Abstract

Metaethicists are interested in questions in the philosophy of language as these apply to ethical and more generally normative terms. One of the core questions in the philosophy of language is how to explain the meaning of terms and the sentences in which they figure. Hence, an important question in metaethics is how to explain the meaning of ethical terms and the sentences in which they figure. In the philosophy of language, one of the main accounts of meaning stresses the roles terms play in an interconnected web of meanings central to our linguistic practice of talking about the world and what to do in it. This general view of meaning is sometimes dubbed “conceptual role semantics.” The basic idea is that the meaning of a term is not something it has, independent of conceptual connections to other words and sentences, but rather something determined by these very connections.