared in print, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language, along with...

 
 
Chicago Area Philosophy Exchange

There is an exciting new iniative here at UChicago Phil: the Chicago Area Philosophy Exchange (CAPHE). Its goal is to foster...

 
 
Credences for Strict Conditionals

My long-in-the-making attempt at explaining how proponents of a strict analysis of conditionals can make sense of probabilities of...

 
 

©2009–2025 Malte Willer. All rights reserved.

[Imprint]

bottom of page