Department of Philosophy
Faculty
Joshua Gert
Associate Professor (University of Illinois-Chicago)
151 Dodd Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1500
Office: 287 Dodd Hall
Phone: (850) 644-0218
Fax: (850) 644-3832
Email: jgert@admin.fsu.edu
Office Hours: On leave, 2007-2008
Brute Rationality (Cambridge University Press, June 2004).
One goal of my research is to shed light on the philosophically mystifying notions that occur all the time in everyday evaluative thought: notions such as ‘good’, ‘harm’, ‘ought’, ‘reasonable’, and so on. Most people tend – in my opinion rightly – to think that they are expressing factual claims when they use such words: for example, most people think that it is simply true that one ought to avoid injury, if no good will come of it. But properties such as goodness or ought-to-be-done-ness do not seem to be properties that are actually in the world. No scientific instruments, however subtly contrived, could discover the badness in injury or the goodness in pleasure or knowledge. It is my goal to explain why this does not matter to the question of whether evaluative claims are capable of truth and falsity just as much as non-evaluative claims about the world around us. It is crucial for this goal that a methodology be worked out – a general way of accounting for the meanings of evaluative terms. In my view one very promising methodology focuses on the relevance, for the development of referring words, of agreement in human responses to various objects and events. One surprisingly fruitful avenue of research that helps explain and exploit this methodology makes use of an analogy between color and value. I have recently been doing a good deal of reading and writing on this issue.