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Why conceptual competence won’t help the non-naturalist epistemologist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Preston J. Werner
Preston J. Werner*
Affiliation:
Centre for Moral and Political Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
*
Email: pjwerner1@gmail.com
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Abstract

Non-naturalist normative realists face an epistemological objection: They must explain how their preferred route of justification ensures a non-accidental connection between justified moral beliefs and the normative truths. One strategy for meeting this challenge begins by pointing out that we are semantically or conceptually competent in our use of the normative terms, and then argues that this competence guarantees the non-accidental truth of some of our first-order normative beliefs. In this paper, I argue against this strategy by illustrating that this competence based strategy undermines the non-naturalist's ability to capture the robustly normative content of our moral beliefs.

Keywords

Conceptual competencemoral epistemologymetasemanticsmoral beliefmoral knowledgenon-naturalism
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 48 , Issue 3-4: Special issue: Representation and Evaluation , 2018 , pp. 616 - 637
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2018

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