Overview
When discussing normative reasons, oughts, requirements of rationality, motivating reasons, and so on, we often have to use verbs like ""believe"" and ""want"" to capture a relevant subject's perspective. According to the received view about sentences involving these verbs, what they do is describe the subject's mental states. Many puzzles concerning normative discourse have to do with the role that mental states consequently appear to play in normative discourse. Tim Henning uses tools from semantics and the philosophy of language to develop an alternative account of sentences involving these verbs. According to this view, which is called parentheticalism, we very commonly use these verbs in a parenthetical sense. These verbs themselves express backgrounded side-remarks on the contents they embed, and these latter, embedded contents constitute the at-issue contents. This means that instead of speaking about the subject's mental states, we often use sentences involving ""believe"" and ""want"" to speak about the world from her point of view. Henning makes this notion precise, and uses it to solve various puzzles concerning normative discourse. The final result is a new, unified understanding of normative discourse, which gets by without postulating conceptual breaks between objective and subjective normative reasons, or normative reasons and rationality, or indeed between the reasons we ascribe to an agent and the reasons she herself can be expected to cite. Instead of being connected to either subjective mental states or objective facts, all of these normative statuses are can be adequately articulated by citing worldly considerations from a subject's point of view.
Full Product Details
Author: Tim Henning (Professor of Practical Philosophy and History of Philosophy, Professor of Practical Philosophy and History of Philosophy, University of Stuttgart)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.40cm
, Height: 2.10cm
, Length: 23.70cm
Weight: 0.542kg
ISBN: 9780198797036
ISBN 10: 0198797036
Pages: 252
Publication Date: 05 June 2018
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Author Information
Tim Henning is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Stuttgart. His research interests include normative ethics, metanormativity, philosophy of language, and Kant. He has published several articles and books in German and English. His books include a monograph on personal autonomy and personal history, entitled Person sein und Geschichten erzählen, and an introduction to Kant's ethics (in German). His articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophical Review, Ethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Philosophical Quarterly.
