What is Global Expressivism?

Abstract

Global expressivism is the radical view that we should never think of any of our language and thought as representing the world. While interesting, global expressivism has not yet been clearly formulated, and its defenders often use unexplained terms of art to characterise their view. I fix this problem by carefully and clearly exploring the different ways in which we can interpret globalism. I reject almost all of them either because they are implausible or because they are bad interpretations of actual globalist views. I then argue that the most promising version of globalism, which we can find in the work of Huw Price, turns out to be completely compatible with the view of so-called ‘local’ expressivists. The debate between globalists and localists is therefore empty: the real interest in this topic lies not in this debate but in whether globalism is true and if so what follows from it.

Beyond ‘All or Some’: Reframing the Debate Between Local and Global Expressivists

“…As such, I propose to reframe the debate between global and local expressivists, and see them as having a more fundamental disagreement than intending to carry the same project to different extents. Essentially, I reverted Simpson's (2020) argument: while he argued, from the presumption that global expressivism is trying to do globally what local expressivism tries to do locally, to the conclusion that they are not really distinct doctrines, I turned it into a modus tollens and argued that we could only see their difference by rejecting that presumption, and moreover by seeing their disagreement as deeper than is usually supposed. This reversal is justified, not only by a careful interpretation of the sometimes-confusing texts of the philosophers involved, but also by its fruitfulness in helping us understand the debate and evaluate its arguments in a new light.…”

“…Matthew Simpson (2020), for example, argues that the only interpretation of global expressivism which makes it plausible also makes it identical to local expressivism, rendering the debate empty. To briefly summarise his argument: global expressivism is taken to be the claim that no term 'robustly' represents.…”

Inferentialism as an Alternative to Expressivism

“…But, from the beginning, the inferentialist will adopt a uniform understanding of the relationship between a statement, its propositional content, and the mental state it expresses, rather than starting out with a representationalist conception of belief and seeking to argue that normative attitudes are enough like these beliefs that they too can be called "beliefs" even though they are really desirelike. Similarly, the inferentialist starts out from the idea that there are lots of different kinds of 16 For discussion, see Price (2019) and Simpson (2020).…”

The Problems of Creeping Minimalism

“… 10 I suspect the distinction between (1) and (2) has gone undrawn because many typically exercised by creeping minimalism are sympathetic to, or endorse, quasi-realist expressivism and/or minimalism (e.g., Dreier, 2004; Golub, 2017; Tiefensee, 2019). This includes so-called global expressivists and pragmatists, who hope to extend expressivism-plus-minimalism beyond morality to all other domains (see Price & MacArthur, 2009, for such a view, and Simpson, 2020, for discussion). For those sympathetic to quasi-realist expressivism (or more global versions of such a view), (1) raises a pressing question their minimalism engenders.…”