Abstract
In recent work Huw Price has defended what he calls a global expressivist approach to understanding language (and/or thought) and its relation to the physical world. Global expressivism rejects a representationalist picture of the language-world relation and thereby, by intention at least, also a certain metaphysical conception of what are commonly known as placement problems: how entities of the everyday, common sense world like mental states, meanings, moral values, modalities and so on fit into the natural world. Global expressivism upholds a commitment to substantive enquiry into the naturalistic basis of thought about the world, but pursues this in a pragmatist or non-representationalist ’key’ (as Price often puts it), thereby rendering—as it sees things—traditional metaphysical questions otiose. I am in broad sympathy with many of Price’s arguments and ideas. However, I believe the specific sub-variety of non-representationalism he develops actually fails to secure the anti-metaphysical results he seeks. My arguments have their starting point in the Carnap-Quine debate. Given Price’s view of this, which I endorse, I think it can be made clear that Quine’s view, or something very close to it, presents us with a coherent example of a non-representationalist metaphysical placement project. Though one might reasonably doubt the rationality of or motivation for such a view, Price’s own strongly naturalistic assumptions, as these are evinced in his so-called ’subject’ naturalism, make that move dialectically unavailable to him. I end with a brief sketch of an alternative non-representationalist and anti-metaphysical position.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Following Price, I will henceforth gloss over this distinction and proceed with the discussion for the most part in the linguistic mode.
The expression ‘anti-representationalism’ has become more widespread than ‘non-representationalism’ in discussion of these issues in the literature. Though they are essentially just labels, I use the less usual ‘non-representationalism’ here deliberately to denote a more purely negative view: one that rejects representationalism and embraces instead some form of semantic deflationism—where the latter is understood as denying and the former maintaining that truth and reference are substantive word-world relations that help to explain meaning. As we shall see, especially in relation to the discussion of Quine and Carnap in Sect. 2, semantic deflationism plausibly also has deflationary implications for ontology. Importantly, NR is the alternative to representationalism Price is mainly concerned with in his argument against ON (that is, he argues that ON presupposes representationalism and lapses if one rejects the latter and instead embraces deflationism). I avoid ‘anti-representationalism’ mainly because it has (perhaps not unreasonably) been connected to Price’s more specific elaboration of NR in the direction of GE—indeed, is often used by him and others as a synonym for the latter. My central gambit will be that there is light between NR and GE (or, if you like, a fully anti-representationalist view) that Price does not see and that accommodates a form of ON.
It will be important to make clear exactly what force the objection is meant to have (something Price himself does not do, as far as I can see). I will ultimately be arguing that given Price’s other commitments a form of ON must be conceded to survive the argument even on its weakest construal.
Representationalism is thus not merely the idea of there being truth-makers and truth-making relations. Semantic deflationism can for example accept that moral states of affairs—in some suitably deflationary sense—make moral statements true or false. Rather representationalism assumes that there is some non-trivial specification of reference that also allows for non-trivial truth-makers in a way that in turn makes space for ON. This is coordinate with the idea that the Canberra planners’ metaphysical project is itself not meant to be trivial, and indeed one way of understanding Price’s argument is that a non-trivial metaphysics requires a non-trivial notion of representation. Note however that Price therefore does not renounce the idea of representation in precisely the trivial, deflationary sense; this will be important later on.
Indeed, it is not the only hitch for ON according to Price, for even if one accepts representationalism in principle there may be problems in understanding referential relations determinately enough to allow useful resolution of metaphysical questions; cf. Stich (1990). But we will not pursue that worry here.
At least, it would seem to be so barring the eventuality that we can exhaustively analyse problematic concepts in terms of naturalistic ones—a vindication of ON which Price is in principle open to (pers. comm.), but presumably thinks so unlikely as to be not worth discussing.
Given this distinction, the label global expressivism might appear somewhat misleading, as this tends to imply an approach to a vocabulary that does not make use of its (putatively) referring terms to explain its existence and function. Price in fact acknowledges this non-standard usage, gesturing further at how GE’s deflationary understanding of truth provides a further, somewhat non-standard way of exemplifying an ‘expressivist’ approach (2013, pp. 177–178). Perhaps global pragmatism—a label he also uses—might thus have been more appropriate. On the other hand, he also thinks expressivist explanations in a more traditional sense can be extended at least a lot further and deeper than is often assumed (see Sect. 3). His main point in any case is that the explanations in question are (uniformly) not representational and (hence) not metaphysical, but rather based on use and function (see further Williams’ (2013), discussion of ‘EMU’-specifications of meanings and Price (2013), p. 173 ff., endorsement of this as an interpretation of his view).
Price uses the term ‘i-representation’ to characterise this latter, ‘language-internal’ relation. Neither i-representation nor e-representation correspond to representation in the sense assumed by representationalism; in Price’s view, the latter makes the mistake of merging what are in fact two separate notions. See ibid. for further discussion.
Somewhat similar though not identical worries to these are voiced by Horwich (2013), to which Price (2013, p. 178 ff.) has replied—to my mind effectively, given the details of Horwich’s piece. Knowles (forthcoming) discusses the relationship between Horwich’s and Price’s views on representationalism and metaphysics.
I should perhaps underline at this juncture that what Price calls ‘object naturalism’ is defined in such a way that it is independent of representationalism. This is clear in his writings (see the citations above), not least his consideration of ON’s viability ‘without semantic crutches’. Nevertheless, since Price thinks ON is actually dependent on representationalism, it is a view that has sometimes been seen and discussed as wedded to representationalism (by Price and others). Furthermore, there are some differences between representationailst and non-representationalist forms of ON in terms of how they understand placement problems (see the following section). As a result, some may think it appropriate to tie ‘ON’ to ‘representationalism’. This however is a purely verbal point and does not affect the substance of what I will argue, namely, that, contra Price, rejecting representationalism does not rule out a recognizably metaphysical form of naturalism (and thus I will, for the record, also apply the label ‘ON’ to such a naturalism, in keeping with Price’s original definition).
In addition to, plausibly, clashing with the ontologically deflationist position Carnap adopts: see note 12.
For an explicit statement of this, see Quine (1986, p. 115). To be clear, I see this commitment as part and parcel of NR. Though the latter is perhaps most recognizably evinced in Quine’s case through his disquotationalism (a form of semantic deflationism; cf. Quine 1970), it is very plausible that there are clear connections between semantic deflationism and the kind of ontological deflationism both Carnap and Quine defend. For an explicit argument to this effect see Thomasson (2015a).
Price commits himself to truth-conditional content both explicitly (see his Price 2013, p. 40) and implicitly in view of his use of Brandom’s inferential semantics (ibid., p. 34), which precisely seeks to ground the notion of content in more basic normative practices. Cf. also Shapiro (2014) for a study of the various ways content inevitably figures in Price’s system. (A couple of lines of possible resistance to this point or its significance that might be mounted by Price are considered below—see note 15 and Sect. 3—but rejected).
It is of course often said that Quine rejected physicalism insofar as he acknowledged quantification over sets as unavoidable in science (cf. Quine 1961, essay 1). On the other hand, one might argue that doing this just enunciates a non-materialistic conception of physics. Though there is much to discuss here, I cannot see that it has any direct implications for my argument: Quine plausibly remained a physicalist in a recognizable sense, and even if he didn’t, it seems clear such a position otherwise identical to Quine’s remains viable. I will thus for simplicity’s sake ignore this complication in the following.
Perhaps Price would at this point put up resistance to my invocation of truth conditional content in the service of an non-representationalist form of ON. Thus at one point he argues for a quietist position about reference and truth, claiming that one needn’t deny ‘in one’s theoretical voice’ semantic properties, only not assert their existence, and not make use of them (Price 2004, pp. 191–192). However, from the position of one involved in the relevant discourses it stands fast that there are ethical truths, say, as well as physical ones, and in the same sense, however deflationary this sense may be—and that is all my Quinean position will require to motivate ON. Indeed, one might put further pressure on Price at this juncture if one adopted the idea that there is a significant distinction between formal and material terms of language, i.e. between referring terms and logical, non-referring terms, as Amie Thomasson does in defending her own neo-Carnapian view against Ted Sider’s claim that it implicitly denies logical structure in the world (cf. Thomasson 2015b, p. 312 ff.)—a line it seems would be conducive to Price’s own view. For then, however much functional pluralism there is within the material category, its distinctiveness as a category is clearly acknowledged, which then presumably is enough to make coherent the idea of anyone valorizing a particular vocabulary in the way my Quinean does.
The quote is from Quine (1960, p. 221). Quine’s realism has perplexed a number of commentators insofar as he also thinks we have no conception of how things are except through our particular, pragmatically derived theoretical schemes (see e.g. Keskinen 2014). However there is really no puzzle here once one bears in mind that there is no perspective external to such schemes from which one can measure their correspondence of lack thereof. See also below.
The notion of explication is originally due to Carnap; it is discussed by Quine in his (1960, p. 258 ff.).
I am thinking here of expressivism as a local and non-cognitivist position, not the kind of view which is involved in Price’s global expressivism. Whether such a local expressivism is coherent given NR is not important for me to establish here (Macarthur and Price 2007, argue that semantic deflationism rules out local expressivism; Kukla and Winsberg 2015, argue that it does not). What is important is that at least the classical options of eliminativism, reductionism or fictionalism are available (I take it that NR must and can unproblematically allow for fictional claims to be false, in spite of, in some sense, their assertibility).
Quine himself is sometimes sceptical about the value of metaphysical discussion—see e.g. Quine (1960, p. 265)—though in truth he seems to vacillate with respect to the extent of his ‘placement’ metaphysical interests. For some representative discussions, apart from Word and Object, see Quine 1953, 1995, essay 8) (on mental entities), Quine (1961, essay 4) (on enduring substances), and (Quine (1981, ch. 6) (on morality).
Exactly in what sense Price is a naturalist will be an important theme of the current section. I also note that Thomasson (2015b) defends a neo-Carnapian position similar to Price’s, but sees it as dependent on upholding the analytic-synthetic distinction. In accord with Quine’s broader epistemological naturalism, I think we should do without the latter. However, defending this view or investigating Thomasson’s alternative, though clearly of interest in relation to understanding the relationship between NR and metaphysics, is beyond the scope of the present paper.
Price explicitly abjures the bifurcation thesis in Macarthur & Price (op. cit.), in which local forms of expressivism that nevertheless aim to make use of a deflationary notion of truth are argued to be unstable.
Price in fact explicitly concedes this (cf. his Price 2007, p. 401). Perhaps he might finesse the problem here by saying that the kind of explanation he has in mind requires the vocabulary in question to pick out at least causally efficacious features of the world. However, there are least two problems with this suggestion. Firstly Price himself thinks we should be able to understand causal talk itself expressivistically, i.e. in terms of more basic naturalistic facts that are not themselves causal in nature (cf. Price and Menzies 1993, and below). Secondly, it is in any case very unclear how one could motivate the idea that expressivist explanation would have to be causal in some substantive, naturalistic sense without begging the question against a view that denied this. For example, it seems we can make quite good sense of the idea of someone, say, coming to realise an act was kind because, at least in part, the act was kind. Admittedly the issues here are complicated—a fuller discussion might consider what Crispin Wright has called ‘wide cosmological role’ (cf. Wright 1992, and for critique Rosen 1994)—but I think it is clear there is no easy route to seeing scientific discourse as having some kind of de jure privileged status in explaining everything else.
References
Blackburn, S. (2013). Pragmatism: All or some? In Price, 2013, 67–84.
Carnap, R. (1950). Semantics, empiricism and ontology. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 4, 2–40. http://www.ditext.com/carnap/carnap.html. Accessed on April 27, 2016.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collins, J. (2007). Metascientific eliminativism: A reconsideration of Chomsky’s review of skinner’s verbal behaviour. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 58, 625–658.
Dupré, J. (1993). The disorder of things: Metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Horwich, P. (2013). Naturalism, deflationism and the relative priority of language and metaphysics. In Price, 2013, 112–127.
Jackson, F. (1998). From metaphysics to ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keskinen, A. (2014). Quine’s conception of objects: Beyond realism and anti-realism. In K. Westphal (Ed.), Realism, Science, and Pragmatism (pp. 93–114). London: Routledge.
Knowles, J. (2014). Naturalism without metaphysics. In K. Westphal (Ed.), Realism, Science and Pragmatism (pp. 200–218). London: Routledge.
Knowles, J. (forthcoming). Representationalism, metaphysics, and naturalism: Price, Horwich, and beyond. Forthcoming in K. Cahill & T. Raleigh (Eds.), Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Mind, and Naturalism. London: Routledge.
Knowles, J. (in preparation). Does metaphysics depend on representationalism?
Kukla, R., & Winsberg, E. (2015). Deflationism, pragmatism, and metaphysics. In S. Gross, N. Tebben, & M. Williams (Eds.), Meaning without Representation (pp. 25–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ladyman, J., & Ross, D., et al. (2007). Everything must go: Metaphysics naturalised Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macarthur, D., & Price, H. (2007). Pragmatism, quasi-realism and the global challenge. Reprinted in Price, 2011, 228–252.
McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, value, and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Price, H. (1997). Time’s arrow and archimedes’ point: New directions for the physics of time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Price, H. (2004). Naturalism without representationalism. Reprinted in Price, 2011, 184–199.
Price, H. (2007). Quining naturalism. Journal of Philosophy, 104, 375–405.
Price, H. (2009a). The semantic foundations of metaphysics. Reprinted in Price, 2011, 253–279.
Price, H. (2009b). Metaphysics after Carnap: The ghost who walks? Reprinted in Price, 2011, 280–303.
Price, H. (2011). Naturalism without mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Price, H. (2013). Expressivism, pragmatism and representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Price, H. (2015). Idling and sidling towards philosophical peace. In S. Gross, N. Tebben, & M. Williams (Eds.), Meaning without representation: Essays on truth, expression, normativity, and naturalism (pp. 307–330). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Price, H., & Menzies, P. (1993). Causation as a secondary quality. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 44, 187–203.
Price, H., & Menzies, P. (2009). Is semantics in the plan? In D. Braddon-Mitchell & R. Nola (Eds.), Naturalism and analysis (pp. 183–200). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. (1953). On mental entities. Reprinted in his The ways of paradox and other essays. New York: Random House, 1966.
Quine, W. V. (1961). From a logical point of view (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. (1969). Epistemology naturalized. In Ontological relativity and other essays (pp. 69–90). New York: Columia University Press.
Quine, W. V. (1970). Philosophy of logic. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Quine, W. V. (1981). Theories and things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. (1986). Reply to Dagfinn Føllesdal. In L. Hahn, & P. Schlipp (Eds.), The philosophy of W.V. Quine (pp. 114–115). La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Quine, W. V. (1995). From stimulus to science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosen, G. (1994). Objectivity and modern idealism: What is the question? In M. Michael & J. O’Leary-Hawthorne (Eds.), Philosophy in mind: The place of philosophy in the study of mind (pp. 277–319). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Shapiro, L. (2014). Linguistic function and content: Reflections on price’s pragmatism. Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 497–506.
Stich, S. (1990). Deconstructing the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomasson, A. (2015a). Deflationism in semantics and metaphysics. In A. Burgess & B. Sherman (Eds.), Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning (pp. 185–213). Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press.
Thomasson, A. (2015b). Ontology made easy. Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press.
Williams, M. (2013). How pragmatists can be local expressivists. In Price, 2013, 128–144.
Wright, C. (1992). Truth and objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Acknowledgments
Versions of the is paper have been presented at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature colloquium (Oslo, March 2014), the conference Perspectives on Intentionality (Fefor, Norway, September 2014) and the Cambridge Philosophy of Science seminar (‘CAMPOS’) (February 2015). I thank audiences for their questions and comments on those occasions. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments substantially improved the final product. Finally, special thanks to Huw Price for inspiration and discussion over the years.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Knowles, J. Global expressivism and the flight from metaphysics. Synthese 194, 4781–4797 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1166-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1166-1