L.W. Aiken

contemporaryAnalytic Philosophy, Metaethics

L.W. Aiken is a contemporary philosopher working in metaethics, particularly on the semantics of moral language. His work engages with expressivist and prescriptivist accounts of evaluative terms, with attention to how moral predicates function in embedded and unasserted contexts. He contributes to debates surrounding the Frege-Geach problem and the logical behavior of moral discourse.

Notable Achievements

Analyzed the optative semantics of 'good' in unasserted propositional contexts

Contributed to debates on the Frege-Geach problem in moral semantics

Examined logical validity conditions for moral arguments under expressivist frameworks

Positions & Arguments(1)

Philosophy of Language

claim

Any theory that explains 'good' as an optative in unasserted contexts would render obviously valid arguments invalid by treating them as equivocal