Hybrid metaethical theories attempt to incorporate essential elements of expressivism and cognitivism, and thereby to accrue the benefits of both. Hybrid theories are often defended in part by appeals to slurs and other pejoratives, which have both expressive and cognitivist features. This paper takes far more seriously the analogy between pejoratives and moral predicates. It explains how pejoratives work, identifies the features that allow pejoratives to do that work, and models a theory of moral predicates on those features. The result (...) is an expressivist theory that, among other advantages, is immune to embedding difficulties and avoids an overlooked difficulty concerning attitude ascriptions that is lethal to most other hybrid theories. (shrink)

Hybrid metaethical theories attempt to incorporate essential elements of expressivism and cognitivism, and thereby to accrue the benefits of both. Hybrid theories are often defended in part by appeals to slurs and other pejoratives, which have both expressive and cognitivist features. This paper takes far more seriously the analogy between pejoratives and moral predicates. It explains how pejoratives work, identifies the features that allow pejoratives to do that work, and models a theory of moral predicates on those features. The result (...) is an expressivist theory that, among other advantages, is immune to embedding difficulties and avoids an overlooked difficulty concerning attitude ascriptions that is lethal to most other hybrid theories. (shrink)

Abstract Though it has been claimed that Frege's commitment to expressions in indirect contexts not having their customary senses commits him to an infinite number of semantic primitives, Terrence Parsons has argued that Frege's explicit commitments are compatible with a two-level theory of senses. In this paper, we argue Frege is committed to some principles Parsons has overlooked, and, from these and other principles to which Frege is committed, give a proof that he is indeed committed to an infinite number (...) of semantic primitives?an intolerable result. (shrink)

In ‘The Trouble with Tarski’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), pp. 1–22, Jonathan Harrison attacks ‘Tarski‐style’ truth theories for both formalized and natural languages, on the grounds that (1) truth cannot be a property of sentences; (2) if it could be, T‐sentences would have to be necessary truths, which they are not; and (3) T‐sentences are not necessarily true and can even can be false. I reply that (1) cannot be an objection to Tarskian truth theories, since these can be (...) formulated in terms of whatever truth bearers might be. Thesis (2) is unjustified: Harrison's argument for it depends on an equivocation. Thesis (3) is false, since the right‐hand side of a T‐sentence is a meta‐language translation of the object‐language sentence described on the left‐hand side, and this guarantees its truth. (shrink)

This dissertation argues for a metaethical theory I call "Expressive-Assertivism." Expressive-Assertivism is a distinctive, substantial refinement of dual-use metaethical theories traditionally associated with R. M. Hare, C. L. Stevenson, and, more recently, with David Copp. If true, Expressive-Assertivism clarifies, resolves, or dissolves---without, in turn, raising additional difficulties---a number of philosophical problems, including what Michael Smith calls "The Moral Problem," which many consider to be the central organizing problem in contemporary metaethics. The following are the three most important features of Expressive-Assertivism. (...) ;1. The central tenet. The proper, literal use of an ethical sentence, such as 'Donating to charity is right', is the performance of a direct expressive illocutionary act and a direct assertive illocutionary act. Recognizing that ethical sentences can be used to both directly express a speaker's attitude and directly assert something about the world captures what is intuitively compelling about "expressivist" theories---namely, that there is some strong connection between a speaker's sincere moral utterance and his or her motivations to act---and what is intuitively compelling about "descriptivist" theories---namely, that moral utterances appear to have descriptive or cognitive content and, therefore, are truth-evaluable. The Central Tenet is the feature of Expressive-Assertivism that dissolves The Moral Problem. ;2. The generality principle. The proper, literal use of an ethical sentence directly expresses an attitude, not toward the subject of the sentence, but toward things of a more general kind, namely, things that have the property picked out by the ethical predicate . ;3. The extensionality principle. A speaker directly expresses an attitude toward things that have the property picked out by an ethical predicate whenever that predicate appears in any extensional context. Together, the Extensionality and Generality Principles shield Expressive-Assertivism from many objections to traditional expressivist theories, including "The Embedding Objection," which many consider to be the most difficult problem faced by expressivists. (shrink)