Expression, Truth, and Reality: Some Variations on Themes from Wright

Philosophy Compass, 2013

After offering a characterization of what unites versions of ‘expressivism’, we highlight a number of dimensions along which expressivist views should be distinguished. We then separate four theses often associated with expressivism – a positive expressivist thesis, a positive constitutivist thesis, a negative ontological thesis, and a negative semantic thesis – and describe how traditional expressivists have attempted to incorporate them. We argue that expressivism in its traditional form may be fatally flawed, but that expressivists nonetheless have the resources for preserving what is essential to their view. These resources comprise a re-configuring of expressivism, the result of which is the view we call ‘neo-expressivism’. After illustrating how the neo-expressivist model works in the case of avowals and ethical claims, we explain how it avoids the problems of traditional expressivism.

Philosophical Studies, 2018

Quasi-realist expressivists (or simply ''expressivists'') set themselves the task of developing a metaethical theory that at once captures what they call the ''realist-sounding'' elements of ordinary moral thought and discourse but is also distinctively antirealist. Its critics have long suspected that the position cannot have what it wants. In this essay, I develop this suspicion. I do so by distinguishing two paradigmatic versions of the view-what I call Thin and Thick expressivism respectively. I contend that there is a metaethical datum regarding our epistemic achievements in the moral domain that presents challenges for each variety of expressivism. Thin expressivism opts not to accommodate and explain this datum but I contend that its rationale for not doing so rests on a suspect methodology. Thick expressivism looks as if it must accommodate and explain this datum but I argue that it is poorly situated to do so. I conclude that we have reason to believe that paradigmatic expressivism cannot have all that it wants.

Ergo, 2018

In a recent paper, Jack Woods (2014) advances an intriguing argument against expressivism based on Moore's paradox. Woods argues that a central tenet of expressivism-which he, following Mark Schroeder (2008a), calls the parity thesis-is false. The parity thesis is the thesis that moral assertions express noncognitive, desire-like attitudes like disapproval in exactly the same way that ordinary, descriptive assertions express cognitive, belief-like attitudes. Most contemporary defenders of expressivism seem not only to accept the parity thesis but also to rely on it to distinguish their view from subjectivism, so Woods's argument against it poses a serious challenge to the view. In this paper, I argue that Woods's argument is unsuccessful , but show that diagnosing precisely where it goes wrong raises interesting questions for expressivists-and metaethicists more generally-about the transparency of our moral attitudes.

Philosophy (special issue), 2019

Philosophers are often interested in explaining significant contrasts between ordinary descriptive discourses, on the one hand, and discourses – such as ethics, mathematics, or mentalistic discourse – that are thought to be more problematic in various ways. But certain strategies for ‘saving the differences’ can make it too difficult to preserve notable similarities across discourses. My own preference is for strategies that ‘save the differences’ without sacrificing logico-semantic continuities or committing to deflationism about truth, but also without embracing either truth-pluralism or global expressivism. I motivate my preference by examining, as a test case, mentalistic discourse. I begin by reconstructing three philosophical puzzles that have led philosophers to think of mentalistic discourse as problematic (Section 2). These puzzles concern the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical status of contrasts between first-person present-tense attributions – ‘avowals’ – and all other ordinary contingent attributions. I then briefly present my own, neo-expressivist strategy for addressing the puzzles (Section 3). Unlike traditional ‘simple expressivism’ (which is the analogue in the mentalistic realm of ethical emotivism), neo-expressivism is not committed to avowals’ being non-truth-apt or having non-propositional meanings. And yet it does not require embracing either deflationism about truth or global expressivism. It preserves continuities between mentalistic and other discourses while allowing us to capture discontinuities. Moreover, it is possible to apply the neo-expressivist framework in other areas where the notion of expression is deemed explanatorily useful, as illustrated by considering ethical neo-expressivism (Section 4). In the final section (5), I make more general comments on truth and meaning and tease out some of the commitments of the approach I advocate.

Philosophy For Us, 2018

Metaethical expressivism is a theory about the nature of moral judgments and moral language. 1

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement

This volume accurately reproduces the talks given there. As its title indicates, the conference focused on different varieties of contemporary expressivism, and how they fare in relation to the truth-aptness of utterances with expressive meaning, and the status of knowledge claims. Expressivisms of all kinds share the negative thesis that claims with expressive meaning do not represent states of affairs 1. This semantic characterisation of the negative thesis also permits the pragmatic wording that the business of expressive discourse is something other than describing. Endorsing this negative thesis suffices for an approach to count as expressivist. The negative thesis can applied to all uses of language, and thus be global, or alternatively be restricted to some specific areas of discourse, or to some specific terms and phrases. The first kind of non-global expressivism is local expressivism, and I'll call the second kind term-focused expressivism. In term-focused expressivism, terms with expressive meaning do not contribute a component to what is said, i.e. they are semantically irrelevant. Frápolli's and Price's contributions defend global versions of expressivism, while Bar-On's, Besson's and Osorio and Villanueva's propose local versions, and Chrisman's, Soria and Stojanovic's, and Zalabardo's views are term-focused varieties. Within their respective scopes, all expressivisms stick to the negative thesis. It is the positive thesis, i.e. the thesis that identifies what expressive claims and utterances actually do, where a deeper disagreement between the different approaches lies. And at this point the options multiply. Just to give a hint of the variety, the positive thesis has attributed to expressive claims subjective as well as 1

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy

I respond to an interesting objection to my 2014 argument against hermeneutic expressivism. I argue that even though Toppinen has identified an intriguing route for the expressivist to tread, the plausible developments of it would not fall to my argument anyways---as they do not make direct use of the parity thesis which claims that expression works the same way in the case of conative and cognitive attitudes. I close by sketching a few other problems plaguing such views.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 8, 2013

I outline an expressivist account of the meaning of normative sentences, according to which normative sentences express higher-order states of being in certain kinds of complex states consisting of both desire-like states (or 'pro-attitudes') and non-normative beliefs. Having first introduced this sort of a higher-order state view (section 1), I argue that it can exploit the resources that ecumenical expressivism (Ridge 2006, 2007, 2009; cf. Jackson 1999; Lenman 2003) is sometimes supposed to have for dealing with the Frege-Geach problem (section 2), and yet avoid the problems with the ecumenical view regarding validity and the expression relation (as developed in Schroeder 2009), and disagreement (sections 3, 4, and 5).

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2009

Jackson and Pettit argue that expressivism in metaethics collapses into subjectivism. A sincere utterer of a moral claim must believe that she has certain attitudes to be expressed. The truth-conditions of that belief then allegedly provide truth-conditions also for the moral utterance. Thus, the expressivist cannot deny that moral claims have subjectivist truth-conditions. Critics have argued that this argument fails as stated. I try to show that expressivism does have subjectivist repercussions in a way that avoids the problems of the Jackson-Pettit argument. My argument, based on the norms for asserting moral sentences, attempts to tie expressivists to a more modest form of subjectivism than the previous arguments