Volume 11, Number 2
February 2017
ARTICLE

Non-Naturalism and Reference

Volume 11, Number 2, February 2017, Pages 1–25
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v11i2.111
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Abstract

Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Nonnaturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas nonnaturalists are unable to provide equally satisfactory metasemantic explanations. This article first describes how the previous nonnaturalist accounts of reference fail to tell us how the normative predicates could have come to refer to the nonnatural properties rather than to the natural ones. I will then use the so-called qua-problem to show how the causal theories of reference of naturalists also fail to fix the reference of normative predicates to unique natural properties. Finally, I will suggest that, just as naturalists need to rely on the noncausal mechanism of reference magnetism to solve the previous problem, nonnaturalists, too, can rely on the very same idea to respond to the pressing metasemantic challenges that they face concerning reference.
Copyright © 2017 Jussi Suikkanen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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