Why the semantics of 'good' and 'bad' isn't good enough: Popular science and the 'language crux'

Abstract

Neuroscientists have recently advanced the thesis that science can answer moral questions, dismissing philosophical questions as irrelevant to such an enterprise. The American science writers Sam Harris and Michael Shermer have been particularly instrumental in popularizing this new science, which is ultimately to replace religion as the only reliable guide to truth. The present article looks at the unstated language philosophies underlying Sam Harris and Michael Shermer's discourse when addressing lay audiences, and seeks to show that their linguistic assumptions are 'mythical', insofar as they support a virtually unchallenged (however flawed) view of how language relates to reality, inherited in its entirety from Greek philosophers unacquainted with neuroscience. This article adopts an integrational critique of language: it aims at promoting an integrational semiology as the epistemological foundation of all sciences, including a science of morality. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.