Sunday, September 1, 2019

"Rule-Following, Moral Realism and Non-Cognitivism Revisited"

Alexander Miller's paper is the first in the collection not to have a colon in the title. It's not the first to talk about John McDowell, though. Here's the conclusion:
for all that McDowell's discussions show, the later Wittgenstein's reflections on following a rule fail to damage methodologically naturalist, synthetic and explanatory forms of non-cognitivism of the sort exemplified by [Simon] Blackburn's projectivist quasi-realism. (p. 121)
In other words, if Miller is right, Wittgenstein's work does not show that one cannot support a certain kind of meta-ethical position, as has been claimed. I don't mean to downplay the importance of the disagreement between McDowell and Blackburn, but my interest in Blackburn's kind of theory isn't great enough to motivate me to go through the details of Miller's argument here.

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