Analysis reveals that moral language can effectively update shared communication dynamics, suggesting a new approach to semantic theory.
When speakers make moral claims, they often indicate that they are themselves committed to, or aim to commit their addressee to, certain actions or attitudes . The way that moral language is practical in these ways is often considered to be detrimental for any descriptivist semantics of moral language. It is argued in this article that the practicality of moral language can be accommodated by appealing to dynamic pragmatics. A dynamic descriptivist accounts for the practicality of moral language in terms of how moral utterances update and relate to a shared interpersonal dimension of communication that contains content accepted by the interlocutors of a moral conversation.
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Stina Björkholm (2025) studied this question.
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