Contextualism About Value

Under review

I defend a form of contextualism about value, according to which evaluative predicates can be used to attribute indefinitely many different properties according to the contexts in which they are used. Such a theory can offer a naturalistic, cognitivist analysis of value which accounts for the ordinarily close relationship between motivation and evaluative belief, relies on no mysterious primitive concepts, and is almost unique in its ability to explain why it makes sense for us to trust our evaluative judgment. Contextualism is not a popular view, mainly because it is supposed to be incapable of accounting for many instances of evaluative disagreement, but this objection does not hold up very well under scrutiny.