In my dissertation I argue that prominent descriptivist metaethical views face a serious semantic problem. According to standard descriptivism, moral thought and discourse purports to describe some ontology of moral properties and/or relations: e.g., the term `good' purports to refer to some property or cluster of properties. Central to any such theory, then, is the recognition of certain items of ontology which, should they actually exist, would count as the referents of moral terms and concepts. And since one commonly accepted feature of moral thought and discourse is a supervenience constraint, descriptivists hold that any ontology suitable for morality would have to supervene upon non-moral ontology. But this lands descriptivists with the task of providing a semantic account capable of relating this ontology to moral terms and concepts. That is, they must explain why it is that certain items of ontology and not others would count as the referents of moral terms and concepts, in a way that is consistent with the supervenience constraint. I argue that this important explanatory task cannot be carried out. And because the problem generalizes from metaethics to all normativity, we are left with good reason to pursue alternatives to descriptivist accounts of normative semantics.

Is truth valuable? In addressing this question, one must parse it into questions that are more manageable. Is the property of truth only instrumentally valuable, or is it both instrumentally valuable and noninstrumentally valuable? Is the normativity of the concept of truth an intrinsic or extrinsic property of the concept? In addressing the first of these questions, I show that certain arguments are flawed, arguments that purport to show that truth is not valuable in any kind of way. After establishing that it is reasonable to think that the property of truth is valuable, I show how inflationists and deflationists can agree that the property of truth is noninstrumentally valuable. In addressing the second question, I rely on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and the resources of moral semantics to claim that the normativity of the concept of truth is an extrinsic feature of the concept. I conclude that the property of truth is both instrumentally and noninstrumentally valuable and that the normativity associated with the concept of truth is an extrinsic property of the concept. In doing so, I suggest that beginning with an investigation about the value and normativity of truth has important ramifications for theories of truth in general.

In metaethics, moral irrealists argue that moral facts are neither ontologically real nor mind-independent. In moral semantics, irrealists who are descriptivist error theorists argue that typical moral claims attempt to report descriptive moral facts but that such facts do not exist, so typical moral claims are descriptively false or erroneous. Moral irrealists who are non-descriptivists, such as Mark Timmons, argue for a different function of moral claims. Timmons argues that moral claims attempt to guide action. He further maintains that moral claims can be true or false, but not according to a descriptivist function (he affirms cognitivism but denies descriptivism). I lay out Timmons‘ semantics and grapple with a number of objections to his view. I conclude that Timmons ought to discard his contextual truth-apt semantics and his non-descriptivism; instead he should defend the prescriptive, or evaluative, function of moral claims within an overarching descriptivist error theory. / Graduate / 0422