Classical Presupposition Audit — Sharon Street
Classical Presupposition Audit — Sharon Street
Instrument: Classical Presupposition Audit (CPA) v1.0. Instrument architecture and analysis: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling. Prose rendering: Claude. Sterling/Kelly corpus. 2026.
Subject: Sharon Street (1974–), Professor of Philosophy, New York University; leading figure in Humean constructivism and evolutionary metaethics. Primary sources: “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” (Philosophical Studies, 2006); “Evolution and the Normativity of Epistemic Reasons” (2009); “What Is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?” (2010); “Coming to Terms with Contingency: Humean Constructivism about Practical Reason” (2012).
Relevance to corpus. Street is named in the Classical Field Audit — Ethics as the primary contemporary representative of the evolutionary debunking tradition and as the architect of the Darwinian dilemma argument against moral realism. Her profile is produced here to complete the Ethics cluster’s boundary documentation, establishing the negative limit case alongside the cluster’s high-alignment figures.
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Corpus in view. Sources restricted to Street’s own published record. No prior conclusion stated. The Non-Operative finding category requires a positive showing at each commitment where it is used; this requirement is in force throughout.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceed to Step 1.
Step 1 — Presupposition Profile
P1 — The Darwinian dilemma. Street’s central argument requires that natural selection shaped our evaluative attitudes to track reproductive fitness rather than mind-independent evaluative facts, and that this creates a dilemma for moral realism: either there is a pre-established harmony between fitness-tracking and truth-tracking (an implausible coincidence on any naturalist view) or our evaluative attitudes are not tracking mind-independent moral facts at all. Both horns defeat moral realism. This is maximally load-bearing: it is the argument on which her entire metaethical program turns.
P2 — Humean constructivism as the positive alternative. Street’s constructivism requires that moral claims are true or false not by correspondence to mind-independent evaluative facts but by relation to the evaluative standpoint the agent brings to practical reasoning. There is no evaluative standpoint that is the right one in a mind-independent sense; moral truth is constructed from within the agent’s own evaluative commitments. This is load-bearing for her positive metaethical program and for the distinction between her position and error theory: she is not a moral nihilist but a constructivist who holds that moral claims can be true, relativized to the agent’s evaluative standpoint.
Stage B — Domain Mapping. P1 is mapped at C3 (the faculty of direct moral apprehension) and C6 (the mind-independent moral facts that faculty is supposed to apprehend). P2 is mapped at C5 (correspondence truth for moral claims) and C6 (moral realism). The C1, C2, and C4 questions are examined for whether P1 or P2 bears on them, with the positive-showing requirement for Non-Operative in force.
Self-Audit Complete: presuppositions drawn from Street’s own record; the Darwinian dilemma and the constructivist alternative mapped to the specific commitments they engage; C1, C2, and C4 flagged for independent examination with positive-showing requirement in force. Proceed to Step 2.
Step 2 — Commitment Audit
C1 — Substance Dualism. Non-Operative. Positive showing: Street’s Darwinian dilemma is an argument in metaethics about the relationship between evolutionary pressures and moral epistemology. It is not an argument about the metaphysics of mind, the soul, or the relationship between mental and physical substances. Her constructivism is equally silent on these questions: it is a claim about the structure of moral truth, not about what the mind is. No engagement with substance dualism, physicalism, or hylomorphism was found as load-bearing anywhere in Street’s published record. The absence is architectural: her argument’s stated structure never reaches the question.
C2 — Libertarian Free Will. Non-Operative. Positive showing: Street’s constructivism presupposes that agents occupy an evaluative standpoint and engage in practical reasoning, but it does not require any particular account of whether that reasoning involves libertarian origination or compatibilist freedom. The Darwinian dilemma targets the epistemic credentials of moral intuitions as guides to mind-independent moral facts, not the metaphysics of the will. No engagement with libertarian free will, compatibilism, or the free will debate was found as load-bearing in her record. The absence is again architectural.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism. Contrary. P1 is a direct, argued, sustained attack on exactly the faculty C3 requires. The Darwinian dilemma’s first horn demonstrates that if moral intuitions were reliably tracking mind-independent moral facts, the correlation between evolutionary fitness pressures and moral truth would require an implausible coincidence that no naturalist account can supply. The second horn demonstrates that if no such correlation exists, our moral intuitions are calibrated to track fitness, not moral truth, and have no credentials as guides to mind-independent moral reality. Both horns directly deny that the rational faculty’s deliverances in the moral domain constitute reliable apprehension of moral truth. This is not an undeveloped silence or an architectural non-reach: Street’s primary published contribution is precisely this argument against the epistemic credentials of the moral faculty C3 requires.
C4 — Foundationalism. Non-Operative. Positive showing: Street’s constructivism operates at the level of whether moral truth is mind-independent or constructed, not at the level of whether moral knowledge has a foundationalist or coherentist structure. Her evaluative standpoint framework does not engage the question of whether some moral propositions are epistemically basic and others derived from them, or whether moral justification is foundational or holistic. The foundationalism debate concerns the architecture of moral knowledge; Street’s debate concerns whether moral knowledge, on any architecture, tracks mind-independent fact or not. These are distinct questions and her record addresses only the latter.
C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth. Contrary. P2’s Humean constructivism directly and explicitly replaces correspondence truth for moral claims with truth relative to the agent’s evaluative standpoint. On Street’s account, a moral claim is true not because it corresponds to a mind-independent moral fact but because it coheres with or follows from the agent’s own evaluative commitments given the Humean practical standpoint. This is a principled, argued rejection of correspondence truth as the governing standard for moral claims — not a silence or an undeveloped residual. It is the specific feature of her constructivism that distinguishes her from error theorists (who accept correspondence as the standard and conclude moral claims fail it) and from realists (who accept correspondence as the standard and conclude moral claims meet it).
C6 — Moral Realism. Contrary. P1 and P2 together constitute one of the most systematic and argued contemporary cases against moral realism. P1 demonstrates that realist moral epistemology faces a dilemma it cannot escape on naturalist grounds. P2 supplies the constructivist alternative that makes moral discourse meaningful without requiring mind-independent moral facts. Street’s entire published metaethical record is organized around establishing and defending this anti-realist conclusion.
Self-Audit Complete: all six commitments audited; three Non-Operative findings each given a positive showing establishing architectural non-reach rather than avoidance of a harder finding; C3 Contrary derived from the specific content of the Darwinian dilemma rather than from a general anti-realist label; C5 Contrary explicitly distinguished from Joyce’s different relationship to correspondence truth; no finding distributed for apparent balance. Proceed to Step 3.
Step 3 — Dissolution Finding
C1: Non-Operative. C2: Non-Operative. Per the instrument’s architecture, Non-Operative findings at C1 and C2 neither establish nor trigger dissolution. No Dissolution.
The practical consequence of this finding is worth stating precisely, since three Contrary findings at C3, C5, and C6 make the profile among the most divergent in the corpus despite No Dissolution. An agent who adopts Street’s framework is not asked to dissolve the self — the question of what the deliberating subject is simply does not arise within her metaethical program. What the agent is asked to accept is that none of his moral intuitions constitutes reliable apprehension of mind-independent moral truth (C3 Contrary), that moral claims are true or false only relative to his own evaluative standpoint (C5 Contrary), and that there are no objective moral facts independent of that standpoint for his moral reasoning to track (C6 Contrary). His prohairesis is architecturally untouched by Street’s framework; the moral content it is supposed to govern is denied an objective ground.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceed to Step 4.
Step 4 — Summary Finding
Part A — Commitment Pattern
| Commitment | Finding |
|---|---|
| C1 — Substance Dualism | Non-Operative |
| C2 — Libertarian Free Will | Non-Operative |
| C3 — Ethical Intuitionism | Contrary |
| C4 — Foundationalism | Non-Operative |
| C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth | Contrary |
| C6 — Moral Realism | Contrary |
Zero Aligned, zero Partially Aligned, three Contrary (C3, C5, C6), zero Inconsistent, three Non-Operative (C1, C2, C4). No Dissolution. The profile is the most concentrated Contrary pattern in the Ethics/Philosophy cluster, unique in carrying three Contrary findings with no Aligned or Partially Aligned offsets. The three Contrary findings are not independent: C3 (direct moral apprehension denied), C5 (correspondence truth for moral claims denied), and C6 (mind-independent moral facts denied) constitute a single, unified, internally consistent anti-realist metaethical position — each entails and is entailed by the other two within Street’s own framework. The three Non-Operative findings reflect the genuine scope of Street’s metaethical project, which deliberately brackets the metaphysics of mind, the metaphysics of agency, and the architecture of moral justification in order to concentrate entirely on the relationship between evolutionary origins and moral epistemology.
Part B — Dissolution Finding. No Dissolution. C1 and C2 both Non-Operative; the dissolution condition is not met. The framework leaves the rational subject architecturally undisturbed while denying the objective ground his moral reasoning is supposed to reach.
Part C — Agent-Level Implication. An agent who adopts Street’s framework is not asked to dissolve himself but is asked to accept that his moral intuitions are evolutionary byproducts calibrated by fitness rather than truth, that the moral claims those intuitions generate are true or false only relative to his own evaluative standpoint, and that there is no mind-independent moral reality for him to be trying to track. His rational faculty is intact; the moral world it is supposed to apprehend is not there, on Street’s account, to be apprehended. Sterling’s framework supplies what Street’s explicitly denies: the faculty is not a fitness-calibrated mechanism but a genuinely rational apprehending power (C1), its deliverances are not evaluated by their fitness contribution but by their correspondence to moral reality (C5), and that moral reality is not constructed from the agent’s evaluative standpoint but discovered by his rational faculty as the objective ground his practical life answers to (C3, C6).
Corpus boundary. The CPA issues findings on presuppositions embedded in an argumentative record. It does not evaluate the internal validity of the Darwinian dilemma, the success of Street’s constructivism as a positive metaethical program, or her standing within contemporary metaethics.
Self-Audit Complete: summary follows from Steps 1–3 without new material introduced; the three-Contrary pattern explained as a unified rather than independent set of findings; the No Dissolution finding’s practical consequence stated precisely rather than left as a technical observation; Sterling’s framework’s specific answer to each of the three Contrary findings stated directly in Part C; corpus boundary declared; summary self-contained. CPA run complete.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling. Instrument architecture and analysis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude.
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