Matthew Chrisman

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Department of Philosophy

Normative discourse includes statements which appear to be truth-apt expressions of normative beliefs. But normative oughts do not seem to fit cleanly amongst the natural facts. This makes many naturalistically-inclined philosophers sympathetic to some form of the expressivist view that normative statements get their meaning from how they express d...

This series is devoted to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The chapters...

Updated and expanded to represent the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophical ethics today, the 2nd edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics covers the key topics in metaethics and normative ethical theory. This edition includes 12 fully revised chapters, and 3 newly commissioned contributions from a range of esteemed academics who...

This paper articulates a general distinction between two important communicative ideals—expressive sincerity and discursive integrity—and then uses it to analyze problems with political debate in contemporary democracies. In the context of philosophical discussions of different forms of trustworthiness and debates about deliberative democracy, self...

This chapter considers the apparent tension between the doxastic involuntaris thesis that we do not exercise voluntary control directly over what we believe and the idea that there are true epistemic normative claims about what people ought to believe. To overcome the apparent tension and to begin to develop an account of epistemic normative evalua...

Some epistemologists (especially virtue reliabilists) argue that belief is a performance, which is a claim they employ to explain the axiological and deontological dimensions of epistemic normativity. This chapter shows, with some relatively simple linguistic tests, that ordinary belief attributions should be classified aspectually as state descrip...

This chapter identifies a parallel between epistemic contextualism and ethical speaker-relativism, in order to argue that a promising way out of two of the primary problems facing epistemic contextualism is one already explored in some detail in the ethical case—viz., expressivism. The upshot is an argument for epistemic expressivism, modelled on a...

Epistemology is not just about the nature of knowledge or the analysis of concepts such as ‘knows’ and ‘justified’, it’s also about what we ought to believe and how we should investigate and reason about what is the case. This is a book focused on these normative aspects of epistemology. More specifically, it is concerned with the nature of epistem...

This chapter argues that it helps to make sense of the nature and source of epistemic normativity if we think of norms of belief as applying to us mainly because of our interpersonal and epistemic sociality. That is, this helps to explain how various epistemic norms have a grip on us even if we don’t typically exercise voluntary control in believin...

Where do we find agency with respect to belief? Many accounts of doxastic agency focus on belief itself or the event of belief-formation to answer this question, to the exclusion of the activity of maintaining a system of beliefs. This chapter argues that the activity of maintaining a system of beliefs is different from the state of believing somet...

This chapter explains my reasons for endorsing an inferentialist rather than an expressivist form of nondescriptivism about epistemic discourse. Epistemic inferentialism is the view that epistemic claims mean what they do in virtue of the inferential responsibilities and entitlements one commits to in making them, rather than because of their poten...

This chapter evaluates the idea that doxastic agency is exercised in belief-formation. Two versions of the idea are considered, one that appeals to intellectual actions of inquiry and deliberation, another that appeals to wider manifestations of cognitive virtues in belief-formation. In both cases, it is argued that etiological accounts of the locu...

This chapter considers the idea that truth is the fundamental “epistemic” end grounding a norm of belief. By carefully reconstructing an argument for the radical claim that truth cannot be the end that individual believers pursue in forming beliefs, we can identify a way that truth can still be a constitutive aim of the activity of belief-system ma...

Imagine you’re teaching someone how to play chess. You might start by saying ‘White must move first’, where the word ‘must’ is used to convey a rule. You would have said basically the same thing if you had used the imperative ‘If you’re white, then move first’. And since imperatives prescribe rather than describe, it is natural to think that using...

Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than bel...

This paper compares and contrasts two recent approaches to the theory of normative concepts with each other and with more traditional theories in metaethics, in order to highlight several different projects one could be engaged in when developing a theory of normative concepts. The two accounts derive from Millgram, The Great Endarkenment (Oxford U...

CV

The dominant route to nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative language is through the expressivist idea that normative terms have distinctive expressive roles in conveying our attitudes. This paper explores an alternative route based on two ideas. First, a core normative term ‘ought’ is a modal operator; and second, modal operators play...

On the assumption that genuinely normative demands concern things connected in some way to our agency, i.e. what we exercise in doing things with or for reasons, epistemologists face an important question: are there genuine epistemic norms governing belief, and if so where in the vicinity of belief are we to find the requisite cognitive agency? Ext...

This paper considers two competing pictures of knowledge of what one ought to do—one which assimilates this to other propositional knowledge conceived as partial ‘locational’ knowledge of where one is in a space of possibilities, the other which distinguishes this from other propositional knowledge by construing it as partial ‘directional’ knowledg...

As a metaethical theory (see Metaethics) about the meaning of ethical words, emotivism is typically seen as a form of non-cognitivism (see Non-Cognitivism) because it holds that ethical words and statements have a distinctive kind of emotive meaning, which distinguishes them from other words and statements, whose meaning is purely cognitive or desc...

Ethical theorists often assume that the verb ‘ought’ means roughly ‘has an obligation’; however, this assumption is belied by the diversity of ‘flavours’ of ought-sentences in English. A natural response is that ‘ought’ is ambiguous. However, this response is incompatible with the standard treatment of ‘ought’ by theoretical semanticists, who class...

Expressivist views of an area of discourse encourage us to ask not about the nature of the relevant kinds of values but rather about the nature of the relevant kind of evaluations. Their answer to the latter question typically claims some interesting disanalogy between those kinds of evaluations and descriptions of the world. It does so in hope of...

Discussions about the meaning of the word "ought" are pulled in two apparently competing directions. First, in ethical theory this word is used in the paradigmatic statement of ethical principles and conclusions about what some agent is obligated to do. This leads some ethical theorists to claim that the word "ought" describes a real relation, roug...

Epistemic expressivism is the application of a nexus of ideas, which is prominent in ethical theory (more specifically, metaethics), to parallel issues in epistemological theory (more specifically, metaepistemology). Here, in order to help those new to the debate come to grips with epistemic expressivism and recent discussions of it, I first briefl...

Sometimes, when I go to dinner parties organized by my partner, people ask me what I do, and I say that I'm a philosopher. But when I fumble at their questions about ‘my philosophy’, my partner will describe what I do by saying, ‘He uses big words to explain little words.’ Although this is meant tongue in cheek, it's basically right. My philosophic...

One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit — roughly, as part to whole — with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind...

Recent philosophical debate about the meaning of knowledge claims has largely centred on the question of whether epistemic claims are plausibly thought to be context sensitive. The default assumption has been that sentences that attribute knowledge or justification (or whatever else is epistemic) have stable truth-conditions across different contex...

In the contemporary metaethical debate, expressivist (Blackburn, Gibbard) and constructivist (Korsgaard, Street) views can be viewed as inspired by irrealist ideas from Hume and Kant respectively. One realist response to these contemporary irrealist views is to argue that they are inconsistent with obvious surface‐level appearances of ordinary ethi...

Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy...

In this paper, I consider the prospects of two different kinds of expressivism - ethical expressivism and avowal expressivism - in light of two common objections. The first objection stems from the fact that it is natural to think of ethical statements and avowals as at least potential manifestations of knowledge. The second objection stems from th...

In this paper, I exploit the parallel between epistemic contextualism and metaethical speaker-relativism to argue that a promising way out of two of the primary problems facing contextualism is one already explored in some detail in the ethical case – viz. expressivism. The upshot is an argument for a form of epistemic expressivism modeled on a fam...