This dissertation consists of three related but self-contained papers. The first clarifies what some philosophers have thought to be an epistemological problem for metaethical realism: If value is objective - rather than depending for its existence on our valuing - and given the evolutionary and cultural causes of our evaluative beliefs, what explains the fact that our evaluative beliefs are mostly true and justified? I show that there are at least two different arguments of this kind, though they are easily conflated. Neither is a knockdown argument against any otherwise plausible form of realism, but properly understood each has some force. In my second paper, I raise a new and more serious epistemological problem. In general, it is rational to give significant credence to other people’s testimony - we can often justifiably form beliefs based purely on their say-so, and when they disagree with us we have some reason to reconsider our views. But when we are trying to assess whether something is good, their opinions often seem to have much less impact on what we should believe. Why is that? I argue that no mainstream metaethical view offers a satisfactory explanation; only a form of relativism or contextualism can account for this aspect of the epistemology of value.. Finally, I defend a form of contextualism about value, according to which evaluative predicates can be used to attribute indefinitely many different properties according to the contexts in which they are used. Such a theory can offer a naturalistic, cognitivist analysis of value which accounts for the ordinarily close relationship between motivation and evaluative belief, relies on no mysterious primitive concepts, and is almost unique in its ability to explain why it makes sense for us to trust our evaluative judgment. Contextualism is not a popular view, mainly because it is supposed to be incapable of accounting for many instances of evaluative disagreement, but this objection does not hold up very well under scrutiny.
Galligan, Phillip,
"How to explain some remarkable features of evaluative epistemology"
(2016).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0D798V4
