I begin with the first subject-that of communication and interpersonal comprehension which are central to public reasoning. Our language reflects the variety of concerns on which our ethical assessments are drawn. There are vast entanglements of facts and values here but 'while the phrase “entanglement of fact and value" is a convenient shorthand. what we are typically dealing with is a triple entanglement of fact, convention and value. The role that an understanding of conventions plays in making sense of our social and ethical inquiries is particularly worth emphasizing here. Indeed, as political thinker Antonio Gramsci. put it, several decades ago, in his letters from prison, 'In acquiring one's conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the mas or collective man'. There is a case for what may look like a bit of digression here, to wit, Gramsci's focus on entanglements and the use of rules of language, which has far-reacting relevance for the developments of contemporary philosophy, Gramsci's line of thinking had. I have tried to argue elsewhere. a distant but important role in the substantial transition of Lydwig Wittgenstein away from his largely doomed search for a full account of what is sometimes called, a little deceptively, the picture theory of meaning'. That of putative understanding of a sentence as representing a state of affairs by being a kind of a picture of it. so that a proposition and what it describes are meant to have, in some sense, the same logical form.
Our ethical evaluations, as reflected in our language will have a bearing on
