Il criterio intenzionale della valutazione etica. Clarence Irving Lewis tra filosofia analitica e pragmatismo concettuale

The Italian philosophical debate in recent years has highlighted many times as the prospects of today's analytic philosophy are closely linked to the recovery of the pragmatist tradition. As can be seen from recent studies on the history of ethics, in particular the volume of Sergio Cremaschi (Ethics of the twentieth century. Following Nietzsche, Carocci 2005), this trend of research can be traced back as early as 1947, when Clarence Irving Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, pulled in key ethics analytic philosophy with the conceptual pragmatism. In this paper we tried to find the link that allows you to legitimize this approach. Starting from the lewisiana of knowledge, we felt that this link is to detect intentionality, ie the criterion of the mind by which we orient the meaning of a particular meaning depending on the use we intend to do with it. Through the use of linguistic models available, the intentional criterion is aimed at understanding the meaning of analytic statements, definitions and declarations within a specific context. In fact, the sense of truth or falsehood becomes a meaning is not the result of a judgment arising from a formal logic that is abstracted from the concrete situation in which the language refers to, but is rooted in a conceptualization a priori type pragmatist: that depends on the intention with which it was decided to characterize the practical use of our empirical representations. As a form of empirical knowledge, the evaluation of ethical finds its intentionality criterion. Although the preaching ethical value are necessarily to be verified by experience, they will not have the experience but are a priori origin. In fact receive connotation of good or evil on the subjective interpretation of a given empirical representation as potentially susceptible to ethical evaluation. This intention is not arbitrary but reasonable, as it is justified by the choice to meet the value that is considered comparatively better than another. Reasonable, and not rational, because the intention is not a prediction, clear and distinct of what will be the actual outcome of the action, but that does not mean - as it would seem to support the use of customary reasonable - that it however, can not be considered a criterion of ethical well-founded, it is necessary to deal with the difficulty of choosing between a variety of comparative values. In these terms, the intentional criterion of ethical evaluation is as subjective as objective. It is subjective because the expectations poured on the action to be carried out depends on the evaluative sense in which the individual chooses to represent ethically experience. However, the intention, to be ethical, must be able to judge the good potential to achieve an objective, which is so indifferent to the satisfaction of specific interest. In fact, this is the effort of the ethical criterion of intentional evaluation, an effort to seek principles and moral imperatives not affected by the realization of practical purposes of a subjective nature.