Indeterminacy and Normativity

Abstract

This paper develops and defends the view that substantively normative uses of words like “good”, “right” and “ought” (e.g. moral uses) are irresolvably indeterminate: any single case of application is like a borderline case for a vague or indeterminate term, in that the meaning-fixing facts (use, intentions, conventions, causal connections, reference magnets, etc.), together with the non-linguistic facts, fail to determine a truth-value for the target sentence in context. Normative claims, like vague or indeterminate borderline claims, are not meaningless, though. By making them, the speaker communicates information about the precisifications that s/he accepts. The analogy with vague/indeterminate language, I argue, lays out a new and interesting foundation for a subjectivist approach to normativity.