Laura and Francois Schroter, A Slim Semantics for Thin Moral Terms?

This is an entirely negative piece. It’s just making a couple of objections to Ralph Wedgwood’s paper Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms. The main objection seems to be that if (P) and (I) are the right conceptual role rules for ‘pain’ and ‘intend’, then Ralph’s version of Peacocke’s version of conceptual role semantics leads to crazy meaning postulates, in particular meaning postulates for ‘pain’ and ‘intend’ that involve normativity. (I’d try and summarise why this is so, but it would take about five pages – and I’d mostly be plagiarising.)

(P) Being in pain commits one to accepting ‘I am in pain’ (should the question arise).
(I) Intending to do x commits one to accepting ‘I intend to do x’ (should the question arise).

But neither of these look very plausible to me. Both of these seem to suppose that certain mental states (pain in the first instance, intention in the second) are luminous. And there are very few luminous states, if any. Either that, or they suppose that we are committed to accepting things that we are in no position to know. Neither claim seems right. The broader objection that the Schroters are trying to make, that Wedgwood’s theory seems to lead to normativity turning up where it ain’t wanted, looks like it could be plausible. But the examples they use don’t work to make that point.