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(2010) Synthese 177 (1).
Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing ‘detaching problems’ by their failure to license modus ponens. I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems. I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for ‘ought’. The semantics for ‘ought’ that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an end-relational theory of normativity with a comparative probabilistic semantics for ‘ought’ provides a more satisfactory solution.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9640-7
Full citation:
Finlay, S. (2010). What ought probably means, and why you can't detach it. Synthese 177 (1), pp. 67-89.