How Expressivists Can and Should Explain Inconsistency

2015

We argue that a number of difficulties facing expressivist solutions to the Frege- Geach problem are paralleled by almost exactly analogous problems facing realist semantic theories. We argue that a prominent realist solution to the problem of explaining logical inconsistency can be adopted by expressivists. By doing so, the expressivist brings her account of logical consequence more in line with philosophical orthodoxy, while simultaneously purchasing herself the right to appeal to a wider class of attitudinal conflicts in her semantic theorizing than is allowed, for instance, by Mark Schroeder in his recent work. Finally, it emerges that a standard objection to expressivist theories is based on a misinterpretation of the Frege-Geach problem. We explain this misinterpretation and show how expressivists can easily skirt the objection it motivates.

Containing numerous content and writing quality related mistakes, this paper was submitted on 27th October, 2017 for my Metaethics Honours class at the University of Western Australia _______________________________________________________________________ In this paper I will argue Gibbard hyperplan semantics do not solve the Frege-Geach Problem for metaethical expressivists due to the Negation Problem: being unable to explain attitude discordance without postulating ad-hoc disagreement, due to the usage of disquotation. I conclude by suggesting that Dynamic Semantics can avoid this problem because it is non-disquotational, and that we should adapt our logic to suit the sort of phenomena we want to model, and thus that abandoning disquotational approaches should not be seen as a cost.

2019

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of 'crossed disagreements', can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language-indexical contextualism-truth-conditional pragmatics-, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements.

Belgrade Philosophical Annual, 2019

Ethics

Mark Schroeder has argued that all reasonable forms of inconsistency of attitude consist of having the same attitude type towards a pair of inconsistent contents (A-type inconsistency). We suggest that he is mistaken in this, offering a number of intuitive examples of pairs of distinct attitudes types with consistent contents which are intuitively inconsistent (B-type inconsistency). We further argue that, despite the virtues of Schroeder's elegant A-type expressivist semantics, B-type inconsistency is in many ways the more natural choice in developing an expressivist account of moral discourse. We close by showing how to adapt ordinary formality-based accounts of logicality to define a B-type account of logical inconsistency and distinguish it from both semantic and pragmatic inconsistency. In sum, we provide a roadmap of how to develop a successful B-type expressivism.

Geltung, 2023

It is a consensus to locate the origin of the reflexive foundations of modern semantics in Frege's work. Since Frege's distinction between two components of meaning (sense and reference), however, semantics has been forced to lead a double life. Among its first receptions, in Russell's famous article (1905), the first unresolved criticism of this solution was that: It is not possible to split semantics into a theory about two classes of objects without their yielding one and the same thing under lower and higher conditions of instantiation (depending on the function used to identify it). But even Russell could not avoid a crisis. It is not possible to reconcile semantic coordination for a set of non-classical extension of instantiation and encoding (possible instances, counterfactual truth values, etc.) while preserving the classical properties of signification. This article covers these moments with a rough diagnosis: modern semantics has a reflexive ceiling. It is unable to model the contingent features of an "object" without oversizing itself to deal with various constraints on that object adapted to various strategies of intensional and modal specification. In order to model idealized conditions of assertability (Putnam), one must filter the sentences that pass Tarskian test using non-sematic parameters – like the parameter of coherence of a scientific paradigm. It cannot keep that model without stopping being semantic. We conclude with a response to attempts to give semantic status to complex scientific reasoning, and a suggestion as to how to locate the philosophical origin of this claim.

Acta Analytica, 2019

Huw Price's neo-pragmatist programme of global expressivism (see Huw Price Naturalism Without Mirrors (2011) and Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (2013)) faces a challenge-it is susceptible to the charge that the proposed combination of expressivism with a deflationary account of semantics leads to inconsistency. Expressivists about a particular discourse deny that it is representational. Global expressivists face the threat of inconsistency due to their attempts to generalise this denial to include the discourse of semantics. In this paper, I explicate two meta-semantic presuppositions of this charge. I argue that such an explication enables us to construct a consistent account of global expressivism. The key point is that global expressivists should adopt two truth predicates and treat meta-semantics as non-substantial. I argue that this framework provides us with a better grasp of Price's response to the problem of inconsistency and enables global expressivists to accommodate the correspondence intuition.

Mark Schroeder's Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivism by isolating a few core assumptions and constraints, and then drawing out the implications of how they can be developed into a semantic theory for a fragment of English. Its main virtue is that it shows how an expressivist can handle the 'Frege-Geach problem' by constructing a semantic system in which expressive language can embed in complex sentences that have the right semantic properties. For example, considerable effort is put into explaining why the sentence 'Murder is not wrong' is inconsistent with the simpler sentence 'Murder is wrong'. Additionally, Being For claims to develop 'non-cognitivism', a family of non-descriptivist theories of normative language of which expressivism is a popular version, in the best way possible. But, ultimately, it concludes pessimistically that expressivism is 'an extremely unpromising hypothesis about the workings of natural languages' (Schroeder 2008: 179).

Logique et Analyse, 2014

It is argued that David Lewis' two triviality results (the probability of the conditional cannot be the conditional probability, desire cannot be belief) both present a problem for expressivism, are related and can both be resolved in the same way: by allowing for gappy propositions (propositions that can lack truth value).

The Philosophical Review, 1996