Hybrid expressivism: Virtues and vices

Ethics

Volumn 119, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 257-309

  Schroeder, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63449099646     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/597019     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. For example, see Alexander Miller, An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 8.
2. See Mark Schroeder, "Expression for Expressivists," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2008): 86-116, for a different presupposition than I discuss in this article.
3. David Copp, "Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism," Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2001): 1-43
4. Michael Ridge, "Ecumenical Expressivism: Finessing Frege," Ethics 116 (2006): 302-36
5. "Ecumenical Expressivism: The Best of Both Worlds?" Oxford Studies in Metaethics 2 (2007): 51-76
6. "Epistemology for Ecumenical Expressivists," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (2007): S83-S108
7. and "The Truth in Ecumenical Expressivism," in Reasons for Action, ed. David Sobel and Stephen Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), chap. 11, http://www.michaelridge.com/mr/publish/pdf/ truth%20in%20ecumentical%20expressivism.pdf.
8. Stephen Barker, "Is Value Content a Component of Conventional Implicature?" Analysis 60 (2002): 268-79
9. Daniel Boisvert, "Expressive-Assertivism," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2008): 169-203.
10. Frank Jackson, "Non-Cognitivism, Validity, and Conditionals," in Singer and His Critics, ed. Dale Jamieson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 18-37
11. David Alm, "Moral Conditionals, Non-Cognitivism, and Meaning," Southern Journal of Philosophy 38:355-77
12. Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)
13. Dorit Bar-On and Matthew Chrisman, "Ethical Neo-Expressivism," in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), vol. 4.
14. See esp. Stephen Finlay, "The Conversational Practicality of Value Judgment, "Journal of Ethics 8 (2004): 205-23
15. and "Value and Implicature," Philosophers' Imprint 5 (2005): 1-20, http://www.philosophersimprint.org/005004/
16. and Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
17. Some readers have wondered why I don't include in this list Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, "Cognitivist Expressivism," in their Metaethics after Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 255-98.
18. The question arises because Horgan and Timmons describe their view as both expressivist and cognitivist. By my lights, however, Horgan and Timmons's view is a perfect example of ordinary, pure expressivism and is not a hybrid theory at all. The only distinctive feature of their expressivist theory which allows them to call it cognitivist is that they offer an object-language semantics for 'believes that' which allows moral complements-a move anticipated much earlier by Simon Blackburn. See Mark Schroeder, Bang For: Evaluating the Semantic Program of Expressivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 10, for further discussion.
19. See, e.g., Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
20. Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), and
21. Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
22. and Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
23. and Thinking How to Live
24. Ridge, "Finessing Frege."
25. This will become clearer later, in Sec. VII.
26. Joyce, Evolution of Morality. It should be noted that although I've classified Copp by the specific hybrid view that he has spelled out, he is an advocate of the hybrid approach more generally and does not wish his advocacy of it to hang on the success of his other views. Also, as noted above, I'm not as inclined to classify Gibbard and Finlay as hybrid theorists. Gibbard's view differs from that of Jackson's in "Non-Cognitivism, Validity, and Conditionals," e.g., in not appealing to the properties picked out by moral terms in order to underwrite his answer to the Frege-Geach Problem; on the contrary, he appeals to his answer to the Frege-Geach Problem in order to argue that moral terms pick out properties.
27. See Laura Schroeter and François Schroeter, "Is Gibbard a Realist?" Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2005), http://wwwjesp.org/PDF/Gibbardvollno2.pdf, for discussion of this aspect of Gibbard's view. Finlay's view has some features similar to Barker's, but it appeals only to explanatory resources to which any cognitivist theory of a certain kind can appeal and is more flexible in some other ways. See Finlay, "Value and Implicature," for comparative discussion. From here forward, I won't be paying special attention to either of these views. Finally, Aim (in "Moral Conditionals") has suggested an interesting view that he calls the "Descriptive Meaning View," according to which the descriptive content of sentences depends on the desire-like attitudes that they express, but the desirelike attitude expressed by a complex sentence in turn depends on the descriptive contents of its parts. This means that his answer to question Q4 is somewhat complicated, so I leave him off of the table. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do justice to his view here.
28. Ridge, "Finessing Frege" and "Best of Both Worlds?"
29. Boisvert, "Expressive-Assertivism."
30. For the record, I do not think that judgment motivational internalism is a conceptual truth-but the idea that it is often plays a role in the motivation of expressivist and hybrid theories. The question here is whether such a view can even succeed at obtaining its putative advantages; whether those advantages are more than putative is a topic for another occasion.
31. See my "Expression for Expressivists" and chap. 2 of Bang For.
32. See, e.g., Peter Geach, "Ascriptivism," Philosophical Review 69 (1960): 221-25
33. and "Assertion," Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 449-65
34. John Searle, "Meaning and Speech Acts," Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 423-32
35. Bob Hale, "Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?" in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed.John Haldane and Crispin Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
36. James Dreier, "Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth," Philosophical Studies 83 (1996): 29-51
37. Mark van Roojen, "Expressivism and Irrationality," Philosophical Review 105 (1996): 311-35
38. and Nicholas Unwin, " Qwasi-Realism, Negation, and the Frege-Geach Problem," Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1999): 337-52.
39. Mark Schroeder, "How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem with Negation," Nous 42 (2008): 573-99
40. and Bang For, chap. 3.
41. See also Nicholas Unwin, "Quasi-Realism" and "Norms and Negation: A Problem for Gibbard's Logic," Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2001): 60-75
42. and James Dreier, "Negation for Expressivists: A Collection of Problems with a Suggestion for Their Solution," in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1:217-33.
43. See, e.g., Daniel Stoljar, "Emotivism and Truth Conditions," Philosophical Studies 70 (1993): 81-101
44. Huw Price, "Semantic Deflationism and the Frege Point," in Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, ed. S. L. Tsohatzidis (London: Routledge, 1994)
45. and Paul Horwich, "Gibbard's Theory of Norms," Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (1993): 67-78
46. but also Dreier, "Expressivist Embeddings," for discussion.
47. For example, Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings and Thinking How to Live.
48. For example, Blackburn, Spreading the Word
49. I include the negation of the conclusion in the diagram in order to illustrate the inconsistency property.
50. Officially, I don't think that cognitivist views are committed to holding that moral sentences express beliefs in the same sense as pure expressivists think that they express desire-like attitudes. See my "Expression for Expressivists." I'll bracket that worry and the complications it results in, for the purposes of this article.
51. Ridge, "Finessing Frege."
52. This is Michael Smith's tactic in The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Note that motivational internalism comes in different strengths and that a strategy like Smith's only explains a weaker version, which says that an agent who judges that doing A is wrong will be motivated not to do A so long as she is practically rational, and can't explain a version of internalism which omits the clause about practical rationality. But versions of internalism which omit this clause are quite difficult to defend.
53. See, e.g., my Being For.
54. Notice, e.g., that Jackson's hybrid view appears on the left-hand side of fig. 1; it requires a different sort of account of the inference-licensing property, for which there is no space to go into here. Other hybrid theories which answer yes to question Q1 may also be possible.
55. There is a model for understanding how desire-like attitudes can, together with beliefs, commit to further desire-like attitudes. It is the instrumental model. So suppose that our argument is from 'stealing is wrong' and 'if stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong' to 'getting your little brother to steal is wrong'. If 'getting your little brother to steal is wrong' expresses the belief that getting your little brother to steal is K and expresses the desire not to get your little brother to steal, then this desire could turn out to be an instrumental desire, derivative from the desire to not do what is K. So if the conditional premise expresses the desire to not do what is K, then we can get commitment to the desire expressed by the conclusion, even though the conclusion expresses a different desire. As we'll see, however, this picture differs very little from the standard answer that I push for in the main text, and it faces essentially all of the same problems in the remainder of the article; I omit separate discussion of it for reasons of space.
56. In the following argument I ignore cancellation of double negations. But it is easy to see for similar reasons that '∼∼P' must express all and only the same desire-like attitudes as 'P', given that the inference from each to the other is valid and so must be inference licensing.
57. See n. 27 above.
58. See Ridge, "Finessing Frege," "Best of Both Worlds?" and "Truth in Ecumenical Expressivism." For discussion of the point in parentheses
59. see Mark van Roojen, "Expressivism, Supervenience, and Logic," Ratio, n.s., 18 (2005): 190-205.
60. Although compare "Epistemology for Ecumenical Expressivists," in which Ridge seems to suggest the view that sentences containing 'knows' express a different desire-like attitude.
61. Thanks to Andrew Alwood for making me be explicit about this important step of the argument. For this point, also see Boisvert, "Expressive- Assertivism."
62. Ridge, "Finessing Frege"; Barker, "Value Content"; Copp, "Realist-Expressivism"; and Boisvert, "Expressive- Assertivism."
63. Finlay's view, as explained in "Conversational Practicality of Value Judgment'" and in "Value and Implicature," is somewhat more complicated; he holds that in certain kinds of contexts speakers pragmatically convey that they have a certain desire-like attitude and that which one the speaker conveys that she has in these sorts of contexts varies along with the descriptive content of the sentence. So Finlay doesn't believe that speakers "express" (pragmatically convey that they have) desire-like attitudes in every context of utterance, but when they do, he holds that they vary systematically with the descriptive content of the sentence, thus obeying the constraint argued for in this section and the last.
64. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, 84-86.
65. Recall that 'dthat' is a directly referential-term-forming operator, so that the semantic contribution of 'dthat(the F)', if x is the F, is just x. The 'dthat' operator gives us a convenient way to describe the rules by which context-dependent expressions acquire their referents.
66. See Ridge, "Finessing Frege," 313-15: "The speaker may not have a very clear idea" and following, particularly the reference to "je ne sais quois" at 315.
67. Wayne Davis, Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
68. as endorsed in Ridge, "Finessing Frege" and "Best of Both Worlds?";
69. and Barker, "Value Content."
70. Davis, Meaning, Expression, and Thought, 59. The italics are from the original text; Davis uses italics for all of his definitions.
71. Ibid., 25.
72. Ibid., 49.
73. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Davis's account also clearly requires the speaker to know which mental state she is expressing, which Ridge explicitly denies.
74. Technically, these rules can be broken, but you are guaranteed to only be bound by one you are not breaking-this is analogous to the fact that indexical validities like 'I am here' are guaranteed to express truths, even though whatever truth they express is contingent.
75. James Dreier, "Internalism and Speaker Relativism," Ethics 101 (1990): 6-26
76. Stephen Finlay, "Conversational Practicality of Value Judgment," "Value and Implicature," and also "Oughts and Ends," Philosophical Studies (forthcoming), and "A Confusion of Tongues," unpublished book manuscript.
77. For the purposes of this section I set aside the question of whether attitude ascriptions also include, as part of their descriptive content, that their subject has or has expressed the associated desire-like attitude. We'll return to consider this question and its consequences in Sees. VIII and IX.
78. For a further maneuver, see Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Normative Contextualism Defended," working paper (University of Gothenburg and University of Southern California, 2008).
79. Thanks to Mike Ridge and to the PEA Soupers for fruitful discussion of the objection in Sec. VLA and for making the worry in Sec. VLB concrete. See http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2007/10/a-problem-for-s.html.
80. Ridge, "Truth in Ecumenical Expressivism."
81. Ibid., 26.
82. Ibid., 20-24.
83. At points Ridge seems to suggest ("Finessing Frege," 307, and "Truth in Ecumenical Expressivism," 8-9) that the difference lies in his semantics for 'true', discussed in the last two sections. But it is hard to see how that could be the case, since Barker's proposal doesn't include a semantics for the object-language word 'true' at all and hence doesn't include one that is inconsistent with Ridge's. So it could be supplemented with the same sort of semantics for 'true' as Ridge adopts, without any extra complications. In any case, even if his answer to Q4 does not turn out to be the main feature that Ridge thinks makes his view special, it does create a special problem for his view.
84. The idealization is that Ridge's preferred version of his view appeals to an 'ideal observer', which I'm leaving out here and which Ridge sometimes leaves out himself, e.g., in "Finessing Frege," 315-16. Holding fixed the difference in their answer to question Q4, Barker's answer could adopt the ideal observer idea as well, in any case.
85. Although, Jake Ross has justly pointed out to me that it isn't crazy to think that we might do better to reserve the claim to the 'succession' for pure expressivists rather than for hybridists at all.
86. The problem in this section can be thought of as a generalization of the problem raised in van Roojen, "Expressivism, Supervenience, and Logic."
87. Ignore possible effects of context on the reference of 'this knife' and 'that knife'; I would give the knives names to avoid this complication, but that would make the sentences look awkward since most knives don't have names.
88. For example, compare esp. the argument for internalism in Michael Smith, Moral Problem
89. and "The Argument for Internalism: Reply to Miller," Analysis 56 (1996): 175-84.
90. See Mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
91. 65; and compare Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, "Toward Fin de Siècle Ethics: Some Trends," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 115-89.
92. Christopher Potts, The Logic of Conventional Implicature (Oxford:. Oxford University Press, 2005).
93. Ibid., 160.
94. These examples are adapted from Kent Bach, "The Myth of Conventional Implicature," Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (1999): 367-421.
95. C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 110.
96. C. L. Stevenson, "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms," reprinted in his Facts and Values (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1963), 10-31, 16.