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Moral Expressivism

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  • Dorit Bar-On & Matthew Chrisman, Ethical Neo-Expressivism.
    A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. We can either treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that one cannot believe without being at least somewhat motivated (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as having their semantic content (...)
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  • Richard Brown (2008). The Semantics of Moral Communication. Dissertation, The Graduate Center, CUNY
    Adviser: Professor Stefan Baumrin In the first chapter I introduce the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics and argue that metaethics, properly conceived, is a part of cognitive science. For example, the debate between rationalism and sentimentalism can be informed by recent empirical work in psychology and the neurosciences. In the second chapter I argue that the traditional view that one’s theory of semantics determines what one’s theory of justification must be is mistaken. Though it has been the case that (...)
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  • Matthew Chrisman (2009). Expressivism, Truth, and (Self-) Knowledge. Philosophers' Imprint 9 (3):1-26.
    In this paper, I consider the prospects of two different kinds of expressivism – ethical expressivism and avowal expressivism – in light of two common objections. The first objection stems from the fact that it is natural to think of ethical statements and avowals as at least potential manifestations of knowledge. The second objection stems from the fact that it is natural to treat ethical statements and avowals as truth-evaluable. I argue that, although a recent avowal expressivist attempt (Bar-On 2004) (...)
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  • Matthew Chrisman (2008). Expressivism, Inferentialism, and Saving the Debate. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2):334-358.
    Theoretical reasoning aims to expand our knowledge of how the world is. Practical reasoning aims to expand our knowledge of how to behave in the world as we know it to be. Although this distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning is notoriously central to normative ethical theorizing, its significance has, I think, been underappreciated and misconstrued in the metaethical debate about realism. I suspect that this is the result of two aspects of that debate: (a) the realism debate has been (...)
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  • Matthew Chrisman (2007). From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophical Studies 135 (2).
    In this paper, I exploit the parallel between epistemic contextualism and metaethical speaker-relativism to argue that a promising way out of two of the primary problems facing contextualism is one already explored in some detail in the ethical case – viz. expressivism. The upshot is an argument for a form of epistemic expressivism modeled on a familiar form of ethical expressivism. This provides a new nondescriptivist option for understanding the meaning of knowledge attributions, which arguably better captures the normative nature (...)
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  • Matthew Chrisman (2005). Review of Alan Gibbard's Thinking How to Live. Ethics 115 (2):406-412.
    I imagine that people will complain that the account of normative concepts defended in Gibbard’s new book makes the metaethical waters even muddier because it blurs the line between cognitivism and noncognitivism and between realism and antirealism. However, these labels are philosophic tools, and in the wake of Gibbard’s new book, one might rightly conclude that there are new and better philosophical tools emerging on the metaethical scene. The uptake of views about practical reasoning—as exhibited by planning—into debates about the (...)
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  • David Copp (2001). Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism. Social Philosophy and Policy 18:1-43.
    Moral realism and antirealist-expressivism are of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or thereby expresses, a cognitive state of mind; she has or expresses a belief that represents a moral state of affairs in a way that might (...)
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  • Cian Dorr (2002). Non-Cognitivism and Wishful Thinking. Noûs 36 (1):97–103.
    Even if non-cognitivists about some subject-matter can meet Geach’s challenge to explain how there can be valid implications involving sentences which express non-cognitive attitudes, they face a further problem. I argue that a non-cognitivist cannot explain how, given a valid argument whose conclusion expresses a belief and at least one of whose premises expresses a non-cognitive attitude, it could be reasonable to infer the conclusion from the premises.
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  • James Dreier (1999). Transforming Expressivism. Noûs 33 (4):558-572.
    In chapter five of Wise Choices, Apt Feelings Allan Gibbard develops what he calls a ‘normative logic’ intended to solve some problems that face an expressivist theory of norms like his. The first is “the problem of embedding: The analysis applies to simple contexts, in which it is simply asserted or denied that such-and-such is rational. It says nothing about more complex normative assertions.”1 That is the problem with which I will be concerned. Though he doesn’t list it as one (...)
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  • James Dreier (1996). Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth. Philosophical Studies 83 (1):29-51.
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  • Stephen Finlay (2005). Value and Implicature. Philosophers' Imprint 5 (4):1-20.
    Moral assertions express attitudes, but it is unclear how. This paper examines proposals by David Copp, Stephen Barker, and myself that moral attitudes are expressed as implicature (Grice), and Copp’s and Barker’s claim that this supports expressivism about moral speech acts. I reject this claim on the ground that implicatures of attitude are more plausibly conversational than conventional. I argue that Copp’s and my own relational theory of moral assertions is superior to the indexical theory offered by Barker and Jamie (...)
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  • Stephen Finlay (2004). The Conversational Practicality of Value Judgement. Journal of Ethics 8 (3).
    Analyses of moral value judgements must meet a practicality requirement: moral speech acts characteristically express pro- or con-attitudes, indicate that speakers are motivated in certain ways, and exert influence on others' motivations. Nondescriptivists including Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard claim that no descriptivist analysis can satisfy this requirement. I argue first that while the practicality requirement is defeasible, it indeed demands a connection between value judgement and motivation that resembles a semantic or conceptual rather than merely contingent psychological link. I (...)
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  • Joshua Gert (2002). Expressivism and Language Learning. Ethics 112 (2).
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  • James Harold, Can Expressivists Tell the Difference Between Beauty and Moral Goodness?
    One important but infrequently discussed difficulty with expressivism is the attitude type individuation problem.1 Expressivist theories purport to provide a unified account of normative states. Judgments of moral goodness, beauty, humor, prudence, and the like, are all explicated in the same way: as expressions of attitudes, what Allan Gibbard calls “states of norm-acceptance”. However, expressivism also needs to explain the difference between these different sorts of attitude. It is possible to judge that a thing is both aesthetically good and morally (...)
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  • Frank Jackson & Philip Pettit (1998). A Problem for Expressivism. Analysis 58 (4):239–251.
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  • James Lenman (2009). Naturalism Without Tears. Ratio 22 (1):1-18.
    Parfit argues that naturalistic theories that seek to understand normative concepts either as simply descriptive of certain natural facts about our desires or as expressive of our desires commit us to a bleak normative nihilism whereby nothing matters. I here defend such naturalism, in particular its expressivist variety, against this charge. It is true that such views commit us to there being no reasons as Parfit understands them. But for Parfit to suppose that equivalent to there being no reasons leaves (...)
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  • James Lenman (2003). Disciplined Syntacticism and Moral Expressivism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1):32–57.
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  • Richard Moran (1993). Impersonality, Character, and Moral Expressivism. Journal of Philosophy 60 (11):578-595.
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  • By Ira M. Schnall (2004). Philosophy of Language and Meta-Ethics. Philosophical Quarterly 54 (217):587–594.
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  • Mark Schroeder, Finagling Frege.
    Michael Ridge claims to have ‘finessed’ the Frege-Geach Problem ‘on the cheap’. In this short paper I explain a couple of the reasons why this thought is premature.
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  • Mark Schroeder, How Not to Avoid Wishful Thinking.
    Expressivists famously have important and difficult problems with semantics and logic. Their difficulties providing an adequate account of the semantics of material conditionals involving moral terms, and explaining why they have the right semantic and logical properties – for example, why they validate modus ponens – have received a great deal of attention. Cian Dorr [2002] points out that their problems do not stop here, but also extend to epistemology. The problem he poses for expressivists is the problem of wishful (...)
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  • Mark Schroeder, Expressivist Truth.
    Expressivism and truth have had a rocky relationship; this paper is a move toward reconciliation. I’ll show how to give a semantics for ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the most promising expressivist framework I know of1, and explain how the resulting marriage can benefit both parties. This is because expressivists need an account of truth, and expressivism about truth itself has certain attractions in its own right. In particular, I’ll show in a rigorous way how expressivists can make good on the (...)
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  • Mark Schroeder (2009). Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices. Ethics 119 (2).
    This paper is a survey of recent ‘hybrid’ approaches to metaethics, according to which moral sentences, in some sense or other, express both beliefs and desires. I try to show what kinds of theoretical issues come up at the different choice points we encounter in developing such a view, to raise some problems and explain where they come from, and to begin to get a sense for what the payoff of such views can be, and what they will need to (...)
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  • Mark Schroeder (2008). What is the Frege-Geach Problem? Philosophy Compass 3 (4):703-720.
    In the 1960s, Peter Geach and John Searle independently posed an important objection to the wide class of 'noncognitivist' metaethical views that had at that time been dominant and widely defended for a quarter of a century. The problems raised by that objection have come to be known in the literature as the Frege-Geach Problem, because of Geach's attribution of the objection to Frege's distinction between content and assertoric force, and the problem has since occupied a great deal of the (...)
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  • Mark Schroeder (2008). How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem with Negation. Noûs 42 (4):573-599.
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  • Mark Andrew Schroeder (2008). Being For: Evaluating the Semantic Program of Expressivism. Oxford University Press.
    Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been (...)
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  • Laura Schroeter & Francois Schroeter (2005). Is Gibbard a Realist? Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2):1-18.
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  • Andrew Sepielli, Normative Uncertainty for Non-Cognitivists.
    This a response to Michael Smith's argument that, if non-cognitivism is true, there can't be anything like normative uncertainty, so non-cognitivism is false. I argue that all plausible non-cognitivisms can withstand Smith's challenge. That's because all plausible non-cognitivisms can support an expressivist meta-semantics capable surmounting the Frege-Geach Problem and related problems about probabilistic inference, and the features that enable them to do that also enable them to surmount Smith's problem.

    NOTE: New version uploaded March 8.
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  • Neil Sinclair (forthcoming). Moral Expressivism and Sentential Negation. Philosophical Studies.
    This paper advances three necessary conditions on a successful account of sentential negation. First, the ability to explain the constancy of sentential meaning across negated and unnegated contexts (the Fregean Condition). Second, the ability to explain why sentences and their negations are inconsistent, and inconsistent in virtue of the meaning of negation (the Semantic Condition). Third, the ability of the account to generalize regardless of the topic of the negated sentence (the Generality Condition). The paper discusses three accounts of negation (...)
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  • Neil Sinclair (2009). Recent Work in Expressivism. Analysis 69 (1).
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  • Neil Sinclair (2007). Expressivism and the Practicality of Moral Convictions. Journal of Value Inquiry 41:201-220.
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  • Neil Sinclair (2007). Propositional Clothing and Belief. Philosophical Quarterly 57 (228):342�362.
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  • Neil Sinclair (2006). The Moral Belief Problem. Ratio 19 (2):249–260.
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  • Michael Smith & Daniel Stoljar (2003). Is There a Lockean Argument Against Expressivism? Analysis 63 (1):76–86.
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  • Daniel Star (forthcoming). Review of Alan Gibbard, Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics (OUP, 2008). Philosophical Review.
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  • Caj Strandberg (forthcoming). A Dual Aspect Account of Moral Language. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account: A person’s utterance of a sentence of a type according to which ing has a moral characteristic, such as ‘ing is wrong’, conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, a belief to the effect that ing has a moral property and her utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that she has a certain action-guiding attitude in relation to ing. This account (...)
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  • Jussi Suikkanen (2009). The Subjectivist Consequences of Expressivism. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (3):364-387.
    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 (...)
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  • Nicholas Unwin, Expressivism and the Metaphysics of Consciousness.
    An expressivist theory of consciousness is outlined. The suggestion that attributions of consciousness involve an essentially projective element is carefully examined, as is the view that ‘zombism’, defined as the thought that certain people are unconscious although physically normal, is a largely affective and not wholly cognitive (hypothetical) disorder. A comparison is drawn between ‘zombism’ and the Capgras delusion. The notion of supervenience is shown to be deeply problematic when applied to projected properties, as is the distinction between weak and (...)
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  • Nicholas Unwin (2008). Divine Hoorays: Some Parallels Between Expressivism and Religious Ethics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3):659-684.
    Divine law theories of metaethics claim that moral rightness is grounded in God’s commands, wishes and so forth. Expressivist theories, by contrast, claim that to call something morally right is to express our own attitudes, not to report on God’s. Ostensibly, such views are incompatible. However, we shall argue that a rapprochement is possible and beneficial to both sides. Expressivists need to explain the difference between reporting and expressing an attitude, and to address the Frege-Geach problem. Divine law theorists need (...)
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  • Nicholas Unwin (2001). Norms and Negation: A Problem for Gibbard's Logic. Philosophical Quarterly 51 (202):60-75.
    A difficulty is exposed in Allan Gibbard's solution to the embedding/Frege-Geach problem, namely that the difference between refusing to accept a normative judgement and accepting its negation is ignored. This is shown to undermine the whole solution.
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  • Nicholas Unwin (1999). Quasi-Realism, Negation and the Frege-Geach Problem. Philosophical Quarterly 50 (196):337-352.
    Expressivists, such as Blackburn, analyse sentences such as 'S thinks that it ought to be the case that p' as S hoorays that p'. A problem is that the former sentence can be negated in three different ways, but the latter in only two. The distinction between refusing to accept a moral judgement and accepting its negation therefore cannot be accounted for. This is shown to undermine Blackburn's solution to the Frege-Geach problem.
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  • Mark van Roojen (1996). Expressivism and Irrationality. Philosophical Review 105 (3):311-335.
    Geach's problem, the problem of accounting for the fact that judgements expressed using moral terms function logically like other judgements, stands in the way of most noncognitive analyses of moral judgements. The non-cognitivist must offer a plausible interpretation of such terms when they appear in conditionals that also explains their logical interaction with straightforward moral assertions. Blackburn and Gibbard have offered a series of accounts each of which interprets such conditionals as expressing higher order commitments. Each then invokes norms for (...)
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  • Ralph Wedgwood (2010). Schroeder on Expressivism: For – or Against? Analysis 70 (1).
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  • Ralph Wedgwood (1997). Non-Cognitivism, Truth and Logic. Philosophical Studies 86 (1).
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