Expressivism, deflationism and correspondence

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Volumn 2, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 171-191

  Marino, Patricia ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33751565086     PISSN: 17404681     EISSN: 17455243     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1740468105054340     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (New York: Vintage International, 1994 [1967]), p. 162
2. The classic texts of expressivism include A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1952), ch. 6
3. R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)
4. and more recently, Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
5. and Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
6. and Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
7. For more on deflationism, see, for example, Hartry Field, 'The Deflationary Conception of Truth', in Graham Macdonald and Crispin Wright (eds.), Fact, Science, and Morality: Essays on A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 55-117
8. and 'Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content', in Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (eds.), Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1994]), pp. 351-91
9. Stephen Leeds, 'Theories of Reference and Truth', Erkenntnis 13 (1978), pp. 111-29
10. and 'Truth, Correspondence, and Success', Philosophical Studies 79 (1995), pp. 1-36
11. and Paul Horwich, Truth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998)
12. See, for instance, Cripsin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
13. and Michael Lynch, Truth in Context: An Essay in Pluralism and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Insofar as Wright contrasts his view with correspondence, I feel it is fair to call it deflationary, though it diverges from traditional formulations
14. In addition to the texts cited below, the following discuss the interaction of deflationism and expressivism: Michael Smith, 'Why Expressivists about Value Should Love Minimalism about Truth', Analysis 54 (1994), pp. 1-12
15. and 'Minimalism, Truth-Aptitude, and Belief', Analysis 54 (1994), pp. 21-26
16. Paul Horwich, 'The Essence of Expressivism', Analysis 54 (1994), 19-20
17. and John Divers and Alexander Miller, 'Platitudes and Attitudes: A Minimalist Conception of Belief', Analysis 55 (1995), pp. 37-44
18. Field writes, 'Unlike cruder writings in the emotivist tradition, Gibbard grants (what I think should be obvious) that evaluations have a factual component; the trick is to combine factual and non-factual components in a single analysis' ('Disquotational Truth and Factually Defective Discourse', Philosophical Review 103 [1994], pp. 405-52 [434]). He goes on to give the analysis I describe below
19. Paul Boghossian, 'The Status of Content', Philosophical Review 99 (1990), pp. 157-84 (163)
20. Boghossian, 'Status of Content', p. 167
21. Ronald Dworkin 'Objectivity and Truth: You'd Better Believe It', Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996), pp. 87-139 (110)
22. Blackburn, Ruling Passions, p. 305
23. Horwich points out that 'they form that-clauses, which function in the normal way to designate objects of assertion, belief, etc' (Truth, p. 84)
24. Paul Horwich, 'Gibbard's Theory of Norms', Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993), pp. 67-78 (71). The essay is a review of Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings
25. For discussion of this kind of case, some of which I draw on below, see Crispin Wright, 'Realism, Anti-Realism, Irrealism, Quasi-Realism', 1987 Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture, in Peter French, Theodore Uehling and Howard Wettstein (eds.), Realism and Anti-Realism, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 25-49, esp. pp. 32-35
26. idem, Truth and Objectivity, p. 11
27. Bob Hale, 'The Compleat Projectivist', Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986), pp. 65-84
28. idem, 'Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?' and 'Postscript', in John Haldane and Crispin Wright, Reality, Representation, and Projection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 373-63, 385-88
29. and Simon Blackburn, 'Realism, Quasi, or Queasy?' in Haldane and Wright, Reality, Representation, and Projection, pp. 365-84
30. The modus ponens problem is also pressed on Blackburn by Schueler (G.F. Schueler, 'Modus Ponens and Moral Realism', Ethics 98 [1988], pp. 492-500)
31. and was, in earlier forms, raised by Geach (Peter Geach, 'Ascriptivism', Philosophical Review 69 [1960], pp. 221-25)
32. and pressed by Searle (John Searle, Speech Acts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969]). The little brother example is Geach's
33. I say more about correspondence theories and content-implication in 'What Should a Correspondence Theory Be and Do?' Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
34. Non-assertion views haven't had many takers in this domain, though perhaps formalist views on which infinitary statements are taken to encode rules rather than stating facts might partly qualify
35. Such as Gary Ebbs, Rule-Following and Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
36. and Paul Horwich, Truth
37. We might, at this point, just take up a Gibbardian 'part-assertion' view, insist on an innocuous deflationism to go along with it, and be done with it. I think, though, that the general points raised below, about logic, consistency, knowledge, and objectivity, apply to expressivism in general; because they are more clearly highlighted by Blackburn's presentation, I will focus on this. Blackburn's 'Gibbard on Normative Logic', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 [1992], pp. 947-52) argues that Gibbard's account of normative logic - and in particular his treatment of the Frege-Geach problem - fails unless buttressed by Blackburnian elements
38. For more on expressivism and the Frege-Geach problem, see James Dreier, 'Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth', Philosophical Studies 83 (1996), pp. 29-51
39. Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Introduction, p. 7
40. Simon Blackburn, 'The Individual Strikes Back', in Essays in Quasi-Realism, pp. 213-28 (217)
41. Blackburn, 'Individual Strikes Back', p. 217
42. Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism, Introduction, p. 6
43. The first in Blackburn, Spreading the Word and the other in his 'Attitudes and Contents' in Essays in Quasi-Realism, pp. 182-97
44. See Blackburn, Spreading the Word, p. 189 and Hale, 'Postscript', section 2
45. See Hale, 'Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?' pp. 350-51
46. and Wright, 'Realism, Anti-Realism, Irrealism, Quasi-Realism', p. 24
47. Blackburn cites David Wiggins, 'Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism, and Motivating Beliefs', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990-91), pp. 61-86, on p. 302 of Ruling Passions
48. For a similar argument, see David Wiggins, 'Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments', in his Needs, Values, Truth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 138-84. The quoted passage is from the latter, p. 153
49. Wiggins stresses in a footnote that the force of the analogy between arithmetic and ethics 'becomes evident when we realize that the explanation "People generally believe that 7+5 = 12 because there is nothing else to think" does not invoke causality in any way that commits the theorist to postulating, absurdly, the existence of some causal relation between minds and the series of natural numbers' ('Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments', p. 153 n. 17). Part of the burden, I take it, of content-implication is that if we are unwilling to have epistemologically accessible mathematical objects, we cannot say arithmetic is simply true, without some further explanations. For an argument that causal relations aren't so absurd in this case after all
50. see Penelope Maddy, Realism in Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
51. Para-consistency aside, this is in contrast to reasoning about an external world, in which the law of non-contradiction is a fundamental logical law
52. Nick Zangwill, in his 'Moral Modus Ponens', Ratio (new series) 5 (1992), pp. 177-93, argues that not delivering 'logical failure' in wrong ethical modus ponens reasoning isn't a problem for Blackburn, but that there are problems with our general inability, on the expressivist view, to treat unasserted ethical statements (those merely entertained, for example) as having the same content as their asserted counterparts
53. I have been influenced in these thoughts by Penelope Maddy's account in her 'Naturalistic Look at Logic' (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, November 2002, pp. 61-90). There, Maddy argues that basic logic is grounded in structural features - objects standing in relations, with ground/consequent interconnections - that are both part of our basic cognitive processing and (largely) present in the external world. If this kind of justification for the application of logical laws is right, the expressivist should expect to find logic in ethical domains applying for different reasons, and in different ways, than it does in ordinary descriptive discourses
54. Blackburn, 'Realism, Quasi, or Queasy?' p. 369. He compares the situation to that of mathematics: perhaps mathematics should be thought of instrumentally, with the role of the instrument something other than description
55. Of course this does lead to a certain land of self-referential puzzle, but I don't think it's my puzzle any more than anyone else's
56. Blackburn, in his popular introduction to ethics, Being Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) makes a point about relativism much in this spirit, when he suggests that what look like the morals of a particular group (slave-owners, and so on) are only the morals of a particular subgroup (not, presumably, the slaves themselves). This helps explain why some human rights principles are 'imposable' on others who do things differently. (See especially page 27.)