Expressivism, question substitution and evolutionary debunking

The Evolutionary Debunking of Quasi-Realism

“…Quasi-realism might be more vulnerable than realism to debunking arguments if the kind of reasoning processes that lead people to endorse it are particularly susceptible to error. At least, this is the view of Kyriacou (2017Kyriacou ( : 1030, who argues that expressivists and therefore quasirealists follow an argumentative strategy that involves a manoeuvre which-given certain facts about our evolutionary psychology-is likely corrupted by 'dubious affect and availability heuristics.' This conclusion is then employed within the explanatory premise of an evolutionary debunking argument, targeted at any theory which endorses significant aspects of metaepistemological as well as meta-ethical expressivism (e.g.…”

“…This rests on the accurate claim that expressivists typically decline to provide any analysis of evaluative terms like 'good', or any metaphysical account of evaluative properties like goodness, and instead ask about the states of mind expressed by evaluative statements (Blackburn 1998: 50, Gibbard 2003. Crucially, Kyriacou (2017Kyriacou ( : 1029 understands this manoeuvre as the substitution of a 'hard and intractable' question about the analysis or metaphysics of value for an easier and 'more tractable' question about the nature of evaluative judgments. However, we can disambiguate here.…”

“…Kyriacou's worry is that, if the expressivist's (and therefore quasi-realist's) reasoning were to involve the substitution of a hard question for an easy one, then it would likely be corrupted by various intuitive biases that are associated with such substitutions, and more precisely with the affect and availability heuristics identified by Kahneman (Kyriacou 2017(Kyriacou : 1027(Kyriacou -1029. However, since expressivists and quasi-realists do not substitute one question for another in this way, such worries are irrelevant.…”