The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non‐descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long‐standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation that the expressive realm lends to a theory of meaning. Expressivist theories of meaning address only a portion of the classical problems attributed to this position when they seek to explain why the expressions they deal with have a given meaning. A position can nevertheless be termed ‘expressivist’ – in the minimal sense that we favor – based simply on the following key features of the meaning of these expressions: they can be used as functions of propositions, and they are not used to describe the way the world is.
This volume accurately reproduces the talks given there. As its title indicates, the conference focused on different varieties of contemporary expressivism, and how they fare in relation to the truth-aptness of utterances with expressive meaning, and the status of knowledge claims. Expressivisms of all kinds share the negative thesis that claims with expressive meaning do not represent states of affairs 1. This semantic characterisation of the negative thesis also permits the pragmatic wording that the business of expressive discourse is something other than describing. Endorsing this negative thesis suffices for an approach to count as expressivist. The negative thesis can applied to all uses of language, and thus be global, or alternatively be restricted to some specific areas of discourse, or to some specific terms and phrases. The first kind of non-global expressivism is local expressivism, and I'll call the second kind term-focused expressivism. In term-focused expressivism, terms with expressive meaning do not contribute a component to what is said, i.e. they are semantically irrelevant. Frápolli's and Price's contributions defend global versions of expressivism, while Bar-On's, Besson's and Osorio and Villanueva's propose local versions, and Chrisman's, Soria and Stojanovic's, and Zalabardo's views are term-focused varieties. Within their respective scopes, all expressivisms stick to the negative thesis. It is the positive thesis, i.e. the thesis that identifies what expressive claims and utterances actually do, where a deeper disagreement between the different approaches lies. And at this point the options multiply. Just to give a hint of the variety, the positive thesis has attributed to expressive claims subjective as well as 1
To be a proposition is to possess propositional properties and to stand in inferential relations. This is the organic intuition, [OI], concerning propositional recognition. [OI] is not a circular characterization as long as those properties and relations that signal the presence of propositions are independently identified. My take on propositions does not depart from the standard approach widely accepted among philosophers of language. Propositions are truth-bearers, the arguments of truth-functions (‘not’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘if’), the arguments of propositional-attitude verbs (‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘doubt’, ‘assume’, ‘reject’) and the kind of entity capable of standing in inferential relations (which are basically implication and incompatibility). The aim of this paper is to argue for [OI]. In doing so, I will show that even what is probably the most repeated argument against non-descriptivism, the so-called Frege-Geach Argument (FGA), presupposes something like [OI], a presupposition that Geach shares with his critics. Despite the huge success of FGA, a thorough analysis of the actual scope of this argument has yet to be given. I will provide such an analysis in section 3 below. In this paper, I argue that [OI] is a meta-theoretical principle which is neutral with respect to specific metaphysical debates about the nature of propositions, as well as specific proposals about the semantics of declarative sentences.
The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane’s assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to context-dependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom–up, building block, model, while expressivism is part of a different tradition, one that might include Lewis’ epistemic contextualism and Frege’s content individuation, with which it shares an organic model to deal with context-dependence. The building-block model and the organic model, and thus relativism and expressivism, are set apart with the aid of a particular test: only the building-block model is compatible with the idea that there might be analytically equivalent, and yet different, propositions.
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