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The thesis explores the semantics of epistemic justification discourse, a very important part of overall epistemic discourse. It embarks from a critical examination of referentialist theories to arrive at a certain nonreferential, expressivist approach to the semantics of epistemic justification discourse. That is, it criticizes the main referentialist theories and then goes on to argue for an expressivist approach on the basis of its theoretical capacity to outflank the problems referentialist theories meet. In the end, I also identify some problems for a prominent expressivist theory and, as a response to these problems, propose a novel norm-expressivist approach that seems to evade these problems. In particular, in Ch.1 I introduce what I call ‘the epistemic justification puzzle’ and then in Chs.2-4 criticize naturalistic referential theories: analytic naturalistic reductionism, synthetic naturalistic reductionism and epistemic kinds realism. In Ch.5 I criticize nonnaturalist referential theories: what I call ‘naïve’ nonnaturalism and J.McDowell’s (1994) more sophisticated quietist version of nonnaturalism. Next, in Ch.6 I introduce the semantic programme of expressivism and go on to construct a simple version of epistemic norm-expressivism (inspired by A.Gibbard (1990)) in order to explain how expressivism can easily outflank the identified problems of referentialist theories. This simple norm-expressivist theory, however, is only used as a theoretical ‘toy’ for the mere sake of motivating the possibility of expressivism, as in Ch.7 I go on to argue for a more sophisticated version of norm-expressivism: habitsendorsement expressivism. In Ch.7 I introduce a prominent expressivist theory of moral and knowledge discourses, namely, plan-reliance expressivism (credited to A.Gibbard (2003, 2008)) and extend it cover the epistemic justification discourse. I then identify some problems for plan-reliance expressivism as extended to cover justification discourse and in response to these problems propose habits-endorsement expressivism. Habits-endorsement expressivism builds on the intuition that (justified) belief-fixation is habitual and exploits the theoretical flexibility of the notion of habits in order to overcome the identified problems of plan-reliance expressivism.

International criminal law lacks a coherent theory suitable for its own context. This lacuna has left the International Criminal Court (ICC) – the most prominent global penal institution - without clear theoretical premise(s) to guide prosecution and punishment. In its current incarnation, international criminal draws on Western liberal modalities founded on dominant domestic penal rationales of retribution and deterrence. However, these principles appear incongruous to the crimes the ICC prosecutes. The theoretical rationales of ICC have barely been interrogated against an extant case. In 2012, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo became the first defendant to be convicted and jailed by the ICC for the conscription, enlistment and use of child soldiers. The use of child combatants for purposes of war is a pernicious global problem outlawed in international criminal law. However, of the crimes designated as ‘egregious,’ it has historically been under-enforced and inadequately articulated as a mass crime, and allocated lesser gravity. The seminal case of Lubanga provides us with a propitious opportunity, not only to locate child soldiering, but also inquire into the theoretical underpinnings of the ICC with regards to mass crime. Mass crimes are distinct from ordinary crimes. International courts charged with adjudicating them face constraints and can only prosecute a few of the suspected perpetrators. The overarching theoretical and analytic framework for this thesis is premised on the notion that international criminal law needs a plausible theory or rationale suitable for its context and crimes it prosecutes. It is important for the ICC to premise its work on a realistic rationale for it to be purposive. A more logical analysis of international penality would draw on the conceptual underpinnings of the whole project of international law and specific features of the ICC. A good starting point is to note that international criminal justice is largely symbolic. A more plausible penal rationale would consider the inhibitions the ICC faces and the role it can still perform with regards to mass crime. The ICC symbolises contemporary standards of an ‘international community.’ It is this concept from which we can extrapolate viable rationales for ICC penology. How do the trial, conviction and punishment of Lubanga for the ‘mass crime’ of child soldiering serve the collectivist ethos of international law and society? The project that follows proposes a penal rationale that accounts for the ICC’s sui generis character, the nature of crimes it adjudicates and what the court can realistically achieve. The ultimate value of international criminal law may rest not in its functions of retribution or deterrence, but in its role in identity construction, in particular in constructing a cosmopolitan community identity. The overall argument for the thesis is that while retribution and deterrence are valid, the most plausible rationale for ICC penality is the expressive function of law (expressivism). The few cases of mass crime the ICC can prosecute can achieve primarily more realistic aims of expression of global or ‘cosmopolitan’ norms, norm internalisation and the reinforcement of collectivism international law and society. Lubanga provides an illustrative exemplar for this argument.

abstract / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

The most important questions we ask are normative questions. And the most fundamental normative questions are couched in terms of reasons: What do I have reason to do? and What do I have reason to believe? Although not always explicitly about reasons, I take it that much of normative philosophy at least implicitly offers first order normative answers to such questions. But stepping back, we can ask what these questions and answers are about - what are reasons anyway? This dissertation addresses those meta-normative questions, questions about the conceptual structure, semantics, ontology and epistemology of reasons. In the inquiry to come, chapters 1 and 2 consider the conceptual structure and core semantics of reasons. I argue that all reasons-internal reasons grounded in motivational states, external reasons connected to morality, epistemic reasons for belief, whatever--share the same conceptual structure and core semantics, so they all will stand or fall together when it comes to questions of reason truths and facts. In chapters 3-5 I argue that reason discourse has realist purport because reason judgments feature cognitive and belief-like attitudes about the way the world is, normatively speaking. To vindicate normativity's realist purport would require an ontology of favoring relations flowing from considerations in the world to actions and attitudes of various agents. So in chapters 6 and 7 I consider such an ontology. Unfortunately, favoring relations do not fit into the emerging naturalized view of the world. To make matters worse, based on the kinds of reasons we accept, there are no good reasons for admitting non-natural favoring relations in to the ontology. Reasons cannot bear their own survey. As a result, this dissertation culminates in a revisionary semantics, discussed in chapter 8, whereby I suggest we all adopt a fictive stance toward propositions about any kind of reason. In the end, we can preserve reason discourse and its characteristic roles in our lives so long as we are disposed to avow irrealism about reasons in critical contexts.

This thesis contains a critical discussion of two metaethical theories: expressivism, as developed in the works of Simon Blackburn, and Cornell realism, as presented by Richard Boyd and David Brink. In the introduction, a distinction is made between external and internal accommodation projects for moral discourse and it is argued that the external accommodation project should be guided by acceptance of methodological naturalism. Expressivism and Cornell realism are then subjected to an extended comparative evaluation, and an answer is sought to the question of which of the two should be favoured. The main conclusion of the thesis is that Cornell realism is rationally preferable to expressivism. This conclusion is arrived at by looking at how well the two theories, respectively, explain various deeply embedded features of moral discourse. Explaining such features is what the internal accommodation project for moral discourse consists in. The assertoric surface-form of moral discourse and the supervenience of moral predicates on natural predicates receive special attention in the study. It is argued that expressivism and Cornell realism do equally well on the issue of moral supervenience. But whereas expressivism is still vulnerable to a particular argument from the philosophy of language (the Frege-Geach point), Cornell realism can fend off the criticism that most persistently has been directed at it from this area of philosophy. In a comparative evaluation involving the selected issues, Cornell realism therefore fares better than expressivism.

This thesis is about the viability of meta-normative expressivism. On what I take to be the dominant conception of the view, it subscribes to two theses. First, that the meaning of sentences is to be explained in terms of the mental states these sentences conventionally express. Second, that there is a fundamental difference in the roles of the states expressed by normative sentences and the states expressed by descriptive sentences: descriptive sentences, according to expressivists, express mental states which are representational and non-motivational, while normative sentences express non-representational and motivational states. Expressivism has attracted many naturalistically inclined philosophers for its ability to explain many of the distinctive features of normative discourse and thought, without adding entities to our ontology that are metaphysically and epistemologically problematic. In this way, expressivism promises to preserve the legitimacy of our ordinary normative practice within a naturalistic world-view, without giving up on any of its distinctive features. Despite it’s benefits, expressivism also faces significant problems. While one of these problems, the Frege-Geach Problem, has attracted a lot of attention, there are several other problems that have not been sufficiently addressed by . But, given that the reasonable assumption that the plausibility of philosophical theories needs to be assessed holistically, it seems that one should pay attention to these problems to be able to assess expressivism’s overall plausibility. In this thesis I explain how expressivists can solve two of these problems. The first problem the dissertation is concerned with is the normative attitude problem. This is a dilemma based on the challenge that expressivists need to give an account of the nature of the attitude that normative thinking consists in. The dilemma is then that expressivists could either do this by holding that normative thinking consists in sui generis attitudes, which is uninformative and potentially in conflict with naturalism, or by holding that normative thinking reduces to attitudes fully describable in non-normative terms, which is in conflict with our intuitions about normative thinking. I argue that this dilemma is structurally identical to a dilemma which meta-normative representationalism faces (expressivism’s dialectical rival) and that expressivists can use the same theoretical resources to address the normative attitude problem meta-normative representationalists have used to address their version of the dilemma. I also argue that these resources will not only help more traditional versions of expressivism, according to which normative thinking reduces to familiar kinds of attitudes fully describable in non-normative terms, but opens up the possibility of an expressivist view according to which normative thinking consists in sui generis attitudes. The second problem I consider is a challenge to a particular expressivist project: quasi-realism. Part of this project is to show that expressivism is compatible with a web of closely connected assumptions, namely, that normative thought and discourse are truth-apt and normative judgements are beliefs. While quasi-realists have made some progress in this direction, there is one relevant phenomenon that has so far been neglected, namely, those uses of that-clauses that are associated with propositional content. This is a problematic neglect, because that-clauses figure prominently in platitudes characterizing our ordinary notions of “truth-aptitude” and “belief ”, and so expressivists need to provide a plausible account of these uses of that-clauses which fits with their allowing that normative thought and discourse are truth-apt and normative judgements are beliefs. I address this challenge as follows: I first remove any worries that one might have that a plausible account of that-clauses that helps the quasi-realist could be given, by introducing the distinction between semantics and meta-semantics and locating expressivism at the level of metasemantics. I then develop a deflationist view of that-clauses which suits the quasi-realist’s purposes. I start by giving such a view for the use of that-clauses in meaning-attributions by expanding on the work of Wilfried Sellars. I then go on to explain how the account can be generalized to the use of that-clauses in belief-attributions and propositional attitude ascriptions more generally, in a way that allows expressivists to say that normative judgements are beliefs.

This thesis critically assesses ‘relaxed realism’ – a group of views that have entered the metaethical debate recently (Dworkin, 1996; Kramer, 2009; Parfit, 2011; Scanlon, 2014). Relaxed realism promises a novel perspective on our normative practice. In particular, it aims for a view that is genuinely distinct from traditional non-naturalism on the one hand, and sophisticated forms of expressivism on the other. This thesis calls into question whether such an aspiration can be met. The approach is twofold. First, the thesis argues that relaxed realism can meet various of its objectives better by relying on theoretical resources that expressivism offers. To argue for this claim, it discusses three challenges that relaxed realism should be able to meet according to its own objectives. With regards to each challenge, it then shows that as it stands relaxed realist views fail to adequately respond to it. Finally, the thesis suggests that relaxed realism can better respond to the respective challenges – and hence, better meet their own objectives – by endorsing certain expressivist resources. Second, the thesis argues that relaxed realism is an inherently unstable view. It does so by raising a dilemma. Either relaxed realism fails to establish the desired difference to expressivism or it succeeds, but at the expense of erasing the difference to traditional non-naturalism. The conclusion of the thesis is critical: the relaxed realist aspiration for a novel take on our normative practice – distinct from both traditional non-naturalism and expressivism – remains unmet.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in philosophical theories which downplay the importance of the idea that our words and thoughts represent aspects of the world. The best-known example of these non-representational theories is metaethical expressivism, the view that ethical language and thought is best understood not as representing or describing ethical features of the world, but as expressing our attitudes towards it. Other theories apply similar ideas to other kinds of language and thought, and global versions apply it to all kinds. Non-representationalism has undergone a major shift in the last few decades, and lack of clarity about what it now involves has led some to worry that it is either unintelligible, or else indistinguishable from its representationalist rivals. In the first part of my thesis, I offer a novel reading of the new kind of non-representationalism. I argue that this reading, for the first time, makes the view both intelligible and distinct from representationalism. However I also show that this reading collapses one of the major debates in the recent literature – the debate between global and local non-representationalists. This debate turns out to be empty: properly understood, the disputants already agree with each other. Many writers think that non-representationalism threatens metaphysics, particularly theories which purport to say what makes statements of given kinds true, and to what various kinds of terms refer. Some take this to be an advantage of the view, others a disadvantage. In the second part of my thesis I argue that this common view is deeply mistaken – nonrepresentationalism does not undermine metaphysics. I respond to a number of recent arguments, showing that neither global nor local forms of non-representationalism undermine metaphysics. I argue that non-representationalism is compatible with metaphysics, and that this is not a problem for the view.

In this thesis I consider the problem of the distinctiveness of knowledge of our own mental states and attitudes. I consider four influential approaches to this problem: the epistemic approach, the "no reasons view," the neo-expressivist approach and the rational agency approach. I argue that all of them face serious problems. I further argue that many of these problems are connected with the lack of fine-grained enough classification of the entities with respect to which we have self-knowledge. I suggest such a classification, distinguishing passive occurrent mental states, mental actions and standing attitudes, and argue that we should treat each of these categories separately for the purpose of explaining self-knowledge of them. I discuss in detail self-knowledge we have with respect to two of these categories: standing attitudes and mental actions. On my account self-knowledge of standing attitudes stands in a derivative relation to self-knowledge of other kinds. In my discussion of self-knowledge of mental actions I establish that we have a distinctive non-observational kind of self-knowledge and show some specific characteristics of this kind of self-knowledge. In the end I attempt to relate self-knowledge of mental actions to practical knowledge in the ordinary sense of skill.