Normative realism and Brentanian accounts of fittingness.

Brentano is often considered the originator of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, on which to be valuable is to be that which it’s fitting to value. But there has been comparatively little attention paid to Brentano’s argument for this analysis. That argument advances the stronger claim that f...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 202; no. 6; pp. 1 - 26
Autor principal: Sass, Reuben
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Dec2023
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:Brentano is often considered the originator of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, on which to be valuable is to be that which it’s fitting to value. But there has been comparatively little attention paid to Brentano’s argument for this analysis. That argument advances the stronger claim that fittingness is part of the analysis of normativity. Since the argument rests on an analogy between truth and fittingness, its impact may seem limited by the idiosyncratic features of Brentano’s later notion of truth. I argue, however, that the Brentanian argument is defensible even if fittingness is analogized to a more typical realist account of truth. The result is what I call the worldly Brentanian account of normativity. I defend this account as a form of naturalistic realism. I then show how the account can fare better than prominent alternatives against two kinds of error-theoretic arguments.