(How) Is Ethical Neo-Expressivism a Hybrid View?

Bar‐On, Dorit; Chrisman, Matthew; Sias, James

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199347582.003.0010

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In particular, HSA has an advantage over Michael Ridge's view in that it is able to maintain robust moral disagreement (Ridge ) . HSA's approach is thus in the spirit of recent pleas for conservatism in semantics (Bar‐On et al : 226–31).…”

Section: Section Iii: Four Advantagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Thought and Language That ‘Has It Both Ways’

Morgan

2016

European J of Philosophy

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In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: (1) it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, (2) it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, (3) it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and (4) it explains how speakers can express different conative states when speaking in different normative domains. In the first section, I discuss the theories of Stephen Finlay and David Copp. I show that they each come very close to having it both ways but ultimately fail. Understanding the shortcomings of these views is instrumental to a clear presentation of my own Hybrid Speech Act theory in section two. In the final section, I demonstrate how my view achieves its four advantages.

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Section: Section Iii: Four Advantagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Thought and Language That ‘Has It Both Ways’

Morgan

2016

European J of Philosophy

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“…It should be noted that some authors argue, against the orthodoxy, that expressivism need not be interpreted as a semantic thesis (Bar-On and Chrisman 2009,Bar-On et al 2014). In Section 4 (in the last footnote), I will briefly discuss how one might interpret the results of this paper in connection with this kind of "neo-expressivist" positions.10 This corresponds to what Sias (2024) calls "semantic ideationalism" in his survey entry on ethical expressivism.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Logical Possibility of Moral Dilemmas in Expressivist Semantics

Tanaka

2024

EuJAP

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In this paper, using Mark Schroeder’s (2008a) expressivist semantic framework for normative language as a case study, I will identify difficulties that even an expressivist semantic theory capable of addressing the Frege-Geach problem will encounter in handling the logical possibility of moral dilemmas. To this end, I will draw on a classical puzzle formulated by McConnell (1978) that the logical possibility of moral dilemmas conflicts with some of the prima facie plausible axioms of the standard deontic logic, which include obligation implies permission. On the tentative assumption that proponents of ethical expressivism should be generally committed to securing the logical possibility of moral dilemmas in their semantic theories, I will explore whether and how expressivists can successfully invalidate obligation implies permission within the framework developed by Schroeder. The case study eventually reveals that this can indeed be a hard task for expressivists. Generalizing from the case study, I will suggest that the source of the difficulty ultimately lies in the mentalist assumption of the expressivist semantic project that the logico-semantic relations exhibited by normative sentences should be modeled in terms of the psychological attitudes that speakers express by uttering them. My final goal will be to show that the difficulty expressivists face in dealing with the logical possibility of moral dilemmas is a reflection of the more general problem that their commitment to the mentalist assumption prevents them from flexibly adopting or dropping axioms in their semantic theories to get the right technical results.

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“…Presumably, this is the sense of 'proposition' that[18] and[4] have in mind when labeling expressivism about mightp as non-propositionalism. For contexts where 'proposition' is intended to track pre-theoretic (meta-)semantic claims, some expressivists advocate pulling apart 'proposition' and 'representational content' (see[3,60,66]), citing minimalism or deflationism about propositions, or taking the proposition associated with an interpreted declarative as nearby its compositional semantic value, whatever this comes to. The purported advantage: expressivists can then claim that non-descriptive declaratives have propositional content, despite lacking representational content.…”

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confidence: 99%

Modal Knowledge for Expressivists

Hawke

2024

J Philos Logic

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What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss.

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(How) Is Ethical Neo-Expressivism a Hybrid View?

Cited by 7 publications

References 25 publications

Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Thought and Language That ‘Has It Both Ways’

Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Thought and Language That ‘Has It Both Ways’

The Logical Possibility of Moral Dilemmas in Expressivist Semantics

Modal Knowledge for Expressivists

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