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Skimmed through the fourth looking for something once. And it looked much like the other two. Besides, older editions tend to be way cheaper:. Thanks in advance. I liked it. This review also reflects my experience of reading the book. Socio-linguistics, but really intriguing stuff.

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She also has one in workplace communication. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. All rights reserved. Want to join? Log in or sign up in seconds. Submit a new link. It is an initially attractive package since it allows us to a maintain the common sense view that moral judgments are to be glossed with non-moral descriptive judgments, while b recognizing and, in a sense, legitimating a deep connection between moral assertions and our conative and affective states.


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Whether the initial attraction of this package persists on inspection is another question. One of Joyce's central motivations for the expressivist portion of his view is the putative incoherence of a moral assertion that is conjoined with a denial of being in the relevant conative state:. Hitler was evil; but I subscribe to no normative standard that condemns him or his actions. This, though, doesn't feel incoherent in the same way Moore-paradoxical constructions like:.

Nazim Hikmet was a poet revolutionary, but I don't believe he was. I worry that insofar as this example feels incoherent, it is because "subscription to a normative standard" typically indicates belief talk, not expression talk footnote 16 and objection 6.

In its most humdrum usage, we subscribe to theories and views, which is at least usually a kind of belief-like endorsement of descriptive content. And "evil" feels pragmatically connected with condemnation -- we usually don't believe people to be evil if we do not condemn their actions. So it is difficult to avoid hearing the above as "Hitler was evil, but I don't believe he was". More generally, I have argued that analogous, but more explicitly non-cognitive constructions simply aren't incoherent in the same way as paradigmatic Moore-paradoxical constructions.

This puts pressure on the idea that expression of non-cognitive content is partially constitutive of competent moral assertion. That there is a constitutive connection between moral assertion and cognitive content like belief is rather more plausible as Joyce notes. Given that:. This is a lesson many recent expressivists have taken on board. As we should expect.

Chapter 2, "Morality, Schmorality," launches an investigation into the functional role of morality on the back of an analysis of whether it's bad to be bad. Joyce argues that if all reasonable pretenders to morality turn out to be schmoralities -- if they fail to serve the intended functional role of morality -- then we ought to be error theorists. This raises important questions about the costs of error-theory; after all, we want the functional role of morality served somehow.

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Joyce suggests that we might turn to a form of fictionalism here, fleshing out the common thought that we ought to carry on with our moral practices even in the wake of widespread error. He tempers this suggestion by arguing that whether or not this is the right path -- whether it is good to pretend to believe in the good -- itself depends on empirical facts about psychological feasibility and pragmatic utility this theme is revisited later the collection.

The complementary third chapter, "The Accidental Error Theorist," suggests that many contemporary naturalistic accounts of moral properties slip into error theory unwittingly by potentially inhuman theorizing. That is, they postulate properties which fit reality only under the presumption of implausible restrictions on what kind of beings we are. Response-dependent and sentimentalist accounts posit generic properties, such as a general disposition to feel resentment upon certain coarsely described stimuli, which we probably don't possess.

For example, it is extremely implausible that we are always disposed to feel resentment in the face of unkindness; it is somewhat implausible that we are typically disposed to feel it.

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Ideal observer theories and contractualist accounts, on the other hand, neglect the fact that we humans come in varieties far askew from the bourgeois moral and doxastic norm theorists in these traditions typically start with. These positions thus tend to either succumb to the temptation to cheat by building a substantive moral constraint into their account or, alternatively, attempt increasingly fraught rationalizations of counterexamples in terms of failures of information or affect. In short, many roads to error theory are paved with empirical plausibility; starting from a compelling analysis of what moral properties are, we may end up accepting it as the correct analysis of moral properties and rejecting that so-analyzed moral properties are ever instantiated.

The final essay of this section, "Metaethical Pluralism", ties these themes all together. Joyce argues that given the widespread disagreement in philosophical accounts of assertion and value, there may be no decisive reason to favor cognitivism over non-cognitivism, nor any decisive reason to favor moral naturalism over moral skepticism. The most compelling aspect of this argument is the explicit attention paid to the payoff between interpretational issues, and context-relative pragmatic concerns. The conclusion, that it might very well be that there is no decisive answer to which view is right and, more importantly, no decisive answer to which view we ought to take, strikes me as compelling.

This ecumenism might seem a step back for Joyce, but I don't read it that way. Rather, I read it as a welcome two-part shift.

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First, a shift away from the view that we will find sufficient grounds for error theory in explicating our moral thought and talk. Second, a shift towards treating empirical issues, such as psychological tractability and pragmatic payoff, modulated by the standpoint we start from, as an important but not decisive factor in whether we should accept an error theory or a revisionary moral naturalism. The upshot is a type of theoretical maturity: we can go on with which view we like, while recognizing that we do so by making decisions about our concepts which were not already forced.

Recognizing that we could have gone another way, we might occasionally usefully flirt with the road not taken.

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Turning to the second section, my competence lies entirely with the second pair of essays chapters 7 and 8 , which address moral debunking arguments. Debunking arguments argue for some skeptical position about moral judgments -- they're all false, they're all unjustified, etc. For example, many have argued that telling an evolutionary story about how we came to have the moral beliefs we have somehow undermines taking our moral beliefs to be accurate or justified Street , Joyce These two chapters counter the pervasive mistake of thinking that debunking arguments establish a strong version of a moral skepticism absent the addition of substantive epistemological theses which close the gap between the modest skeptical position "Theory T currently lacks justification" and the extreme skeptical position "Theory T is unjustifiable.

There are also agreement phenomena with e. As pointed out by Postal, this chapter is very informal in nature and rather than giving a detailed analysis of the phenomenon it fleshes out the generalisations a proper analysis must account for. Mary knows shit about quantum physics. Mary doesn't know shit about quantum physics.

They apparently behave like 'nothing' and 'anything', but, according to Postal, contrary to intuition it does not make sense to treat these minimizers as homonyms. He also extends this analysis to the more standard form word 'nothing'. Postal's main point is that NLs are 'open'. Using direct speech as part of the data, he claims that the openness of NL, invalidates Chomsky's claims that sentences have finite length, a finite vocabulary, and that a generative grammar is an adequate tool for describing NL.

The second part of the book is called 'Studies of Junk Linguistics'. Of the eight papers in this section, the first two are definitely the most interesting ones from a linguistic point of view. Postal claims that these effects have never been proven and gives an extensive overview of SCE and lots of data that refutes the principle C account. But here it is the government and binding analysis of passives that is under scrutiny.


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    8. The starting point is the transformational account of passives given in Syntactic Structures. Postal shows that there are three major problems with this account and its variant move alpha. First, there is overgeneration with for instance 'buy'. Second, undergeneration e. Third, there is no satisfactory account of the 'by'-phrase. Just as in the previous chapter the reader gets a thorough introduction and background to the topic.

    There are also lots of data and arguments for why the analysis in question fails. This chapter is also a harsh critique of how the transformational account has more or less been taken for granted in government and binding, despite the fact that all data have been known, and even cited in the relevant literature.


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    Of the studies in junk linguistics this is the most entertaining and enjoyable paper. This is not to say that Postal's critique is unjustified, but it is tedious reading after a while. In addition these are not the kind of papers you expect when you read the blurb. And definitely not what you want to pay