In this paper I argue that the explanationist argument in favour of moral realism fails. According to this argument, the ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations provides strong evidence for, or entails, the metaphysical claims of moral realism. Some have rejected this argument by denying that moral explanations are ever good explanations. My criticism is different. I will argue that even if we accept that moral explanations are (sometimes) good explanations the metaphysical claims of realism do not follow.

According to moral realists, moral properties such as justice and goodness take their own unique place in nature's ontological roll-call. Although realists disagree about the nature of these moral properties — for example, whether they are reducible or otherwise constituted by non-moral or natural properties — they all agree that such properties are genuine constituents of the world that are sometimes instantiated by objects, events or states of affairs.

Many theorists hold that there is, among value concepts, a fundamental distinction between thin ones and thick ones. Among thin ones are concepts like good and right. Among concepts that have been regarded as thick are discretion, caution, enterprise, industry, assiduity, frugality, economy, good sense, prudence, discernment, treachery, promise, brutality, courage, coward, lie, gratitude, lewd, perverted, rude, glorious, graceful, exploited, and, of course, many others. Roughly speaking, thick concepts are value concepts with significant descriptive content. I will discuss a number of problems having to do with how best to understand the notion of a thick concept. Thick concepts have been widely discussed in the metaethical literature. But some important problems concerning what thick concepts are supposed to be have not been squarely addressed even in the most systematic of these discussions. Here I want to highlight these problems.

Does epistemic justification aim at truth? The vast majority of epistemologists instinctively answer ‘Yes’; it's the textbook response. Joseph Cruz and John Pollock surprisingly say no. In ‘The Chimerical Appeal of Epistemic Externalism’ they argue that justification bears no interesting connection to truth; justification does not even aim at truth. ‘Truth is not a very interesting part of our best understanding’ of justification (C&P 2004, 137); it has no ‘connection to the truth.’ A ‘truth-aimed … epistemology is not entitled to carry the day’ (C&P 2004, 138, emphasis added).

Pollock and Cruz's argument for this surprising conclusion is of general interest for it is ‘out of step with a very common view on the part of epistemologists, both internalist and externalist alike’ (C&P 2004, 136), as nearly all ‘epistemologists have claimed that truth and falsity play a crucial role in distinguishing between justified and unjustified beliefs [for] believing truths is the ultimate aim of human rational cognition’ (C&P 2004, 125; cf. Audi 1988).

This paper explores the relationships between Davidson's indeterminacy of interpretation thesis and two semantic properties of sentences that have come to be recognized recently, namely semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision. More specifically, I will examine what the indeterminacy thesis entails for sentences of the form ‘By sentence S (or word w), agent A means that m’ and ‘Agent A believes that p.’ My primary goal is to shed light on the indeterminacy thesis and its consequences. I will distinguish two kinds of indeterminacy that have very different sources and very different consequences. But this does not purport to be an exhaustive study: there may well be other forms of indeterminacy that this paper does not address.

I will first explain the phenomena of semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision, and then explore their relationships with the indeterminacy thesis.

Towards the end of her seminal work on the notion of representation Hanna Pitkin makes the following observation:

After introducing Millianism and touching on two problems raised by genuinely empty names for Millianism (section I), I provide a brief exposition of the Gappy Proposition View (GPV) and of how different versions of this view can reply to the problems in question (section II). In the following sections I develop my reasons against the GPV. First, I will try to argue that apparently promising arguments for the claim that gappy propositions are propositions are not successful (section III). Then, I will develop two arguments against GPs via demonstrating two odd consequences of the GPV: (a) that there can be an atomic proposition which contains other propositions that are not the semantic contents of any part of the sentence expressing that atomic proposition, and (b) that propositional structures are propositions (section IV). And finally, I will attempt to show that if any of these views can provide a successful defense of Millianism, it can do so without GPs, given some slight changes (section V). I will conclude that GPs should be avoided (section VI).