Outscoping and Discourse Threat

Abstract

For various philosophical purposes it is sometimes necessary to give truth-conditions for sentences of a discourse in other terms. According to Agustín Rayo, when doing so it is sometimes legitimate to use the terms of that very discourse, so long as the terms do not occur in the truth-conditions themselves. I argue that giving truth-conditions in this ‘outscoping’ way prevents one from answering ‘discourse threat’ (for example, the threat of indeterminacy).     

The Distinctiveness of Christian Ethics

Book reviewed in this article:
John E. Colwell, Living the Christian Story: The Distinctiveness of Christian Ethics     

Substantivity in feminist metaphysics

Elizabeth Barnes and Mari Mikkola raise the important question of whether certain recent approaches to metaphysics exclude feminist metaphysics. My own approach (from my book Writing the Book of the World) does not, or so I argue. I do define “substantive” questions in terms of fundamentality; and the concepts of feminist metaphysics (and social metaphysics generally) are nonfundamental. But my definition does not count a question as being nonsubstantive simply because it involves nonfundamental concepts. Questions about the causal structure of the world, including the causal structure of the social world, are generally substantive because their answers are not sensitive to any alternate, equally good conceptual choices we could have made. I also argue that such questions are substantive regardless of the ontology of social kinds.