Resisting the New Contextualist Orthodoxy in Metaethics

Abstract According to metaethical contextualism, normative sentence types do not express complete truth-evaluable contents but rather only a sentence token as uttered in a context does so. This is because, on this view, the context is required to supplement the missing elements of the sentence-type meaning to complete the content. After explaining this currently popular view, this chapter makes three objections to it. It argues that metaethical contextualism seems incompatible with the intuitive felicity conditions of normative utterances, threatens to lead to regresses of analysis, and fails to fit the modular explanations of our linguistic abilities. This chapter then concludes by outlining a minimalist alternative and several strategies for how semantic minimalists can accommodate many of the central motivations for metaethical contextualism.