ABSTRACT

This chapter determines different metasemantic approaches to explaining how the content of normative terms. It divides the accounts into two broad groups—internalist approaches and externalist approaches—that diverge over what's required for semantic competence and how facts about competence determine semantic content. The chapter focuses on recent developments in metaethics that bring a more nuanced understanding of the role of compositional semantic theorizing in linguistics into the metaethical debate. Metaethicists have traditionally assumed a straightforward relationship between the content of normative and evaluative terms and the content of the thoughts those terms are used to express. A metasemantic theory should explain both what constitutes competence with the meaning of a particular expression, and how meeting those competence conditions ensures that the use of that expression has a particular semantic content. Metasemantic externalism is simply the negation of internalism. One important new development in metaethics is the metasemantic construal of expressivism.