Expressivism by Force

Abstract

There is on the one hand the traditional speech act-theoretic notion of illocutionary force, and there is on the other hand the kind of notion of force we have in mind when we are theorizing in formal pragmatics about conversational states and their characteristic modes of update. These notions are different, and occur at different levels of abstraction.They are not helpfully viewed as in competition.The expressivist idea that normative language is distinctive in force can be developed in two sorts of directions, depending on which of the two senses of ’force’ is emphasized. I suggest expressivists do better to take the path stressing conversational update: they do better to start with the idea that normative discourse is distinctive in respect of its dynamic effect on the state of the conversation.

Convergence, Community, and Force in Aesthetic Discourse

“…The issue is complicated by the fact that there are two levels at which we might locate the directive 'force' of aesthetic discourse. Here I am persuaded by Yalcin (2018), who distinguishes between illocutionary and dynamic force. The illocutionary force of a speech act concerns what the speaker is trying to do in using a certain phrase in a certain conversational context.…”

A Bridge from Semantic Value to Content

“…Contexts play a content-generating role-resolving contextdependence in order to determine what's said-and indices play a content-evaluating role-they're the contemporary literature on embedding objections to expressivism (e.g. Yalcin 2017). Much of this material was incorporated into the last section of "Two notions of necessity" (1980).…”

“…Thus, anyone who knew the true w conditions would thereby be in a position to speak and understand the language, and thus also in position grasp the content. See Yalcin Yalcin (2017) for critical discussion of this idea that sense of a sentence is something "shown" by specifying its semantic value in a certain way. 26 For early work on this see Crossley and Humberstone (1977).…”

Semantic expressivism for epistemic modals

“…These are (merely) pragmatic expressivists, holding that the property of attitudes expressed by a sentence is non-trivially determined by-and so distinct from-the components of the sentence's compositional semantic value, along with context. 2 An (alleged) advantage of merely pragmatic expressivism is that it neutralizes Frege-Geach worries (Yalcin 2018a). This is intended to flow from its avoidance of a sharp bifurcation of the semantics, and better sensitivity to the distinctive theoretical roles of compositional semantic values and objects of assertion.…”