Conceptual Analysis in Metaethics

Abstract

Conceptual analysis is therefore often equated with, and pursued by means of, semantic analysis or study of linguistic meaning. This chapter presents two different approaches to normative concepts and their ­analysis—Prototype Theory and Network Theory—that depart from the Classical Theory in a less radical way, accepting the central tenet of cognitivism but rejecting the tenet of ­definitionism, at least as classically understood. It investigates the major responses in roughly reverse order of how radically they depart from the Classical Theory. A particularly radical departure from the Classical Theory is found in "Cornell Realism", which seeks at once to evade the Open Question Arguments (OQA's) challenge and put metaphysical analysis of normative properties on a respectably naturalistic footing by freeing it from conceptual analysis altogether. This combines synthetic naturalism with the doctrine of semantic externalism, which rejects the classical tenet of competency as grasping a definition.

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