In contemporary metaethics, various versions of hybrid expressivism have been proposed according to which moral sentences express both non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs. One important advantage with such positions, its proponents argue, is that they, in contrast to pure expressivism, have a straightforward way of avoiding the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper, I provide a systematic examination of different versions of hybrid expressivism with particular regard to how they are assumed to evade this problem. The major conclusion is that none of (...) these views succeeds to provide both a fully satisfying interpretation of moral sentences and a convincing response to the Frege-Geach problem. I end by briefly considering alternative hybrid views that employ the notion of conventional or conversational implicature. (shrink)

Over the years, metaethicists have witnessed the rise of a cottage industry devoted to claiming that expressivist analyses cannot capture some allegedly important feature of moral language. In this paper, I show how Simon Blackburn's pragmatist method enables him to respond decisively to many of these objections. In doing so, I hope to call into question some prevailing assumptions about the linguistic phenomena that a metaethical theory should be expected to capture.

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 (...) attention both of defenders of broadly noncognitivist views, and of their critics. In this article I explain Geach and Searle's historical objections, and put the subsequent discussion into dialectical context, paying some attention to the developments along the way and how they have enhanced our overall understanding of the problem. The article covers a lot of territory, so we will only be able to see the highlights, along the way. For further reading, see the Works Cited. (shrink)

Expressivists have a problem with negation. The problem is that they have not, to date, been able to explain why ‘murdering is wrong’ and ‘murdering is not wrong’ are inconsistent sentences. In this paper, I explain the nature of the problem, and why the best efforts of Gibbard, Dreier, and Horgan and Timmons don’t solve it. Then I show how to diagnose where the problem comes from, and consequently how it is possible for expressivists to solve it. Expressivists should accept (...) this solution, I argue, because it is demonstrably the only way of avoiding the problem, and because it generalizes. Once we see how to solve the negation problem, I show, it becomes easy to state a constructive, compositional expressivist semantics for a purely normative language with the expressive power of propositional logic, in which we can for the first time give explanatory, formally adequate expressivist accounts of logical inconsistency, logical entailment, and logical validity. As a corollary, I give what I take to be the first real expressivist explanation of why Geach’s original moral modus ponens argument is genuinely logically valid. This proves that the problem with expressivism cannot be that it can’t account for the logical properties of complex normative sentences. But it does not show that the same solution can work for a language with both normative and descriptive predicates, let alone that expressivists are able to deal with more complex linguistic constructions like tense, modals, or even quantifiers. In the final section, I show what kind of constraints the solution offered here would place expressivists under, in answering these further questions. (shrink)

Expressivism’s central idea is that normative sentences bear the same relation to non-cognitive attitudes that ordinary descriptive sentences bear to beliefs: the expression relation. Allan Gibbard teIls us that “that words express judgments will be accepted by almost everyone” - the distinctive contribution of expressivism, his claim goes, is only a view about what kind of judgments words express. But not every account of the expression relation is equally suitable for the expressivist’s purposes. In fact, what I argue in this (...) paper, considering four possible accounts of expression, is that how suitable each account is for the expressivist’s purpose varies in proportion to how controversial it is. So Gibbard is wrong - if expression is to get expressivism off the ground, then it will be enormously controversial whether words do express judgments. And thus expressivism is committed to strong claims about the semantics of non-normative language. (shrink)

It is argued that expressivists can solve their problems in accounting for the unity and autonomy of logic – logic is topic independent and does not derive from a general ‘logic’ of mental states – by adopting an analysis of the logical connectives that takes logically complex sentences to express complex combinations of simple attitudes like belief and disapproval and dispositions to form such simple attitudes upon performing suppositional acts, and taking acceptance and rejection of sentences to be the common (...) mental denominator in descriptive and evaluative discourse, and structural requirements governing these to be the basis for logic. Such an account requires that attitudes like belief, intention and disapproval can come in hypothetical mode – plausibly linked to the capacity to mentally simulate or emulate one's own attitudes – and, if correct, suggests that these form the basic building blocks for our capacity to understand logically complex sentences. (shrink)

Critics argue that non-cognitivism cannot adequately account for the existence and nature of some thick moral concepts. They use the existence of thick concepts as a lever in an argument against non-cognitivism, here called the Thick Concept Argument (TCA). While TCA is frequently invoked, it is unfortunately rarely articulated. In this paper, TCA is first reconstructed on the basis of John McDowell’s formulation of the argument (from 1981), and then evaluated in the light of several possible non-cognitivist responses. In general, (...) TCA assumes too much about what a non-cognitivist is (or must be) committed to. There are several non-cognitivist theories, and only some fit the view attacked by TCA. Furthermore, TCA rests on a contestable intuition about a thought experiment, here called the External Standpoint Experiment (ESE). It is concluded that TCA is remarkably weak, given how frequently the argument is invoked. (shrink)

In this paper I defend against a certain objection the view that it is possible to account for validity and kindred notions for moral language within a non-cognitivist framework by appeal to the descriptive meaning of moral terms. The objection is that such an account leads to an asymmetry in the accounts it offers for synonymy in different contexts; in certain contexts it holds that sameness of meaning for a moral term depends on its evaluative meaning, in other contexts that (...) it depends on the term's descriptive meaning. In the third part of the paper I try to show why non-cognitivists should be prepared to live with that asymmetry. In the process I also deal with two other objections. (shrink)

Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, noncognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense. Roughly put, noncognitivists think that moral statements have no truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people (...) utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes more similar to desires, approval or disapproval. Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus it holds that moral statements do express beliefs and that they are apt for truth and falsity. But cognitivism need not be a species of realism since a cognitivist can be an error theorist and think all moral statements false. Still, moral realists are cognitivists insofar as they think moral statements are apt for truth and falsity and that many of them are in fact true. (shrink)