Weight for Stephen Finlay

Value and Implicature

Irreducibly Normative Properties

On the nonnaturalists’ view, ... reality has ‘brute, inexplicable’ normativity, which cannot be explained in motivational or other natural terms. This inexplicability is twofold: we cannot explain what normativity is in nonnormative language, and neither can we explain why the fundamental normative truths hold (e.g., why the fact that pain hurts counts in favor of preventing it). (Finlay 2007: 24)

Stephen Hawking's Community-Bound Voice A Functional Investigation of Self-Mentions in Stephen Hawking's Scientific Prose

Thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. While a large number of so called metadiscoursal resour...

The Obscurity of Internal Reasons

© 2009 Stephen Finlay S ince its publication in 1979, Bernard Williams’ “Internal and External Reasons”1 has been one of the most influential and widely discussed papers in ethics. I suggest here that the paper’s argument has nevertheless been universally misunderstood.2 On the standard interpretations, his argument — which he subsequently elaborated and de...

The Pragmatics of Normative Disagreement

On their surface, moral and normative sentences appear descriptive. But what kinds of facts could they describe? Many have been drawn to the idea that normative words like ‘ought’ and ‘good’ are used to refer to relational properties, consisting in a relation to something like a standard, rule, desire, or end, which can vary between contexts. On my preferred view, to say that s ought to φ is ro...