{"product_id":"9780190463625","title":"The Meaning of 'Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics","description":"The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. In this book Matthew Chrisman develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator, and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. This is a metanormative account that agrees with traditional descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth-conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation of their meaning. But Chrisman argues that this leaves important metasemantic questions about what it is in virtue of which ought-sentences have the meanings that they have unanswered. His appeal to inferentialism aims to provide a viable anti-descriptivist but also anti-expressivist answer to these questions.  \"This is a remarkably bold and interesting book. Chrisman challenges nothing less than the entire conceptual framework within which most previous metaethics (and indeed, much other contemporary philosophy) has been done, and advances a very ambitious rethinking of the theoretical space. It's not only ambitious, but also extremely imaginative and smart, and Chrisman's scholarship is at a rare level, as he has assimilated a literature that is unusually broad both in terms of field and historical scope.\"-Stephen Finlay, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47180327289072,"sku":"9780190463625","price":55.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780190463625_p0.jpg?v=1769914631","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780190463625","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}