4 Conclusion

In this commentary on Prinz’s highly interesting and substantial target paper I welcomed his methodological naturalism, but argued that his project is not as conciliatory between traditional analytical philosophy and naturalized philosophy as he seems to think. The reason is that on closer scrutiny we find opposing views on the methodology and purpose of philosophy. In the second part of my contribution I looked at an objection against Prinz’s sentimentalism. I argued, first, that he misses the real core of this kind of objections. Then I used Jon Tresan’s distinction between de dicto- and de re-internalism as a conceptual tool to propose and develop another answer that Prinz could use against this objection. In particular, I claimed that, given Prinz’s metaethical naturalism, we should not look for conceptual necessity but for fruitful hypotheses which we can test in a posteriori. In the third and last part I argued against Prinz’s critique of non-cognitivism. Prinz thinks that the most obvious empirical prediction of non-cognitivism fails. Here, I tried to demonstrate how non-cognitivism, given a pragmatical view of moral language, actually predicts the surface grammar of moral discourse as well as cognitivistic alternatives. I proposed a speculative explanation for this interesting fact. This kind of explanation, I believe, fits even better with Prinz’s project of a naturalized metaethics.