Imagine coming across an alternative community such that, while they have normative terms like 'ought' with the same action-guiding roles and relationships to each other, their normative terms come to pick out different properties. When we come across such a community, or even just imagine it, those of us who strive to be moral and rational want to ask something like the following:
Further Question: Which set of concepts ought we use — theirs or ours?
The problem, first raised by Eklund (2017), is that on almost any metasemantic theory, Further Question cannot be stated in a way that captures the spirit of what we want to ask. In this paper, I propose a solution to this problem by appeal to edenic representation, inspired by, but not identical to, David Chalmers’ (2010) notion of edenic content. The rough idea here is that representation is edenic to the extent that the representational vehicle mirrors, in quality and structure, the represented property.
Imagine coming across an alternative community such that, while they have normative terms like 'ought' with the same action-guiding roles and relationships to each other, their normative terms come to pick out different properties. When we come across such a community, or even just imagine it, those of us who strive to be moral and rational want to ask something like the following:
Further Question: Which set of concepts ought we use — theirs or ours?
The problem, first raised by Eklund (2017), is that on almost any metasemantic theory, Further Question cannot be stated in a way that captures the spirit of what we want to ask. In this paper, I propose a solution to this problem by appeal to edenic representation, inspired by, but not identical to, David Chalmers’ (2010) notion of edenic content. The rough idea here is that representation is edenic to the extent that the representational vehicle mirrors, in quality and structure, the represented property.