The practicality of moral language and dynamic descriptivism
Mind & Language / Mind and Language
Published online on February 01, 2026
Abstract
["Mind &Language, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 158-176, February 2026. ", "\nWhen 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.\n"]