Does Informational Semantics Commit Euthyphro’s Fallacy?

To commit Euthyphro's fallacy is to endorse a pair of incompatible explanations, one constitutive and the other causal. Asked to explain the nature of piety, Euthyphro hazards that being pious consists in being an object of the gods' love. But asked what causes the gods to love what they do, he holds with the commonsensical thought that the gods love pious people because they are pious. As Socrates points out (and for reasons we shall shortly rehearse), Euthyphro cannot have it both ways. To hold that one's god-belovedness is constitutive of one's status as a pious person is to rule out its being one's piety that prompts the gods' affection. More generally, we commit the fallacy when we hold of two properties f and g both of the following: possession of f constitutes possession of g, and possession of g causes possession of f. 1 In the course of pursuing the familiar philosophical project of reducing one type of fact to another, philosophers are often led to analyses that run opposite the grain of our ordinary view of the phenomena in question. The most striking instances of this are cases of what Kripke calls " inversion of a conditional " , in the central species of which what we are pre-philosophically inclined to regard as a cause/effect relation is " inverted " such that the presence of the 'effect' is said to be constitutive of the presence of the 'cause' (Kripke 1982, 93fn). To take one of Kripke's examples of a view reached by this means: " We do not condemn certain acts because they are immoral; they are immoral because we condemn them " (93fn). Euthyphro's fallacy might seem a particular risk in the context of this maneuver. But historically, reductionists have rarely gone in for it. Thus the moral subjectivist of Kripke's example acknowledges that the Jason Bridges, 11/8/2006 Euthyphro's Fallacy ordinary view and its " inverse " are in conflict; she does not hold, à la Euthyphro, that they can be correct together. Contemporary naturalism pursues its reductive ambitions with a sophisticated conceptual arsenal that was unavailable to earlier reductionists. One danger of sophistication is that it can serve to paper over underlying confusions and inconsistencies, which in the context of the more austere formulations of past reductionists might have been exposed to the light of day. I will argue that this is just what has happened …