9 - Is and Ought

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.