Flexible Contextualism about Deontic Modals: A Puzzle about Information-Sensitivity

Dowell, J. L.

doi:10.1080/0020174x.2013.784464

Cited by 43 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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Order By: Relevance

“…According to the Standard Ordering Semantics, this entails that it would not be wrong to block a shaft. For this reason, it has been suggested that we additionally need to rely on information-sensitive ordering sources that rank the relevant worlds in the epistemic modal base in terms of expected value (Dowell 2013;Silk 2013). For an objection, see Finlay (2016: 186-187).…”

Section: Epistemic Modals Disagreement and Proposition Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According toDowell (2013), Charles's own referential intentions are sufficient to determine which proposition he asserts. It's not clear, however, how Charles's audience could access those intentions so as to know to which proposition they are to react.12 We only get this consequence if the ordering source provided by morality is itself information-sensitive.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The proposal is, however, fully compatible with adding that aspect of the character of moral terms to the account. For SRC-views formulated explicitly in that way, seeBjörnsson and Finlay (2010) andDowell (2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Contextualism, Moral Disagreement, and Proposition Clouds

Suikkanen¹

2019

Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 14

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According to contextualist theories in metaethics, when a moral term is used in a context, the context plays an ineliminable part in determining what natural property will be the semantic value of the term. Furthermore, on subjectivist and relativist versions of these views, it is either the speaker’s own moral code or her moral community’s moral code that constitutes the reference-fixing context. One standard objection to views of this type is that they fail to enable disagreement in ordinary conversations. Chapter 3 develops a new response to this objection on the basis of Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies’s notion of proposition clouds. It is argued that, because we live in a multicultural society, the conversational contexts we face will fail to disambiguate between all the things we could mean. This is why we can at best put into play proposition clouds when we make moral utterances. All the propositions in such clouds are then available for rejection and acceptance on behalf of our audiences. The norms of conversation then guide us to make informative contributions to the conversation—accept and reject propositions in a way that leads to coordination of action and choice.

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Section: Epistemic Modals Disagreement and Proposition Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Contextualism, Moral Disagreement, and Proposition Clouds

Suikkanen¹

2019

Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 14

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“…Chrisman (2008) uses the same terminology. 16 See Kolodny and MacFarlane (2010), Björnsson and Finlay (2010), Dowell (2012Dowell ( , 2013, Charlow (2013), Carr (2015) and Wedgwood (forthcoming). Kolodny and MacFarlane (Ib.) is a special case.…”

Section: The Collective 'Should'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather, you will look not only at their evidence, but also your own, and then tell them what they should do in light of this more informative collective evidence. 21 19 See, Björnsson and Finlay (2010) and Dowell (2013). These authors actually focus on 'ought', but 'ought' and 'should' are extremely similar in meaning and what applies to one of them in terms of evidence-sensitivity will apply to the other, too.…”

Section: The Collective 'Should'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving Turri's Puzzle about Withholding

Becker

2016

Dialectica

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Turri (2012) describes a case in which a group of experts apparently correctly advise you not to withhold on a proposition P, but where your evidence neither supports believing nor disbelieving P. He claims that this presents a puzzle about withholding: on the one hand, it seems that you should not withhold on P, since the experts say so. On the other hand, we have the intuition that you should neither believe nor disbelieve P, since your evidence doesn't support it. Thus, there is apparently no doxastic attitude you are permitted to adopt to P. Turri considers various solutions to the puzzle, but in the end rejects all of them and concludes that it seems to be unsolvable. I suggest resolving the puzzle by distinguishing between what I call the subjective and the collective ‘should’. In light of your, the subject's, evidence, i.e., in the subjective sense of ‘should’, you should neither believe nor disbelieve P. However, in light of your and the experts' combined evidence, i.e., in the collective sense of ‘should’, you should not withhold on P. It is true that you are not permitted to adopt a doxastic attitude if you should not, in the subjective sense of ‘should’, adopt it; but this is not so if you should not adopt it in the collective sense. Thus, you are actually permitted to withhold on P. The puzzle is nonetheless philosophically interesting since it points something out that deserves more discussion in epistemology: epistemic advice and the collective sense of the doxastic ‘should’, which we use when giving epistemic advice.

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Graded Modality

Lassiter

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics

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Obligation, goodness, certainty, likelihood, knowledge, belief, and ability are examples of modal concepts – concepts whose conditions for application depend not only on how the real world is, but also on various non‐actual ways that the world could be. Ought , good , certain , likely , know , believe , and be able are examples of modal words whose meaning is closely related to the modal concepts just mentioned. Is there graded structure underlying (at least some) modal concepts – are they all‐or‐nothing, or can they come in degrees? To the extent that there is, how should semanticists model the meanings of modal expressions whose meanings make reference to graded concepts? Modals are usually thought of as (non‐graded) quantificational expressions, but there is also a tradition of treating some modal concepts – such as goodness, likelihood, and obligation – on the analogy of graded concepts like height, weight, and temperature. Recently there has been increased attention to scalar aspects of the meanings of modal expressions, but there are still many interesting open questions about how far modal gradation extends, and how it relates to grammatical gradability of the type studied in the extensive literature on degree expressions.

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Flexible Contextualism about Deontic Modals: A Puzzle about Information-Sensitivity

Cited by 43 publications

References 17 publications

Contextualism, Moral Disagreement, and Proposition Clouds

Contextualism, Moral Disagreement, and Proposition Clouds

Resolving Turri's Puzzle about Withholding

Graded Modality

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