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Wei_Dai comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong
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As I indicated in a recent comment, I don't really see the point of austere metaethics. Meaning~1 just doesn't seem that interesting, given that meaning~1 is not likely to be closely related to actual meaning, as in your example when someone thinks that by "Murder is wrong" they are asserting "Murder is forbidden by Yahweh".
Empathic metaethics is much more interesting, of course, but I do not understand why you seem to assume that if we delve into the cognitive algorithms that produce a sentence like "murder is wrong" we will be able to obtain a list of truth conditions. For example if I examine the algorithms behind an Eliza bot that sometimes says "murder is wrong" I'm certainly not going to obtain a list of truth conditions. It seems clear that information/beliefs about math and physics definitely influence the production of normative sentences in humans, but it's much less clear that those sentences can be said to assert facts about math and physics.
Can you show me an example of such idea transfer? (Depending on what ideas you want to transfer, perhaps you do not need to "fully" solve metaethics, in which case our interests might diverge at some point.)
This is probably a good idea. (Nesov previously made a general suggestion along those lines.)
What do you mean by 'actual meaning'?
The point of pluralistic moral reductionism (austere metaethics) is to resolve lots of confused debates in metaethics that arise from doing metaethics (implicitly or explicitly) in the context of traditional conceptual analysis. It's clearing away the dust and confusion from such debates so that we can move on to figure out what I think is more important: empathic metaethics.
I don't assume this. Whether this can be done is an open research question.
My entire post 'Pluralistic Moral Reductionism' is an example of such idea transfer. First I specified that one way we can talk about morality is to stipulate what we mean by terms like 'morally good', so as to resolve debates about morality in the same way that we resolve a hypothetical debate about 'sound' by stipulating our definitions of 'sound.' Then I worked through the implications of that approach to metaethics, and suggested toward the end that it wasn't the only approach to metaethics, and that we'll explore empathic metaethics in a later post.
I don't know how to explain "actual meaning", but it seems intuitively obvious to me that the actual meaning of "murder is wrong" is not "murder is forbidden by Yahweh", even if the speaker of the sentence believes that murder is wrong because murder is forbidden by Yahweh. Do you disagree with this?
But the way we actually resolved the debate about 'sound' is by reaching the understanding that there are two distinct concepts (acoustic vibrations and auditory experience) that are related in a certain way and also happen to share the same signifier. If, prior to reaching this understanding, you ask people to stipulate a definition for 'sound' when they use it, they will give you confused answers. I think saying "let's resolve confusions in metaethics by asking people to stipulating definitions for 'morally good'", before we reach a similar level of understanding regarding morality, is to likewise put the cart before the horse.
That doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me, which illustrates one reason why I prefer to taboo terms rather than bash my intuitions against the intuitions of others in an endless game of intuitionist conceptual analysis. :)
Perhaps the most common 'foundational' family of theories of meaning in linguistics and philosophy of language belong to the mentalist program, according to which semantic content is determined by the mental contents of the speaker, not by an abstract analysis of symbol forms taken out of context from their speaker. One straightforward application of a mentalist approach to meaning would conclude that if the speaker was assuming (or mentally representing) a judgment of moral wrongness in the sense of forbidden-by-God, then the meaning of the speaker's sentence refers in part to the demands of an imagined deity.
But "reaching this understanding" with regard to morality was precisely the goal of 'Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory' and 'Pluralistic Moral Reductionism.' I repeatedly made the point that people regularly use a narrow family of signifiers ('morally good', 'morally right', etc.) to call out a wide range of distinct concepts (divine attitudes, consequentialist predictions, deontological judgments, etc.), and that this leads to exactly the kind of confusion encountered by two people who are both using the signifier 'sound' to call upon two distinct concepts (acoustic vibrations and auditory experience).
With regard to "sound", the two concepts are complementary, and people can easily agree that "sound" sometimes refers to one or the other or often both of these concepts. The same is not true in the "morality" case. The concepts you list seem mutually exclusive, and most people have a strong intuition that "morality" can correctly refer to at most one of them. For example a consequentialist will argue that a deontologist is wrong when he asserts that "morality" means "adhering to rules X, Y, Z". Similarly a divine command theorist will not answer "well, that's true" if an egoist says "murdering Bob (in a way that serves my interests) is right, and I stipulate 'right' to mean 'serving my interests'".
It appears to me confusion here is not being caused mainly by linguistic ambiguity, i.e., people using the same word to refer to different things, which can be easily cleared up once pointed out. I see the situation as being closer to the following: in many cases, people are using "morality" to refer to the same concept, and are disagreeing over the nature of that concept. Some people think it's equivalent to or closely related to the concept of divine attitudes, and others think it has more to do with well-being of conscious creatures, etc.
When many people agree that murder is wrong but disagree on the reasons why, you can argue that they're referring to the same concept of morality but confused about its nature. But what about less clear-cut statements, like "women should be able to vote"? Many people in the past would've disagreed with that. Would you say they're referring to a different concept of morality?
I'm not sure what it means to say that people have the same concept of morality but disagree on many of its most fundamental properties. Do you know how to elucidate that?
I tried to explain some of the cause of persistent moral debate (as opposed to e.g. sound debate) in this way:
Let me try an analogy. Consider someone who believes in the phlogiston theory of fire, and another person who believes in the oxidation theory. They are having a substantive disagreement about the nature of fire, and not merely causing unnecessary confusion by using the same word "fire" to refer to different things. And if the phlogiston theorist were to say "by 'fire' I mean the release of phlogiston" then that would just be wrong, and would be adding to the confusion instead of helping to resolve it.
I think the situation with "morality" is closer to this than to the "sound" example.
(ETA: I could also try to define "same concept" more directly, for example as occupying roughly the same position in the graph of relationships between one's concepts, or playing approximately the same role in one's cognitive algorithms, but I'd rather not take an exact position on what "same concept" means if I can avoid it, since I have mostly just an intuitive understanding of it.)
This is the exact debate currently being hashed out by Richard Joyce and Stephen Finlay (whom I interviewed here). A while back I wrote an article that can serve as a good entry point into the debate, here. A response from Joyce is here and here. Finlay replies again here.
I tend to side with Finlay, though I suspect not for all the same reasons. Recently, Joyce has admitted that both languages can work, but he'll (personally) talk the language of error theory rather than the language of moral naturalism.
I'm having trouble understanding how the debate between Joyce and Finlay, over Error Theory, is the same as ours. (Did you perhaps reply to the wrong comment?)
Sorry, let me make it clearer...
The core of their debate concerns whether certain features are 'essential' to the concept of morality, and thus concerns whether people share the same concept of morality, and what it would mean to say that people share the concept of morality, and what the implications of that are. Phlogiston is even one of the primary examples used throughout the debate. (Also, witches!)
An analogy for "sharing common understanding of morality". In the sound example, even though the arguers talk about different situations in a confusingly ambiguous way, they share a common understanding of what facts hold in reality. If they were additionally ignorant about reality in different ways (even though there would still be the same truth about reality, they just wouldn't have reliable access to it), that would bring the situation closer to what we have with morality.
Can you elaborate this a bit more? I don't follow.
Even by getting such confused answers out in the open, we might get them to break out of complacency and recognize the presence of confusion. (Fat chance, of course.)
This makes sense. My impression of the part of the sequence written so far would've been significantly affected if I had this intention understood (I don't fully believe it now, but more so than I did before reading your comment).
What is 'it', here? My intention? If you have doubts that my intention has been (for many months) to first clear away the dust and confusion of mainstream metaethics so that we can focus more clearly on the more important problems of metaethics, you can ask Anna Salamon, because I spoke to her about my intentions for the sequence before I put up the first post in the sequence. I think I spoke to others about my intentions, too, but I can't remember which parts of my intentions I spoke about to which people (besides Anna). There's also this comment from me more than a month ago.
I believe that you believe it, but I'm not sure it's so. There are many reasons for any event. Specifically, you use austere debating in real arguments, which suggests that you place more weight on the method than just as a tool for exposing confusion.
(You seem to have reacted emotionally to a question of simple fact, and thus conflated the fact with your position on the fact, which status intuitions love to make people do. I think it's a bad practice.)
What do you mean by 'austere debating'? Do you just mean tabooing terms and then arguing about facts and anticipations? If so then yes, I do that all the time...