Matthew Chrisman

Robust realists and quasirealist expressivists have both been accused, in different ways, of being committed to an alienated stance towards fundamental oughts, reasons, and values. Either normative facts obtain completely independently of our cares and concerns, in which case, why do we care about them as much as we do? Or their reality is something more like a projection from or construction out of our ways of normative thinking, in which case why should we care about them as much as we do? Sometimes this looks like philosophical bedrock in metaethics. But in this paper I want to explore the possibility that inferentialism offers a way past the impasse. In the first instance, this is by suggesting that normative terms can be viewed analogously to logical terms in getting their meaning neither from what they refer to nor from what attitudes they primarily serve to convey. But I also want to propose a way of thinking of normative/logical facts and normative/logical thinking as reciprocally related to each other in a way that rejects both the realist’s commitment to the explanatory independence of normative/logical facts from normative/logical thinking and the expressivist’s commitment to starting our explanation of normative/logical facts with an account of normative/logical thinking.