The Frege-Geach Objection to Expressivism, Structurally Answered

Köhler, Sebastian

doi:10.26556/jesp.v6i2.150

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“…Rather, what Schroeder is committed to is the claim that being for giving to charity is not expressible through a declarative sentence that predicates some property or relation of a subject. It could be that such attitudes exist, however; they are simply inexpressible or else expressed through non-declarative sentences with simpler logical structure, such as exclamations or imperatives (Köhler 2012 shares this reading of This is as it should be: one could judge that it is good not to blame for murder, because giving up on blame leads to greater mental health, while still holding that blaming murderers makes sense or is fitting or is the thing to do. The problem is, we can also judge that not blaming murderers makes sense (or is fitting, etc), and that judgment does rule out the rational coherence of continuing to blame for murder.…”

Section: The Other Half Of the Negation Problem: The Right Kind Of In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The problem of which sentence expresses an attitude such as (J) has already been raised in (Skorupski 2012), and answered in (Schroeder 2012;and Köhler 2012). So it's worth looking at the replies given.…”

Section: The Problems With Identifying ψ With Being Formentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another possible reply is that attitudes such as (J) are not linguistically expressible. Only cases of the being for attitude with properly structured content can be expressed in sentences (Köhler 2012). This response is, however, highly problematic.…”

Section: The Problems With Identifying ψ With Being Formentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is the specific problem that, once we grant that instances of being for with structured contents are expressible, it becomes mysterious why instances with unstructured commitments are not, given the utility such sentences would have in coordinating normative judgments. (Köhler 2012) suggests another way of dealing with attitudes such as (J): (J) and (NJ) are expressible, but not through declarative sentences. Köhler does not elaborate on which non-declarative sentences might be doing the work, but in relation to the problem of inexpressible logical disagreement, the natural answer would be imperatives.…”

Section: The Problems With Identifying ψ With Being Formentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Skorupski 2012) reads Schroeder's semantics as effectively the same as Gibbard's, with the being for attitude corresponding to 'ought' in the way the planning attitude corresponds for Gibbard. See(Schroeder 2012;and Köhler 2012) for arguments that this is a mistake.…”

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Expression and Guidance in Schroeder’s Expressivist Semantics

Baker

2017

Erkenn

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Mark Schroeder's expressivist program has made substantial progress in providing a compositional semantics for normative terms. This paper argues that it risks achieving this semantic progress at the cost of abandoning a key theoretical motivation for embracing expressivism in the first place. The problem can be summarized as a dilemma. Either Schroeder must allow that there are cases in which agents are in disagreement with one another, or can make valid inferences, but that these disagreements or inferences are not expressible in natural language; or his version of expressivism must abandon one of the key theoretical advantages expressivist theories seemed to possess over cognitivism, the ability to provide a very straightforward explanation of the action-and attitude-guiding role of normative judgments.* Thanks to Jack Woods and anonymous referees for extensive comments and criticism.

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Section: The Other Half Of the Negation Problem: The Right Kind Of In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Problems With Identifying ψ With Being Formentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Problems With Identifying ψ With Being Formentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Problems With Identifying ψ With Being Formentioning

confidence: 99%

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Expression and Guidance in Schroeder’s Expressivist Semantics

Baker

2017

Erkenn

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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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The Frege-Geach Objection to Expressivism, Structurally Answered

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Cited by 1 publication

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Expression and Guidance in Schroeder’s Expressivist Semantics

Expression and Guidance in Schroeder’s Expressivist Semantics

The Logical Possibility of Moral Dilemmas in Expressivist Semantics

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