Normative Sentences Research Articles

The Logical Possibility of Moral Dilemmas in Expressivist Semantics

In this paper, using Mark Schroeder’s (2008a) expressivist semantic framework for normative language as a case study, I will identify difficulties that even an expressivist semantic theory capable of addressing the Frege-Geach problem will encounter in handling the logical possibility of moral dilemmas. To this end, I will draw on a classical puzzle formulated by McConnell (1978) that the logical possibility of moral dilemmas conflicts with some of the prima facie plausible axioms of the standard deontic logic, which include obligation implies permission. On the tentative assumption that proponents of ethical expressivism should be generally committed to securing the logical possibility of moral dilemmas in their semantic theories, I will explore whether and how expressivists can successfully invalidate obligation implies permission within the framework developed by Schroeder. The case study eventually reveals that this can indeed be a hard task for expressivists. Generalizing from the case study, I will suggest that the source of the difficulty ultimately lies in the mentalist assumption of the expressivist semantic project that the logico-semantic relations exhibited by normative sentences should be modeled in terms of the psychological attitudes that speakers express by uttering them. My final goal will be to show that the difficulty expressivists face in dealing with the logical possibility of moral dilemmas is a reflection of the more general problem that their commitment to the mentalist assumption prevents them from flexibly adopting or dropping axioms in their semantic theories to get the right technical results.

Obligation and Value in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Law (Edmund Husserl’s Works)

Basing upon the two fundamental works of Edmund Husserl (Logische Untersuchungen and Idee) the author presents Husserl’s concepts of obligation and value according to the phenomenological reduction and the theory of the constitution of objects. Within the context of reduction the conclusions are: as according to Husserl the substance of normative sentences in valuation, the problems of obligation may be reduced to problems of valuation. The sense (Sinn) proves to be fundamental, prior to the existence. If anything should come to being in the ontological meaning it must become a moment of intentional life of consciousness. That is why the object and value exist in the same way but are only different names of some units of sense. The difference becomes clearer on a ‘higher’ level when they are characterised as intentional objects and the intentional experience directed towards them. Contrary to objects we can be directed towards values in a perceptible way (erfassenseise). The experience of value is always a based act. These acts are analysed against the background of noesis and noema. On the stage of constitution of the world it appears however that the substance of morality may be cognised with a personalistic attitude.

Detention of a person under the martial law: grounds and authorized officials for implementation

From the beginning of the armed aggression of the russian federation on the territory of Ukraine, 13 changes and additions have been amended to the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, that were related to the transformation of various institutions of the criminal process, and in particular the institution of detention. The conducted analysis made it possible to understand that the detention of a person by an authorized official without a decision of an investigating judge in conditions of martial law is carried out in accordance with the general procedure specified in Art. 208-213 of the CPC of Ukraine, taking into account the features established by Art. 615 of the CPC of Ukraine.
 It has been established that the list of grounds for detention under martial law, compared to peacetime, is extended, as the possibility of detaining a person not only on the grounds specified in Art. 208 of the CPC of Ukraine, as well as in cases where there are grounds to believe that a person suspected of committing any type of crime may escape with the aim of evasion of criminal responsibility. It has been proven that the application of these normative sentences is conditioned by the effect of martial law and, accordingly, the moment and circumstances of the crime. This ground, in particular, can be used to justify the detention of a person suspected of collaborative activity, violation of the laws and customs of war, creation of paramilitary or armed groups not provided by law, as well as "non-military crimes", etc.
 The right to detain a person in the conditions of martial law, as well as in peacetime, is granted to an authorized official, that is, a person who is authorized by law to carry out detention, in particular, employees of the Security Service of Ukraine; military personnel, as well as employees of the State Border Service of Ukraine; servicemen of the National Guard of Ukraine; a policeman; employees of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine; to authorized officials of the State Bureau of Investigation and others. The need to improve the legislative provisions of the Laws of Ukraine "On the Security Service of Ukraine", "On the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine", "On the State Bureau of Investigation" regarding the clear authorization of the employees of the SSU, NACB, SBI to detain persons suspected of committing crimes was emphasized.

Towards a Sigmatics of the Word ‘Norm’: An Ontological Turn in the Semiotics of the Normative

During the twentieth century, the development of semiotics and philosophy of language had a great influence on the investigation of normative phenomena, particularly within the philosophy of law: the analysis of normative language became the prevalent methodological approach among many legal philosophers, and the science of law was frequently understood as an analysis of the object language of law. This approach led to the development of a linguistic ontology of the normative and to a semiotic theory of the validity of norms, in which norms are conceived of as linguistic entities, and their validity is accordingly conceived of as a predicate of normative sentences. However, the resort to a semiotic approach for the investigation of normative phenomena does not necessarily imply the adoption of a linguistic ontology of norms. The semiotic analysis of the possible referents of the word ‘norm’ elaborated by Conte (“Studio per una teoria della validità”, Giappichelli, Torino [1970]1995; entry “Norma” in Enciclopedia filosofica, Bompiani, Milano, 2006) shows that the word ‘norm’ may alternately refer to both linguistic entities and non-linguistic entities, such as deontic states-of-affairs and deontic noemata. Such a “sigmatic” analysis exhibits the relevance of the ontological notion of deontic states-of-affairs, and of the correlative notion of “syntactical validity”. After reconstructing Conte’s theory of validity, we wonder whether validity is necessarily to be conceived of as systemic validity, or also an asystemic and factual validity of norms should be considered.

Representation, Deflationism, and the Question of Realism

How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought goes, while expressivists appeal instead to desire-like mental states in their explanations of meaning. However, I argue that, if we adopt a deflationary approach to representation and other related notions, there need be no such explanatory divide between expressivism and anything recognizable as a plausible notion of normative realism. Any alleged explanatory criterion for realism will either be incompatible with deflationism, or it will fail to capture some standard versions of normative realism. I conclude that, in a deflationary framework, expressivism is compatible with genuine realism.

Quasirealism as semantic dispensability

I argue that standard explanationist solutions to the problem of creeping minimalism are largely on the right track, but they fail to correctly specify the kind of explanation that is relevant to distinguishing realism from quasirealism. Quasirealism should not be distinguished from realism in terms of the explanations it gives of why a normative judgment—a normative sentence or attitude—has the semantic content that it has. Rather, it should be distinguished in terms of the explanations it offers of what the semantic content of a normative judgment is.

Normativity of Prescriptions in Adolf Reinach’s Aprioristic Theory of Right

In the Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl defines that which is normative as the objectively regular with its rules of regularity, which can be recognised rationally – normativity concerns the being itself and the rational cognition of the being (logic as a normative discipline establishing the rules of scientific knowledge, as the science of science). Instead, Adolf Reinach in The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law defines the notion of norm as polysemantic and distinguishes the legal provisions (the prescriptive sentences), formulated within a given community, from the basic norms which are grounded in the objective (including moral) justness of the states of affairs. The obligation of the being and the obligation of acting exist in themselves, independently from cognition. In turn, “enactments and the propositions which express enactments” as a kind of normative sentences have the character of normalisation, but they require a person to pronounce them. The prescriptions realise and refer to what is objectively being and to the objectivity of what is being and obligatory. In my text, I present Reinach’s position on the relations between norms and provisions (as prescriptive propositions “which express enactments”) referring his theories to the Husserlian concept of normativity.

Deontic Paradoxes and Tableau System for Kalinowski’s Deontic Logic K1

In 1953, Jerzy Kalinowski published his paper on the logic of normative sentences. The paper is recognized as one of the first publications on the formal system of deontic logic. The aim of this paper is to present a tableau system for Kalinowski’s deontic logic and to discuss some of the topics related to the paradoxes of deontic logic.

Neural Measures Reveal Implicit Learning during Language Processing.

Language input is highly variable; phonological, lexical, and syntactic features vary systematically across different speakers, geographic regions, and social contexts. Previous evidence shows that language users are sensitive to these contextual changes and that they can rapidly adapt to local regularities. For example, listeners quickly adjust to accented speech, facilitating comprehension. It has been proposed that this type of adaptation is a form of implicit learning. This study examined a similar type of adaptation, syntactic adaptation, to address two issues: (1) whether language comprehenders are sensitive to a subtle probabilistic contingency between an extraneous feature (font color) and syntactic structure and (2) whether this sensitivity should be attributed to implicit learning. Participants read a large set of sentences, 40% of which were garden-path sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Critically, but unbeknownst to participants, font color probabilistically predicted the presence of a garden-path structure, with 75% of garden-path sentences (and 25% of normative sentences) appearing in a given font color. ERPs were recorded during sentence processing. Almost all participants indicated no conscious awareness of the relationship between font color and sentence structure. Nonetheless, after sufficient time to learn this relationship, ERPs time-locked to the point of syntactic ambiguity resolution in garden-path sentences differed significantly as a function of font color. End-of-sentence grammaticality judgments were also influenced by font color, suggesting that a match between font color and sentence structure increased processing fluency. Overall, these findings indicate that participants can implicitly detect subtle co-occurrences between physical features of sentences and abstract, syntactic properties, supporting the notion that implicit learning mechanisms are generally operative during online language processing.

A Primitive Solution to the Negation Problem

It has recently been alleged that expressivism cannot account for the obvious fact that normative sentences and their negations express inconsistent kinds of attitudes. I explain how the expressivist can respond to this objection. I offer an account of attitudinal inconsistency that takes it to be a combination of descriptive and normative relations. The account I offer to explain these relations relies on a combination of functionalism about normative judgments and expressivism about the norms governing them. It holds that the inconsistency of normative judgments is primitive. One potential problem for this view is that the large number of normative primitives that the expressivist will allegedly need to accept will render the view grossly unparsimonious. In defending this thesis, I suggest that it is a mistake to hold the lack of normative parsimony of expressivism against its core psychological claims.

On Legal Decisions within the Scope of Application of Elastic Normative Propositions

The purpose of this jurisprudential study is to clarify the meaning of a normative sentence. Although the work is theoretical and discusses the logical character of a normative sentence, the approach also relies on real data analyzed in my previously published more comprehensive study on 6000 cases.As a practical activity, a legal decision is divided into contributory factors with very little common theoretical basis. All the problems coming up in a legal decision cannot fruitfully be examined within the framework of the same philosophical concept system.I have distinguished between three different groups of questions as separate problems: 1) the ascertainment of the truth in an individual case; 2) the questions connected to interpretation and qualification; and 3) the problems connected to the determination of the consequence. As far as this study is concerned, it is possible to think that the principal questions center around the formulation of either the essential elements (F) or the consequence (G). The differences between these alternatives are probably not great, because the issue is, in any case, how to describe a possible situation in the world.

How to Be an Ethical Expressivist

Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I callordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, the expressivist can explain the semantic properties of normative sentences in terms of the logical properties of that attitude. Expressivism's problems with capturing the logical relations among normative sentences can be reduced to the familiar, more tractable problem of explaining certain coherence constraints on preferences. Particular attention is given to the interpretation of wide‐scope negation. The proposed solution is also extended to other types of embedded contexts—most notably, disjunctions.

Giving up Hume's Guillotine

The appealing principle that you can't get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, sometimes called Hume's Guillotine (or, more soberly, Hume's Law), faces a well-known challenge: it must give a clear account of the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences while dodging counter-examples. I argue in this paper that recent efforts to answer this challenge fail because the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences cannot be described well enough to be of any help. As a result, no version of the principle is both true and adequate. Yet a different principle—that no normative terms are synonymous with any descriptive terms—can satisfy much of the motivation we had for defending Hume's Guillotine in the first place. I show briefly how this second principle can explain why is-ought arguments are invalid, block some attempted deductive justifications of beliefs with normative terms, and create an explanatory advantage for moral non-cognitivism. Just so, giving up Hume's Guillotine is the prudent thing to do.

Jerzy Kalinowski’s Logic of Normative Sentences Revisited

The paper tackles two problems. The first one is to grasp the real meaning of Jerzy Kalinowski's theory of normative sentences. His formal system K 1 is a simple logic formulated in a very limited ...

STYLISTIC POTENTIAL OF GERMAN SYNTAX

The article deals with the stylistic potential of German syntactic means, their expressive–stylistic and functional–stylistic features. The study sets out to reveal the expressive syntactic means. Disorder of a proper sentence structure makes its expressiveness. In contrast to a «syntactic tension», the article analyses a «syntactic loosening» of a normative sentence structure as a current trend in German syntax, as a source of syntactic expressiveness and the most productive instrument of simplification of a sentence structure. Thus, it assimilates to the structure of the everyday language. Syntactic «loosening» of a normative sentence structure is formed by a simple hypotaxis, a failure of closed–in constructions and a lack of grammatical agreement among sentence parts. The study is carried out in the context of historical dynamics. The renunciation of a difficult multi-stage hypotaxis but using of a simple sentence as block structures leads to expression saving and easily understanding. Each of the blocks has a large amount of information. Parts of the sentence are in the same line and are united with nominal juxtaposition. Their development is closely related to the nominalization trend. The influence of colloquial speech on the literary German and its written form, closing to natural speech lead to the renunciation of closed–in constructions. The author proves that the removal of grammatical structures isn't new for the modern literary German, but it presents the perfectly sound tendency. As a result of this study, there is a conclusion that the modification of the grammatical structure isn't the result of an abrupt shift or radical turn but it is a natural continuation of a dynamic process.

One Ought Too Many

[Extract] Normative branches of philosophy take special interest in claims expressed by sentences of the form ‘S ought to φ', where S is some agent and φ-ing is some action (broadly conceived). We'll call sentences satisfying this description agential. These claims raise many important philosophical issues, such as: Which ones are true? What makes them true? How can we know if they are true? What follows from them? Some philosophers have hoped that light would be cast on these issues if we could get clearer on the exact meaning of this word ‘ought’. Once we start looking to language for philosophical clues we should notice that the word ‘ought’ is also employed in different kinds of sentences. It appears in normative sentences with different grammatical forms, like ‘It ought to be that Charlie was born a girl’, and ‘There ought to be less suffering in the world’. For convenience we'll call sentences like these nonagential.1 (It also has a non-normative epistemic use meaning approximately what is probable, as in ‘The sky ought to get dark soon’.) In these other sentences, ‘ought’ appears to represent a propositional operator, O(p).

Corrección y cognitivismo. Comentarios al argumento sobre la pretensión de corrección de Robert Alexy

El argumento de la pretensión de corrección ha sido presentado por R. Alexy con el objeto de defender la idea según la cual los enunciados normativos admiten respuestas objetivas. Mi propósito en este trabajo es el de preservar esta aspiración inicial, aun a costa de desviarme de algunas de las ideas originales que soportan el argumento. Empiezo explicando una versión pura del cognitivismo normativo, con base en la cual propongo reconstruir el argumento de la pretensión de corrección. Sostengo que el contexto de emisión de las emisiones normativas está dirigido a la posibilidad de cognición normativa, pero no la constituye. Lo que constituye tanto la posibilidad como la necesidad de cognición, es la estructura proposicional de las normas. Concluyo que el argumento de la pretensión de corrección debe salvaguardar una distinción entre el contexto de emisión de un enunciado normativo y la proposición que individualiza el contenido de la emisión.

Against Normative Naturalism

This paper considers normative naturalism, understood as the view that (i) normative sentences are descriptive of the way things are, and (ii) their truth/falsity does not require ontology beyond the ontology of the natural world. Assuming (i) for the sake of argument, I here show that (ii) is false not only as applied to ethics, but more generally as applied to practical and epistemic normativity across the board. The argument is a descendant of Moore's Open Question Argument and Hume's Is-Ought Gap. It goes roughly as follows: to ensure that natural ontology suffices for normative truth, there must be semantically grounded entailments from the natural truths to the normative truths. There are none. So natural ontology does not suffice for normative truth.

Correctness and Cognitivism. Remarks on Robert Alexy's Argument from the Claim to Correctness*

AbstractThe argument from the claim to correctness has been put forward by Robert Alexy to defend the view that normative utterances admit of objective answers. My purpose in this paper is to preserve this initial aspiration even at the cost of diverting from some of the original ideas in support of the argument. I begin by spelling out a full‐blooded version of normative cognitivism, against which I propose to reconstruct the argument from the claim to correctness. I argue that the context of uttering normative propositions points to the possibility of normative cognition, but does not constitute it. What constitutes the possibility of cognition is, as of necessity, the propositional structure of norms. I conclude that the argument from the claim to correctness ought to safeguard a distinction between the context of uttering a normative sentence and the proposition that individuates the content of the utterance.

Normativity in tractatus

Although the Tractatus is composed of meaningless sentences, as Wittgenstein himself acknowledges in the penultimate section, according to the traditional interpretation they are not just plain nonsense because they convey important truths about the common structure of language and reality. These truths cannot be said but can only be shown. Resolute readers claim that the notion of important or illuminating nonsense is inconsistent with the context principle, which Wittgenstein ascribed to in the Tractatus, and that most of its sentences are mere gibberish. In this paper I maintain that Wittgenstein thought there were meaningless sentences that show something, only what they show are not truths but rules. Such sentences, which comprise the Tractatus, are normative and do not represent any state-of affairs, therefore they cannot be meaningfully expressed in a purely descriptive language Wittgenstein considers in the Tractatus. His claim that there is something that cannot be said but can only be shown is the first version of the thesis of nonreducibility of normative sentences, which he later developed in the rule-following considerations.