What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/what-if-the-frege-geach-problem-isnt/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social&utm_vampaign=lih

#Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

Something about the way the consequentializing literature (and as a result the normative ethics literature more generally) defines what makes a moral theory consequentialist always bothered me. It always felt like the definition was trying to give precision beyond what makes sense for a family of views. But of course "that's too precise of a definition" is not an objection that gets taken very seriously by analytic philosophers.

I always tried to vaguely gesture at my worry in conversation by saying things like "consequentialism isn't a theory or set of theories, its a tradition."
I don't think that's wrong, but I can understand why is always left my interlocutors unsatisfied.

I think finally reading some Elisabeth Camp has helped it click for me - I think consequentialism is a Campian *perspective* (something like a cluster of dispositions and patterns of salience in deliberation), and the consequentialist tradition is the set of people who have roughly overlapping Campian perspectives about how to approach moral theory.

I think this is also equally true of deontology and virtue theory.

On this proposal, we shouldn't think about dividing moral theories in terms of logical structure or even of how they answer some set of paradigmatic moral dilemmas (though there will be non-coincidental connections), but in terms of which things are taken to be salient and how to approach moral theory. While certain approaches will tend to lead to certain answers to these questions about structure and solutions to moral dilemmas, they don't entail them.

#philosophy #ethics #analyticphilosophy

From Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960:

The big claims were about the imminence of a final dissolution: ancient knots would be cut, the old metaphysical doctrines hunted to extinction. Once the old detritus was cleared, then the revelation, ‘of a whole world of infinite subtlety and diversity with its own fine and complex structure, a world which had always lain about us to be observed as soon as we ceased straining our eyes towards imaginary grandeurs and simplicities’*. That world would reveal itself once we ceased straining our eyes and tried instead to listen, not least to ourselves.

Remind you of anyone? Now it’s been a long while since I was immersed in Rorty but I don’t recall this ever being part of his intellectual narrative, whereas the ethos of his ironism I now suspect resembles post-war Oxford philosophy much more than, as often alleged, postmodernism. To what extent was this an intellectual juncture reached through multiple pathways or a common ethos which coalesced?

*From Peter Strawon’s post-linguistic thaw

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/07/the-unacknowledged-debt-of-richard-rorty-to-the-ethos-of-post-war-oxford-philosophy/

#analyticPhilosophy #irony #language #linguisticTurn #richardRorty

#TimothyWilliamson posted an accepted critique of fellow #philosopher #PhilipKitcher's book 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩'𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙐𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙤𝙥𝙝𝙮? (#Oxford #University Press)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BTPlCPQ5FmAGCARgbT0yC6MVU_iqirbx/view

"According to ...Kitcher,... much of contemporary #analyticPhilosophy ...offers ... nothing useful. [...] He wants #philosophy to change [...] But most of his recommendations would make philosophy worse: more anxious to imitate the neighbours and impress the general public...."

#metaphilosophy #science #higherEd #academia

Au sujet de la publication de Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. (1983), du début des science wars, et de la réception de la philo féministe par le mainstream de la profession.

Cet entretien avec Harding est vraiment une mine d'or ! ➡️ https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/qlvzx3b

#philosophie #épistémologie #féminisme #philosophy #feminism #harding #hintikka #analyticphilosophy #sciencewars #oralhistory