It is often claimed that there is an explanatory divide between expressivism and normative realism: more precisely, that the two views offer conflicting explanations of (i) the metaphysical structure of the normative realm, (ii) the connection between normative judgment and motivation, (iii) our normative beliefs and any convergence thereof, or (iv) the content of normative thoughts and claims. In this paper I argue that there need be no such explanatory conflict. Given a minimalist approach to the relevant metaphysical and semantic notions, expressivism is compatible with any explanation that would be acceptable as a general criterion for realism.
Suppose there are objective normative facts and our beliefs about these facts are by-and-large true. 1 How did this come to happen? This is the reliability challenge to normative realism. It is significantly different from other epistemological challenges in that it assumes the truth of realism, and asks realists to explain the correlation between our beliefs and the facts, rather than to argue that we are reliable. In answering this demand, realists may rely on any normative or metaphysical claims that are part of their view. 2 The dialectical force of the challenge comes precisely from this generous setup: if even after being granted their own conception of the subject-matter of normative discourse, realists are unable to provide a good explanation of our reliability, or at least to convince us that an explanation is in principle available, then they are in a problematic epistemological position. Or so the argument goes. 3 Importantly, the reliability challenge does not rely on any specific causal story meant to undermine realist commitments. This is not to say that facts about the origins of our normative beliefs may not be relevant in pressing this challenge. Evolutionary considerations, in particular, can be used to highlight one kind of explanation of our reliability that is available in other regions of thought, but not in the normative domain: namely, an evolutionary vindication of our reliability. Take the following passage from Jamie Dreier's (2012) paper on the reliability challenge: 1 I focus here on practical normativity. For brevity, I will use normative and normativity to mean practically normative and practical normativity, respectively, throughout the paper. 2 The reliability challenge differs in these respects from the evolutionary debunking arguments due to Joyce (2001, 2006) and Street (2006), which do not allow realists to take for granted the truth of our beliefs about objective normative facts. 3 Enoch (2011), Dreier (2012) and Joshua Schechter ("Does Expressivism Have an Epistemological Advantage over Realism?", unpublished manuscript) offer similar statements of the reliability challenge, inspired by Field's (1989) challenge to mathematical Platonism. How the failure to explain our reliability would undermine the realism is still a disputed question: it might provide a defeater for the justification we previously had for our realist beliefs, it might undermine the knowledge status of said beliefs, or it might just be that the absence of an explanation of our reliability is an important theoretical cost for realism. I will not attempt to settle this issue here.
We all could have had better lives, yet often do not wish that our lives had gone differently, especially when we contemplate alternatives that vastly diverge from our actual life course. What, if anything, accounts for such conservative retrospective attitudes? I argue that the right answer involves the significance of our personal attachments and our biographical identity. I also examine other options, such as the absence of self-to-self connections across possible worlds and a general conservatism about value.
How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought goes, while expressivists appeal instead to desire-like mental states in their explanations of meaning. However, I argue that, if we adopt a deflationary approach to representation and other related notions, there need be no such explanatory divide between expressivism and anything recognizable as a plausible notion of normative realism. Any alleged explanatory criterion for realism will either be incompatible with deflationism, or it will fail to capture some standard versions of normative realism. I conclude that, in a deflationary framework, expressivism is compatible with genuine realism.
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