A problem for expressivism

Analysis

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 239-251

  Jackson, Frank ^a   Pettit, Philip ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039680685     PISSN: 00032638     EISSN: 14678284     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/analys/58.4.239     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz, 2nd. ed. 1946,
2. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984,
3. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
4. For a view according to which ethical sentences report attitudes but only in this wide sense - in a sense in which the presence of the attitudes is not the focus of attention - see James Dreier, 'Internalism and Speaker Relativism', Ethics 101: 6-26.
5. see also Blackburn, Spreading the Word, p. 168,
6. chapter 1 of C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book III, chapter 2.
8. For more on this, see, e.g., see H. P. Grice, 'Meaning', Philosophical Review, 66 (1957): 377-88,
9. David Lewis, Convention, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969,
10. Jonathan Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
11. The issue here is quite separate from whether the attitudes reported are themselves in the general category of beliefs. Expressivists are typically internalists and Humeans - they argue that moral judgements have internal connections to motivation that Hume taught us no cognitive state can have. This would mean that moral judgements are not beliefs proper but that does not negate our point that ethical sentences had better, in that case, express subjects' beliefs about their allegedly non-cognitive judgements. This point was overlooked by one author (FJ) in Frank Jackson, Michael Smith and Graham Oppy, 'Minimalism and Truth Aptness', Mind, 103 (1994): 287-302.'Minimalism and Truth Aptness', but he stands by the critique of minimalism about truth aptness in that paper.
12. Language, Truth and Logic, p.109.
13. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 84.
14. This account of why 'but' signals a contrast without altering truth conditions is essentially the one Michael Dummett, Frege, London: Duckworth, 1973, offers on p. 86. Incidentally, as he points out, the contrast signalled need not be between 'P' and 'Q'.
15. For detailed accounts, see Grice, 'Meaning', Philosophical Review, 66 (1957): 377-88,
16. Lewis, Convention, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969,
17. Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
18. See, e.g., Stevenson, Ethics and Language. Incidentally, it might be argued that the reason 'boo' and 'hurrah' lack truth conditions is not that the conventions governing their use are not 'good' enough, but rather that they belong with commands and recommendations. In this case, we would not have different models for understanding the expressivist view, but the same model approached in slightly different ways.
19. See esp. Lewis, 'General Semantics', reprinted in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
20. The view that a sentence cannot both be a performative and have truth conditions is prominent in J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, see esp. Lecture I.