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Abstract
Sellars argues that a word stands for a concept when there are good arguments in which it is essentially involved. This alternative to empiricist theories of content (such as Ayer’s) can allow the conceptual character of some nonempirical language (e.g., moral, mathematical, logical). Moral judgments (as verbal expressions of attitudes) express concepts because good reasons can be brought to bear concerning such judgments. Further, these reasons allow us to vindicate moral first principles. In “rational disciplines” such as morality and mathematics, the derivation of subsidiary moral maxims from first principles is then a matter of consistency. This nonempiricist account of moral conceptual content allows Sellars to situate normative ethical discourse within a scientific realist framework: As a rational discipline, moral judgments can be contentful without troublesome ontological commitments. Further, Sellars’s account indicates how such an expressivist theory could (unlike, say, Ayer’s expressivist theory) offer an account of moral expressions as intersubjective and objective.
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