Abstract

In his recent book, Meaning and Normativity, Allan Gibbard argues at length that meta-ethical expressivism can be profitably extended to semantic and intentional language: meta-linguistic discourse about meaning, reference, content, and the like. This chapter argues that the extension of expressivism to semantic discourse is unprofitable and—worse still—in a certain sense selfundermining. It is unprofitable because it sheds no light on the problem of intentionality; and it undermines itself because many of the sentences that make up the expressivist’s theory are semantic sentences, and if these are understood to express non-cognitive attitudes of some kind, the expressivist’s explanations are spurious.