Truth, Reference and Realism

The Refutation of Expressivism

rAlph WedgWood The refutation of expressivism how should we set about the task of explaining the meaning of normative statements—that is, of statements about what ought to be the case, or about what people ought to do or to think? (as i am using the term, a “statement” is just the speech act that is performed by the sincere utterance of a declarative sentence. so a “normative statement” is just the speech act, whatever exactly it may be, that is performed by the sincere utterance of a declarative sentence involving a normative term like ‘ought.’ i shall use the term ‘judgment’ to refer to the type of mental state that is expressed by a statement; so a “normative judgment” is just the type of mental state, whatever exactly it may be, that is expressed by a normative statement.) in this paper, i shall consider a certain well-known approach to the task of giving an account of the meaning of normative statements. This is the approach that is based on an expressivist account of normative statements—the approach whose most distinguished exponents in recent years have been simon Blackburn and allan Gibbard.1 i shall argue against the expressivist approach, and in favor of the rival truthconditional or factualist approach. an earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on truth at the central european university in april 2005. i should like to thank that audience for their helpful comments. a slightly modified version of this paper has already been published; see r. Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity (Oxford: clarendon Press, 2007), chap. 2. 1 see especially Gibbard 1990 and 2003, Blackburn 1993 and 1998. i4 Truth.indb 207 2011.08.15. 8:57 208 Truth, reference and realism 1 expressivism and non-cognitivism according to an expressivist account of normative statements, the fundamental explanation of the meaning of normative statements, and of the sentences that are used to make those statements, is given in terms of the type of mental state that the statements made by uttering those sentences express. That is, the fundamental explanation of the meaning of these statements and sentences is given by a psychologistic semantics.2 according to a plausible version of the principle of compositionality, the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of the terms that it is composed out of, together with the compositional structure of the sentence (perhaps together with certain features of the context in which that sentence is used). so assuming this version of the compositionality principle, this expressivist approach will also give an account of the particular terms involved in these sentences in terms of the contribution that these terms make to determining what type of mental state is expressed by sentences involving them. i shall suppose that all such expressivist accounts aim to conform to a basic non-circularity constraint.3 Thus, according to these expressivist accounts, the fundamental explanation of the meaning of normative statements, such as statements of the form “i ought to ϕ,” must not identify the mental state that is expressed by this statement simply as the belief that one ought to ϕ (or the feeling or the sentiment that one ought to ϕ), or anything of that sort. This mental state must be identified without using any normative terms like ‘ought’ within the scope of propositional attitude ascriptions of any kind. Otherwise, we would be presupposing what we are seeking to give an account of—namely, what it is for a thinker to have such normative attitudes. in fact, many expressivist accounts conform to a yet stronger constraint : they seek to give their fundamental explanation of the meaning of normative statements in wholly non-normative terms. so they not only avoid using normative terms in any way that would effectively amount to presupposing what it is for a statement to be a normative statement, or what it is for a judgment to be a normative judgment: they insist on 2 i borrow this term from rosen (1998, 387). 3 The sort of non-circularity constraint that i have in mind is the constraint that is articulated by christopher Peacocke (1992, chap. 1). i4 Truth.indb 208 2011.08.15. 8:57 209 The Refutation of Expressivism banishing all normative terms from the metalanguage altogether. The main reason for this is that the proponents of expressivist semantics usually aspire to give an account of normative statements that is wholly...