Abstract
Prior’s arguments for and against seeing ‘ought’ as a copula and his considerations about normative negation are applied to the case of responsibility judgments. My thesis will be that responsibility judgments, even though often expressed by using the verb ‘to be’, are in fact normative judgments. This is shown by analyzing their negation, which parallels the behavior of ought negation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A convention on the use of quotation marks: quotation marks are simple (‘ ’) only for terms used in suppositione materiali; quotation marks are double (“ ”) for all other uses: scare quotes, irony, etc. Here it is an example: ‘When talking about “use”, use ‘use”.
Barcan schema dates back to 1946, but Prior’s well-known discussion of it is—as far as I know—later than his Prior (1951).
Ross (1968, §§ 31–32) noticed this with direct reference to deontic logic. It’s possible that external negation in this flavor is non-classical. I thank Olivier Roy for discussion on this point. I don’t know of any discussion of internal and external negation in hyperintensional contexts. In recent work (Faroldi ms) I have maintained that ‘ought’ creates hyperintensional contexts, not just intensional ones. By hyperintensional I mean anything finer than intensionality (defined either in terms of metaphysical or logical equivalence), ie. co-intensional expressions are not equivalent in ought contexts. The hyperintensionality of ought appear to require a stronger notion of equivalence for normative expressions, which I generically call co-hyperintensionality.
For instance by Horn (1989, §6).
‘True’ was proposed by Karttunen and Peters (1979).
Horn (1989, Chap. 6) questions the use of ‘true’ and underlines how no known natural language employs two distinct negative operators corresponding directly to internal and external negation, even if a given language employs two (or more) negative operators, for instance (former: declarative negation; latter: emphatic negation): Ancient Greek: ‘ou’ vs. ‘mē’; Modern Greek: ‘den’ vs. ‘me’; Hungarian: ‘nem’ vs. ‘ne’; Latin: ‘non’ vs. ‘nē’; Irish: ‘nach’ vs. ‘gan’; Sanskrit: ‘na’ vs. ‘mā’. There is another ‘un-’ in English which is not a negative operator, but it is analogous to German ‘ent-’ as in ‘un-fold’, ‘ent-falten’. See Horn’s interesting list of languages with distinct negative operators at p. 366.
But duplex negatio affirmat only in classical logic and some natural languages, for instance contemporary standard English. Both in Old and Middle English, along with contemporary languages such as Italian, Portuguese and many others, duplex negatio n e g a t.
This cancellability feature seems to distinguish presuppositions from Gricean implicatures. Cf. Beaver and Geurts (2013, § 3). For a cutting-hedge survey on the pragmatics/semantics debate on presuppositions, see Schlenker (forthcoming).
External negation need not to be realized linguistically. It can also be realized metalinguistically. I discuss at length these concerns about various kinds of negation and their different uses in Faroldi (2014b, Chap. 5).
Of course I am aware these are only some possible paraphrases— there might be many more. The most important fact is that internal and external negation can be consistently kept separable.
It’s plausible that (normative) justifications are hyperintensional. This would nicely explain also the use of ‘because’ in giving justifications. I thank Paul McNamara for discussion on the point.
As I noted with accusations, not all excuses are pled using a verb like ‘to excuse’ or Italian ‘scusare’; in an analogous fashion, it is not only the use of ‘to excuse’ or ‘scusare’ that can make an excuse.
The results of this section partially overlap with Faroldi (2014a, Sect. 4).
References
Anselm of Canterbury (1936). Lambeth’s Fragments. In Ein neues unvollendetes Werk des hl. Anselm von Canterbury, ed. by Franciscus Saverius Schmitt, Münster i. W.: Aschendorff.
Austin, J. L. (1956). A plea for excuses: The presidential address. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57, 1–30.
Beaver, D. I., Geurts, B. (2013). Presupposition. In: E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2013
Bulygin, E. (1985). Norms and logic: Kelsen and Weinberg on the ontology of norms. Law and Philosophy, 4, 145–163.
Faroldi, F. L. G. (2014a). Denial of responsibility and normative negation. In F. Cariani, et al. (Eds.), Deontic logic and normative systems (pp. 81–94). Dordrecht: Springer.
Faroldi, F.L.G. (ms) Oughts, Apples, and Popes: Normativity and Hyperintensionality, under review
Faroldi, F. L. G. (2014b). The normative structure of responsibility. Law, language, ethics. London: College Publications.
Frege, G. (1918-1919). Der Gedanke: Eine logische Untersuchung. Beiträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus, I, 58–77.
Geach, P. T. (1981). Whatever happened to deontic logic? Philosophia, 11, 1–12.
Halbach, V., Leitgeb, H., & Welch, P. H. (2003). Possible-worlds semantics for modal notions conceived as predicates. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 32, 179–223.
Halbach, V., & Welch, Ph. (2009). Necessities and necessary truths: A prolegomenon to the use of modal logic in the analysis of intensional notions. Mind, 118, 71–100.
Horn, L. R. (1989). A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Karttunen, L., & Peters, S. (1979). Conventional implicature. In C.-K. Oh & D. Dinneen (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 11: Presupposition (pp. 1–56). New York: Academic Press.
Palmer, F. R. (1986). Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prior, A. N. (1951). The ethical copula. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 29(3), 137–154.
Ross, A. (1968). Directives and norms. New York: Humanities Press.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind, 14, 479–493.
Schlenker, PH. (forthcoming). The semantics/pragmatics interface. In M. Aloni & P. Dekker (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of formal semantics, forthcoming
von Wright, G. H. (1963). Norm and action: A logical enquiry. New York: Humanities Press.
Weinberger, O. (1979). Logik, Semantik, Hermeneutik. München: C.H. Beck.
Acknowledgments
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Faroldi, F.L.G. Ethical copula, negation, and responsibility judgments. Synthese 193, 3441–3448 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0911-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0911-1