Abstract
Huw Price’s neo-pragmatist programme of global expressivism (see Huw Price Naturalism Without Mirrors (2011) and Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (2013)) faces a challenge—it is susceptible to the charge that the proposed combination of expressivism with a deflationary account of semantics leads to inconsistency. Expressivists about a particular discourse deny that it is representational. Global expressivists face the threat of inconsistency due to their attempts to generalise this denial to include the discourse of semantics. In this paper, I explicate two meta-semantic presuppositions of this charge. I argue that such an explication enables us to construct a consistent account of global expressivism. The key point is that global expressivists should adopt two truth predicates and treat meta-semantics as non-substantial. I argue that this framework provides us with a better grasp of Price’s response to the problem of inconsistency and enables global expressivists to accommodate the correspondence intuition.
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Notes
The following discussion applies to any bearer of content (such as propositions, thoughts and beliefs), but in order to keep the discussion concise, let us confine it to linguistic items.
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Funding
This research has been supported by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA and the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (European Regional Development Fund),and is related to research project IUT20-5 (Estonian Ministry of Education and Research).
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Sova, H. A Non-substantial Meta-semantics for Global Expressivism. Acta Anal 34, 505–514 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00385-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00385-1