Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements

ISBN-13: 9780198785897 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 256 str.

Bart Streumer

Opis

Unbelievable Errors defends an error theory about all normative judgements: not just moral judgements, but also judgements about reasons for action, judgements about reasons for belief, and instrumental normative judgements. This theory states that normative judgements are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, but that normative properties do not exist. It therefore entails that all normative judgements are false.

Bart Streumer also argues, however, that we cannot believe this error theory. This may seem to be a problem for the theory. But he argues that it makes this error theory more likely to be true, since it undermines objections to the theory and it makes it harder to reject the arguments for the theory.

He then sketches how certain other philosophical theories can be defended in a similar way. He concludes that to make philosophical progress, we need to make a sharp distinction between a theory's truth and our ability to believe it.

Recenzje

Bertrand Russell wrote that the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to be worth stating only to end up with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. In his aptly named Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer has produced an exemplary case of philosophy so described.

O autorze

Bart Streumer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. He previously taught at the University of Reading. His work on metaethics has appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.