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9 - Is and Ought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

William F. Harms
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Summary

The task for the previous chapter was merely to articulate the hypothesis that there is a basic kind of meaning – primitive content – and that the normative intuitions regarding standards of rational thought and epistemic justification which constitute the primary objection to epistemological naturalism, in fact, possess this kind of content or meaning-rules, rather than the more elaborate propositional content in terms of which we have been attempting, unsuccessfully, to understand them. In the simplest terms, animal warning cries and human feelings are not merely brute expressions of distress but possess conventional, as opposed to natural, meaning. Try to understand normative intuitions as a kind of warning cry, sent by adapted rule-enforcement mechanisms, and you have the essence of the proposal. We saw that the three sorts of conventions implicit in the functional history of any adapted signaling system map nicely onto the truth, justification, and comprehension of beliefs. What Chapter 8 did not attempt was to establish that our normative intuitions, in fact, express this kind of primitive content and that the content they possess largely conforms to our usual sense of such things. Indeed, as an empirical hypothesis, its confirmation falls far beyond the scope of these short chapters, depending as it does on obscure facts of adaptive history, neurological architecture, and the study of human emotions. Preliminary to any such investment of time and resources, one must at least answer theoretical objections to the effect that this cannot be correct.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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  • Is and Ought
  • William F. Harms, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498473.010
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  • Is and Ought
  • William F. Harms, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498473.010
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Is and Ought
  • William F. Harms, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498473.010
Available formats
×