Those who are interested and happen to be in the area can see me present my paper "Advice for Noncognitivists" at this year's Central APA (Thursday February 19, 12:10--2:10). Ezra Cook will chair the session and Thony Gillies kindly agreed to comment, so it promises to be a blast. Here is the abstract of the talk:
Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this paper is 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 a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication that stresses the role of moral language as a means for coordinating—rather than simply expressing—moral attitudes.