Online research in philosophy

Contemporary expressivists typically deny that all true judgments must represent reality. Many instead adopt truth minimalism, according to which there is no substantive property of judgments in virtue of which they are true. In this article, I suggest that expressivists would be better suited to adopt truth pluralism, or the view that there is more than one substantive property of judgments in virtue of which judgments are true. My point is not that an expressivism that takes this form is true, but that it more readily accommodates the motivations that typically lead expressivists to their view in the first place.

Expressivism is most widely known as a thesis that semantically complements non-cognitivism in meta-ethics: if there are no moral facts to be known, if moral judgements or statements are not capable of being true or false, then the meaning of morally evaluative sentences cannot centrally consist in their having a truth conditional content, expressing a truth-evaluable proposition. But since the truth conditional approach to meaning is widely accepted, non-cognitivists are called upon to offer an alternative theory of meaning for moral sentences. What they frequently offer is expressivism, the view that the meaning of moral sentences must be analysed in terms of special kinds of illocutionary act, for the performance of which these sentences serve. To utter the sentence “Gambling is bad.”, for example, is not to assert the truth-evaluable proposition that gambling is bad (there is no such truth-evaluable item), but rather to condemn gambling and thereby to express one’s moral attitude towards gambling. Whether or not “expressivism” is a good label for this view (“speech-act analysis” might be a better one), there are highly analogous views about sentences other than moral ones, which we might conveniently label in the same way. Thus, as there are expressivists about morals, there might be expressivists about truth, about negation, about causality, about taste, about probability, about modality, about conditionals and more. All these views share the combination of two claims: a denial of the truth-evaluability of (the contents of) the sentences in a certain class X combined with a speech-act-analysis to account for the meaning of the sentences in X . So it would seem to be reasonable to assume that expressivism can be discussed in general for variable X. The aim of this paper is to re-examine and to generalise a certain line of objection against expressivisms, a line prominently taken by Searle (1969) and Geach (1960, 1965)..

Jimmy expresses sympathy for Scanlon’s contractualism but wonders whether it might be better developed in the context of a Humean expressivism. Jimmy presses this point, in part, by observing that much of what Scanlon wants to say about moral and normative discourse, such as their logical discipline and apparent truth-aptitude, can be accommodated by the expressivist. If all that Scanlon wants to say about moral and normative discourse can be accommodated by the expressivist then what content can be given to his denial of expressivism, to his commitment to a cognitive understanding of moral judgment and judgments of reasons? The appearance of a genuine dispute between Scanlon and the expressivist can seem to slip quietly out of view. In this reply I will focus in detail on one strand of Scanlon’s thought that raises difficulties for the expressivist model that Jimmy favors. The point is to emphasize that there is indeed a genuine dispute between Scanlon and the expressivist and to suggest, tentatively, that Scanlon’s contractualism might require its present cognitive development.

This paper is a reply to Michael Lynch's "Truth, Value and Epistemic Expressivism" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research for 2009. It argues that Lynch's argument against expressivism fails because of an ambiguity in the employed notion of an 'epistemically disengaged standpoint'.

Stanovich & West continue a history of norm-setting that began with deference to reasonable people's opinions, followed by adherence to probability theorems. They return to deference to reasonable people, with aptitude test performance substituting for reasonableness. This allows them to select independently among competing theories, but defines reasoning circularly in terms of aptitude, while aptitude is measured using reasoning.

Early expressivists, such as A.J. Ayer, argued that normative utterances are not truth-apt, and many found this striking claim implausible. After all, ordinary speakers are perfectly happy to ascribe truth and falsity to normative assertions. It is hard to believe that competent speakers could be so wrong about the meanings of their own language, particularly as these meanings are fixed by the conventions implicit in their own linguistic behavior. Later expressivists therefore tried to arrange a marriage between expressivism and the truth-aptness of normative discourse. Like many arranged marriages, this has not been an entirely happy one. In particular, the marriage has seemed to depend on so-called deflationist theories of truth, and these may well turn out to provide at best a shaky foundation for any marriage. Before advising the parties to file for divorce, though, we should first see whether expressivism itself has not been misunderstood. I argue that the marriage of expressivism to the truth-aptness of normative discourse can indeed be saved, though only in the context of a version of expressivism I call “Ecumenical Expressivism.”.

The moral belief problem is that of reconciling expressivism in ethics with both minimalism in the philosophy of language and the syntactic discipline of moral sentences. It is argued that the problem can be solved by distinguishing minimal and robust senses of belief, where a minimal belief is any state of mind expressed by sincere assertoric use of a syntactically disciplined sentence and a robust belief is a minimal belief with some additional property R. Two attempts to specify R are discussed, both based on the thought that beliefs are states that aim at truth. According to the first, robust beliefs are criticisable to the extent that their content fails to match the state of the world. This sense fails to distinguish robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. According to the second, robust beliefs function to have their content match the state of the world. This sense succeeds in distinguishing robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. The conclusion is that the debate concerning the cognitive status of moral convictions needs to address the issue of the function of moral convictions. Evolutionary theorising may be relevant, but will not be decisive, in answering this question.

My main task here is first to distinguish, and then to map out possibilities. I won’t be concerned to argue for a certain position as much as to argue that various combinations of positions are consistent. In particular, I want to argue that a commitment to minimalism about truth does not bring an automatic commitment to what has been called a minimalist theory of truth-aptitude: the claim that every assertoric sentence which is used in a systematic way will be either true or false. Nor does minimalism about truth bring a commitment to what has been called minimalism about reference: the claim that every word used in a systematic way will refer.

This paper is about Truth Minimalism, Norm Expressivism, and the relation between them. In particular, it is about whether Truth Minimalism can help to solve a problem thought to plague Norm Expressivism. To start with, let me explain what I mean by 'Truth Minimalism' and 'Norm Expressivism.'.