ABSTRACT

This chapter surveys and assesses several critical issues that confront Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas and Brad Kallenberg in their attempts to deny epistemic access to an extra-linguistic world. Historical communities are quite particular for MacIntyre, so it seems to be quite a stretch to say that all the communities in the history of one tradition spoke the exact same language. Regardless of the linguistic community from which he writes, MacIntyre addresses professors and students of moral philosophy, and the history of ethics. One of Kallenberg's great contributions is to make explicit an assumption latent in much of MacIntyre's works: that language has world-making power, and that each social world is made by the members' linguistic use within local forms of life. It might seem that Kallenberg, like Hauerwas, represents an advance over MacIntyre in consistency within their linguistic method, since he at least explicitly owns his Christian stance.