Whose language and reason? Just your own, or a carefully chosen sample?
I don't believe (drawing on Wittgenstein's private language argument) that language and reason can ever be held singularly by just one person; it's the fact they are in (in whatever part) common with at least one other person that make them language and reason. And so we get a sense of linguistic communities who share a common language and reason. I do think that the vast majority (if perhaps not all) of 21st century Earthlings actually share to a large degree many of the deeper structures of a common language and reason; at the same time, there's a very clear sense in which you and I, despite speaking very similar forms of English, are speaking different languages.
To think of it in terms of language, obviously everyone has their own unique idiolect. But they might belong to a group with a specialized jargon, and also (usually) speak within a certain dialect, which may be part of a sub-language like a pigdin or creole, which is part of a language or languages, which fall under a family of languages like Indo-European.
Do you expect these categorical ethical truths to stand for all time or will they change as language and reason develop?
Oh, they definitely change; that's a cornerstone of the approach, I think. (Someone like Kant would have thought they'd stand for all time.) (This opens up questions about how to talk about the morality of past actions performed in history, but I think the questions are largely academic; we judge past actions by our standards because they are ours, the most correct set of standards we [believe we] have access to. This doesn't, I don't think, require us to imagine an ideal ethics or a God's eye view or an endpoint to history or anything like that.)
If you concede they change, at what rate do you think they change?
32 feet per second per second? Honestly, I'm not quite sure how to answer the question. I suppose that I need to recognize that while I am arguing that any notion of "categoricalness" we might have has to be contingent and contextual, still some claims are more categorical than others. I don't see us throwing out modus ponens any time soon, while aesthetic tastes are notoriously fickle.
no subject
I don't believe (drawing on Wittgenstein's private language argument) that language and reason can ever be held singularly by just one person; it's the fact they are in (in whatever part) common with at least one other person that make them language and reason. And so we get a sense of linguistic communities who share a common language and reason. I do think that the vast majority (if perhaps not all) of 21st century Earthlings actually share to a large degree many of the deeper structures of a common language and reason; at the same time, there's a very clear sense in which you and I, despite speaking very similar forms of English, are speaking different languages.
To think of it in terms of language, obviously everyone has their own unique idiolect. But they might belong to a group with a specialized jargon, and also (usually) speak within a certain dialect, which may be part of a sub-language like a pigdin or creole, which is part of a language or languages, which fall under a family of languages like Indo-European.
Do you expect these categorical ethical truths to stand for all time or will they change as language and reason develop?
Oh, they definitely change; that's a cornerstone of the approach, I think. (Someone like Kant would have thought they'd stand for all time.) (This opens up questions about how to talk about the morality of past actions performed in history, but I think the questions are largely academic; we judge past actions by our standards because they are ours, the most correct set of standards we [believe we] have access to. This doesn't, I don't think, require us to imagine an ideal ethics or a God's eye view or an endpoint to history or anything like that.)
If you concede they change, at what rate do you think they change?
32 feet per second per second? Honestly, I'm not quite sure how to answer the question. I suppose that I need to recognize that while I am arguing that any notion of "categoricalness" we might have has to be contingent and contextual, still some claims are more categorical than others. I don't see us throwing out modus ponens any time soon, while aesthetic tastes are notoriously fickle.