INTRODUCTION

     In Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Allan Gibbard pursues a hugely important project: explaining our normative judgment as a part of nature, using evolutionary theory and psychological speculation for support.¹ Galilean explanations, he notes -- those involving a theoretical reduction to physics -- "explain in a specially fundamental way" (123). What makes Galilean explanations fundamental is that they explain how, functionally (that is, in terms of physical laws governing the interactions among components of a causal network), outcomes relate to their causal antecedents.

     For typically human phenomena, such explanations require both a psychological part (explaining how the organism's functional components interact with its environment to produce a given result) and an evolutionary one (explaining how those functional components evolved to fill the roles they do). Because the psychological account involves a complex matrix of causes that may stretch back to birth (or before), and the evolutionary account involves a vastly larger array of causes through billions of years of evolutionary time, the combined functional explanation accounting for the phenomenon in question --without contradicting any of our core Galilean commitments -- is indeed special.

     Gibbard's project is one of metaethics: he hopes to help integrate human life into the Galilean core of our story of Nature, providing insight into questions about how to live our lives. I will examine the extent to which he succeeds, with respect to both his specific area of concern (human normativity) and his general approach (Galilean explanation).

     I will also examine an apparent error of omission. Gibbard has failed to apply Galilean reduction where it is needed the most -- and there are good signs that some very common, deeply entrenched anti-Galilean attitudes are to blame for this.

     Furthermore, Gibbard's argument relies upon assumptions that, properly analyzed, provide a superior explanation of the origins and nature of human normativity than he musters in his book. This superior explanation provides a basis for an ethics of axiology: the reflexive functionality (a concept I'll need to explain at length) of Life (the three-plus-billion-year-old biological process of begetting begetters) and of living (the homeostatic process of maintaining individual functional integrity -- staying alive) as types of intrinsic value from which other human values have been derived.

     Everything I have to say here is based on a set of fundamental philosophic commitments, which aren't far removed from perspectives deriving from empiricism, positivism, and the semantic tradition (and have been sharpened dramatically by those influences). For the purposes of this project, the indispensable foundational assumptions are (i) the distinction between semantic and substantive facts (facts about a given semantic system, including definitions of terms, vs. true propositions about properties of the physical world, which may or may not be expressed by sentences in a given language), (ii) the distinction between substantive facts and putative facts (propositions expressed in thought or language, purportedly about properties of the physical world, perhaps having the same content as substantive facts, but perhaps not), and (iii) the claim that evolutionary (and, recently, cultural) selection has brought about (and can refine) a remarkably close correspondence between these two kinds of facts for propositions that have been of great import to our ancestors for organismic survival and reproduction -- that is, that our success is not accidental, but largely the result of evolved mechanisms for apt responses to the environment, including apt beliefs² about the features of our world.

     Accepting the uncertainty entailed by theoretical holism, I acknowledge that any serious flaw in my theoretical or metatheoretical assumptions could undermine my entire project. My claim is that, with the additions I offer, the body of Galilean theory upon which science relies will explain the empirical evidence better than alternatives do (the same claim Gibbard makes for norm-expressivism). My hope is that future versions of the Galilean theoretical core will incorporate some of what I have offered here.

     A complete defense of my own theory is beyond the scope of this project (though it may be suitable for a doctoral dissertation); its role here is to provide a counterpoint to what I believe are the shortcomings of Gibbard's norm-expressivism. I will therefore offer only a modestly detailed sketch of it -- in bits and pieces where direct contrast is required, and with a synopsis at the end.

     This is an ambitious project, and it strains the ordinary confines of a Master's thesis. A modern classic such as Gibbard's demands more than a rebuttal; it requires an alternative -- if not fully developed, then at least sketched out with enough detail that philosophers can assess its viability. Here, then, with equal parts of temerity and trepidation, we go.