Nordic Wittgenstein Review (Nov 2012)
How to Be an Expressivist about Avowals Today
Abstract
According to expressivism about avowals, the meaning of typical self-ascriptions of mental states is a matter of expressing an attitude, rather than describing a state of affairs. Traditionally, expressivism has been glossed as the view that, qua expressions, avowals are not truth-evaluable. Contemporary neoexpressivists like Finkelstein and Bar-On have argued that avowals are expressions, and truth-evaluable besides. In contrast, this paper provides a defence of the view that avowals are, qua expressions, truth-evaluable. This defence is based on an argument from disagreement, to the effect that an adequate explanation of the existence of disagreement involving both cases of avowals and cases of nonlinguistic expression (like winces) supports a view according to which genuine (sincere, truthful) expression is what truth amounts to in avowals.
