Cognitivist Expressivism *

Abstract

Expressivism is a position in metaethics that is a descendant of noncognitivism-a view that was perhaps the dominant metaethical theory for about 40 years, between 1935 and 1975. 1 The basic insight of the noncognitivists was that language can play a dynamic as well as a descriptive role in interpersonal interaction, and that moral discourse is a prime example of the dynamic use of language. According to one dominant strain of noncognitivism, emotivism, championed by A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson, moral judgments function primarily to express one"s feelings about some object of evaluation. In an interpersonal context, such expressions of feeling typically serve the dynamic function of influencing the attitudes of others. The other main variety of noncognitivism, prescriptivism, developed by R. M. Hare, took dynamic, imperatival utterances as a model for moral discourse, and thus emphasized the directive, action-guiding element of such discourse. Noncognitivism did come in for its share of criticism, depending on the version under scrutiny, but the bottom line seemed to be that this kind of view appears incompatible with what Allan Gibbard calls the "objective pretensions" of moral thought and discourse, including the idea that moral judgments seem to be beliefs with assertible, truth-apt content. Emotivists and prescriptivists, because they took moral language to express noncognitive attitudes, were forced to explain away such pretensions. So, for instance, Carnap (1935: 25) held that "a value statement is nothing else than a command in misleading grammatical form". But noncognitivist attempts to explain away various deeply embedded features of moral thought and discourse have seemed implausible and indeed unnecessary to many moral philosophers. In the late 1970s and on through the 90s, some moral philosophers have been tempted by moral realism, thinking that with the help of various developments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of 1 Ayer"s Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936 and contained the first widely influential presentation of a noncognitivist metaethical theory. As Mary Warnock noted in her Ethics Since 1900, "It is part of the measure of the importance of [Ayer"s] book that no sooner was it published than it seemed that emotivists were everywhere. They had not been converted by the book; it was their creed already" (1960: 84).

Logic for morals, morals from logic

“…38 See pages 69-70 for an especially clear statement of this assumption. A similar point holds for the recent expressivist account of logical consequence provided in Horgan and Timmons (2006). 39 In what follows, I will for convenience, follow Schroeder in focusing on logical inconsistency rather than logical consequence.…”

“…Most obviously, logical consequence relations are formal in the sense that they are determined solely by the structure or form-not the content-of the sentences involved: Intuitively, it's in virtue of form alone that the conclusion 'someone drank 7 See, for instance, the citations in footnote 3. 8 E.g., Horgan andTimmons (2006, pp. 288-297), andSchroeder (2008, Chap.…”

On Two Responses to Moral Twin Earth

“…According to it, we judge the speakers to express a substantive moral disagreement because reflection on the Moral Twin Earth case leads us to suppose that one of the parties uses 'wrong' with the intention of picking out the 5 Horgan and Timmons might not be happy seeing the relevant attitude described as non-cognitive, since they see moral judgements as expressions of cognitive beliefs that have "non-descriptive" content. See Horgan and Timmons (2006). To avoid confusion, I here stick with a more orthodox way of describing expressivist doctrines.…”

Cognitivism, non-cognitivism, and skepticism about folk psychology

“…In a series of recent articles, Horgan and Timmons (2000, 2006a, 2006b have developed a cognitivist view in metaethics that seeks to accommodate the desire-like features of moral judgment within the framework of belief. They do this by challenging what they take to be a common, but unsupported assumption about the nature of belief: that the content of belief must be descriptive.…”