![]() In effect, Gibbard and Moore are appealing to a familiar Fregean cognitive difference principle for individuating concepts. Competent subjects may rationally doubt or even reject the putative definition. But in that case Gibbard thinks the equivalence-although possibly true-won't qualify as an analytic equivalence between naturalistic and normative terms. On the other hand, the definition may provide a genuine naturalistic specification of what it takes to be right. Gibbard thinks normative definitions may provide an analytic equivalence, but they simply postpone the problem of giving a full specification of what it takes to fall into the extension of normative terms. On the one hand, the definition of what is right may itself involve normative terms. Following Moore (1903), Gibbard thinks that these divergences in our standards for deciding what is right pose a challenge for the semantics of normative terms. Some think that what is right to do is what maximizes personal preference, some that it is what matches objective standards of perfection, while many others simply don't have any definite opinion on the matter. People disagree widely about what it takes to fall into the extension of normative terms. The prospects for peace and reconciliation in metaethics, we believe, are much dimmer than Gibbard suggests. Gibbard's proposal, we will argue, fails to capture what is distinctive of the realist's view. However, we think realists ought to reject Gibbard's claim that he has vindicated realism. There is much to admire and much to be learned from Gibbard's probing discussion of these issues. Although the semantic account he provides for normative terms takes a distinctively expressivist form, he argues at length that metaethical realism is a natural consequence of this semantic proposal. Gibbard develops an ingenious and original version of expressivism which is grounded in a detailed and sophisticated exploration of some of the deepest logical and semantic issues in metaethics. Gibbard's conciliatory gesture is not just a pious hope. So there is no need to choose between expressivism and realism: Gibbard thinks he can have both. Using only expressivist resources, Gibbard thinks he can show that there is a natural property signified by normative terms. In his new book, Thinking How to Live, (1) Allan Gibbard goes a step further and claims he has now bridged the gap between expressivism and realism. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realist program, for instance, aims to show that expressivism has the resources to vindicate many of the apparently realist features of normative discourse (Blackburn 1984, 1993a, 1998). ![]() More recently, however, expressivists have become more conciliatory. COULD THERE BE PEACE at last in metaethics? Early expressivists like Ayer (1946) and Stevenson (1937) took their semantics for moral terms to be the very antithesis of realism about moral discourse.
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