Analetheism

Polysemy (or the concept as I shall use it) is the view that all words or concepts have multiple meanings. This would seem nonsensical to some critics because the whole point of a concept is to isolate a single and precise meaning. Thus we might suppose that some word could be used to express multiple concepts; for example, “bank” can pick out a financial institution or land beside a river. (There is the further ambiguity of whether “bank” is therefore one word or two words.) But my long experience as both a wordsmith and a philosopher has convinced me that no concept itself is singular in its meaning.             Insofar a this is an empirical issue I can at once point to an interesting empirical study that would seem to bear out my contention in spades, to wit: Many social and legal conflicts hinge on semantic disagreements. Understanding the origins and implications of these disagreements necessitates novel ...

My subjectivist turn began with the revelation that morality is a myth. There is no such thing as morality, that is, objective right and wrong. Soon enough I realized this extended to good and bad as well; these too were banished from reality. So ethics itself ceased to be, or to be like theology, a discipline devoted to studying a fiction, or to be prized apart from morality (a realm of fictitious truths and imperatives) and conceived simply as the inquiry into how to live. I chose the third option. I then proposed the ethics of desirism, which is the recommendation to rationalize our desires.             However, other dominoes began to fall. Ultimately I bit the bullet and rejected even truth as something real. Along the way there were eliminations less radical or controversial, and yet even with these it could be a shock to confront them “in the flesh.” Consider, for example, that beauty ceases to exist (as also ugliness)—that...

Desirism purports to be an entirely subjective ethics (and its analog letheism, an entirely subjective metaphysics or epistemology). This involves, then, turning our backs on objective values. So for example, the recommendation is to avoid asserting that something is right or wrong in any absolute (i.e., moralist) sense. And to make it clear that this is what is going on, desirism recommends dropping (“abolishing”) the very vocabulary that is normally associated with objective values in many if not all cases. [1] After all, if a thoroughly convinced desirist still says things like, “I think that’s wrong,” the natural interpretation by most people, who are presumed to be objectivists, [2] will be that the desirist is making an objective assertion, namely, that “it” is objectively wrong.             Fortunately an alternative way of speaking is ready to hand that avoids this ambiguity: I recommend speaking about one’s own menta...

My current sense is that analytic philosophy has been burdened with the metaphysico-methodological assumption that reality is to be known in terms of univocal concepts and therefore the proper aim and method of philosophy is to isolate those singular meanings. Thus for example: What is a desire? What is morality? What is rationality? and so on. There is presumed to be one and only one correct or true answer in each case. This is the road not only to clarity but to truth in general, since the only way to know if a proposition is true (for example: “Morality is objective”; “Pluto is a planet”; etc. ad inf.) is to have a firm grasp of the meaning of each of its component terms (“morality,” “objective,” “planet,” “is”).             Well, I’m with President Clinton on this one: It depends on what “is” (and “planet” etc.) is. [1] I now view concepts as polysemous, and so one does not really know what a term means unless that is spelled ...

Desirism -- a reassessment Desirism arose from the ashes of morality after my anti-epiphany on Christmas Day 2007, when I quite suddenly and unexpectedly became convinced that morality is a myth. Reeling from this realization I struggled to find my footing in an amoral world. Over time I felt I had found it in desire. Since then I have happily developed a new ethics, which continues to be fruitful for my thinking and life. However I have also become aware of problems with its original formulation, including the very name “desirism.” I would now therefore like to carry out a full reassessment. In what follows I will begin with a review of the motivation for desirism, then proceed to a critique, and conclude with a summary of what I consider still to be of value.  The Reasons for Desirism  The original motivation for desirism was my having become convinced that my lifelong assumptions about morality had been radically mistaken. It hit me that deeming something to be morally righ...