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  1. How to Be an Ethical Expressivist.Alex Silk - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (1):47-81.
    Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I call ordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, (...)
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  • The Problem of Ethical Vagueness for Expressivism.Nicholas Baima - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):593-605.
    Ethical vagueness has garnered little attention. This is rather surprising since many philosophers have remarked that the science of ethics lacks the precision that other fields of inquiry have. Of the few philosophers who have discussed ethical vagueness the majority have focused on the implications of vagueness for moral realism. Because the relevance of ethical vagueness for other metaethical positions has been underexplored, my aim in this paper is to investigate the ramifications of ethical vagueness for expressivism. Ultimately, I shall (...)
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  • Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism.Mark van Roojen - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2013 (1):1-88.
    Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, noncognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense. Roughly put, noncognitivists think that moral statements have no truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people (...)
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  • Logic and Semantics for Imperatives.Nate Charlow - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (4):617-664.
    In this paper I will develop a view about the semantics of imperatives, which I term Modal Noncognitivism, on which imperatives might be said to have truth conditions (dispositionally, anyway), but on which it does not make sense to see them as expressing propositions (hence does not make sense to ascribe to them truth or falsity). This view stands against “Cognitivist” accounts of the semantics of imperatives, on which imperatives are claimed to express propositions, which are then enlisted in explanations (...)
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  • The problem with the Frege–Geach problem.Nate Charlow - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):635-665.
    I resolve the major challenge to an Expressivist theory of the meaning of normative discourse: the Frege–Geach Problem. Drawing on considerations from the semantics of directive language (e.g., imperatives), I argue that, although certain forms of Expressivism (like Gibbard’s) do run into at least one version of the Problem, it is reasonably clear that there is a version of Expressivism that does not.
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  • The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.Peter Ludlow - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
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  • Disagreeing (about) What to Do: Negation and Completeness in Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivism. [REVIEW]Jamie Dreier - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3):714 - 721.
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  • Free Thinking for Expressivists.Neil Sinclair - 2008 - Philosophical Papers 37 (2):263-287.
    This paper elaborates and defends an expressivist account of the claims of mind-independence embedded in ordinary moral thought. In response to objections from Zangwill and Jenkins it is argued that the expressivist 'internal reading' of such claims is compatible with their conceptual status and that the only 'external reading' available doesn't commit expressivisists to any sort of subjectivism. In the process a 'commitment-theoretic' account of the semantics of conditionals and negations is defended.
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  • Constructivism, Expressivism and Ethical Knowledge.Matthew Chrisman - 2010 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (3):331-353.
    In the contemporary metaethical debate, expressivist (Blackburn, Gibbard) and constructivist (Korsgaard, Street) views can be viewed as inspired by irrealist ideas from Hume and Kant respectively. One realist response to these contemporary irrealist views is to argue that they are inconsistent with obvious surface-level appearances of ordinary ethical thought and discourse, especially the fact that we talk and act as if there is ethical knowledge . In this paper, I explore some constructivist and expressivist options for responding to this objection. (...)
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  • Philosophy of language for metaethics.Mark Schroeder - 2011 - In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York, USA: Routledge.
    Metaethics is the study of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, insofar as they relate to the subject matter of moral or, more broadly, normative discourse – the subject matter of what is good, bad, right or wrong, just, reasonable, rational, what we must or ought to do, or otherwise. But out of these four ‘core’ areas of philosophy, it is plausibly the philosophy of language that is most central to metaethics – and not simply (...)
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  • How to Be a Normative Expressivist.Michael Pendlebury - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (1):182-207.
    Expressivism can make space for normative objectivity by treating normative stances as pro or con attitudes that can be correct or incorrect. And it can answer the logical challenges that bedevil it by treating a simple normative assertion not merely as an expression of a normative stance, but as an expression of the endorsement of a proposition that is true if and only if that normative stance is correct. Although this position has superficial similarities to normative realism, it does full (...)
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  • Darwin and moral realism: Survival of the iffiest.Knut Olav Skarsaune - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (2):229-243.
    This paper defends moral realism against Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” (this journal, 2006). I argue by separation of cases: From the assumption that a certain normative claim is true, I argue that the first horn of the dilemma is tenable for realists. Then, from the assumption that the same normative claim is false, I argue that the second horn is tenable. Either way, then, the Darwinian dilemma does not add anything to realists’ epistemic worries.
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  • Moral expressivism and sentential negation.Neil Sinclair - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (3):385-411.
    This paper advances three necessary conditions on a successful account of sentential negation. First, the ability to explain the constancy of sentential meaning across negated and unnegated contexts (the Fregean Condition). Second, the ability to explain why sentences and their negations are inconsistent, and inconsistent in virtue of the meaning of negation (the Semantic Condition). Third, the ability of the account to generalize regardless of the topic of the negated sentence (the Generality Condition). The paper discusses three accounts of negation (...)
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  • (1 other version)Expressivism and contrary-forming negation.Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons - 2009 - Philosophical Issues 19 (1):92-112.
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  • Semantics, moral.Mark Schroeder - 2021 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
    Semantics is the investigation of meaning, and semantic theories, including semantic theories about moral language, come in two very different kinds. Descriptive semantic theories are theories about what words mean. So descriptive moral semantic theories are theories about what moral words mean: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘right’, ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘reason’, and ‘rational’. In contrast, foundational semantic theories are theories about why words mean what they do, or more specifically, about what makes it the case that words mean what they do. (...)
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  • Intuitions are inclinations to believe.Joshua Earlenbaugh & Bernard Molyneux - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 145 (1):89 - 109.
    Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. (...)
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  • What is the Frege-Geach problem?Mark Schroeder - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (4):703-720.
    In the 1960s, Peter Geach and John Searle independently posed an important objection to the wide class of 'noncognitivist' metaethical views that had at that time been dominant and widely defended for a quarter of a century. The problems raised by that objection have come to be known in the literature as the Frege-Geach Problem, because of Geach's attribution of the objection to Frege's distinction between content and assertoric force, and the problem has since occupied a great deal of the (...)
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  • Disciplined syntacticism and moral expressivism.James Lenman - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1):32–57.
    Moral Expressivists typically concede that, in some minimal sense, moral sentences are truth-apt but claim that in some more robust sense they are not. The Immodest Disciplined Syntacticist, a species of minimalist about truth, raises a doubt as to whether this contrast can be made out. I here address this challenge by motivating and describing a distinction between reducibly and irreducibly truth-apt sentences. In the light of this distinction the Disciplined Syntacticist must either adopt a more modest version of his (...)
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  • Expression for expressivists.Mark Schroeder - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1):86–116.
    Expressivism’s central idea is that normative sentences bear the same relation to non-cognitive attitudes that ordinary descriptive sentences bear to beliefs: the expression relation. Allan Gibbard teIls us that “that words express judgments will be accepted by almost everyone” - the distinctive contribution of expressivism, his claim goes, is only a view about what kind of judgments words express. But not every account of the expression relation is equally suitable for the expressivist’s purposes. In fact, what I argue in this (...)
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  • Hybrid Theories: Cognitive Expressivism.Alex Silk - forthcoming - In David Copp & Connie Rosati (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaethics. Oxford University Press.
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  • Expressing Moral Belief.Sebastian Hengst - 2022 - Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
    It is astonishing that we humans are able to have, act on and express moral beliefs. This dissertation aims to provide a better philosophical understanding of why and how this is possible especially when we assume metaethical expressivism. Metaethical expressivism is the combination of expressivism and noncognitivism. Expressivism is the view that the meaning of a sentence is explained by the mental state it is conventionally used to express. Noncognitivism is the view that the mental state expressed by a moral (...)
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  • A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse.Drew Johnson - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Connecticut
    What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated to act on (...)
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  • Should expressivists go global?Matthew Simpson - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2275-2289.
    Moral expressivists think that moral thoughts and sentences don’t represent or describe the world, at least not in any interesting sense. Global expressivists think that _no_ thoughts or sentences represent the world; local expressivists think that some do and others don’t. Huw Price has influentially argued that local expressivism collapses into global expressivism, due both to the effects of minimalist theories of representation and similar concepts, and to an unappreciated consequence of the success of specific expressivist theories like moral expressivism. (...)
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  • Metaethics as Conceptual Engineering.Knut Olav Skarsaune - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    On the traditional approach to metaethics, theories are expected to be faithful to ordinary normative discourse – or at worst (if we think the ordinary discourse is metaphysically unsound) to deviate from it as little as possible. -/- This paper develops an alternative, “conceptual engineering” approach to metaethical enquiry, which is not in this way restricted by our present discourse. On this approach, we will seek to understand the psychology, semantics, metaphysics and epistemology, not just of our present concepts, but (...)
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  • Sidestepping the Frege-Geach Problem.Graham Bex-Priestley & Will Gamester - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Hybrid expressivists claim to solve the Frege-Geach problem by offloading the explanation of the logico-semantic properties of moral sentences onto beliefs that are components of hybrid states they express. We argue that this strategy is undermined by one of hybrid expressivism’s own commitments: that the truth of the belief-component is neither necessary nor sufficient for the truth of the hybrid state it composes. We articulate a new approach. Instead of explaining head-on what it is for, say, a pair of moral (...)
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  • Noncognitivism without expressivism.Bob Beddor - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):762-788.
    According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical (...)
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  • Handling rejection.Derek Baker & Jack Woods - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):159-190.
    This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look (...)
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  • Moral uncertainty, noncognitivism, and the multi‐objective story.Pamela Robinson & Katie Steele - 2022 - Noûs 57 (4):922-941.
    We sometimes seem to face fundamental moral uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about what is morally good or morally right that cannot be reduced to ordinary descriptive uncertainty. This phenomenon raises a puzzle for noncognitivism, according to which moral judgments are desire-like attitudes as opposed to belief-like attitudes. Can a state of moral uncertainty really be a noncognitive state? So far, noncognitivists have not been able to offer a completely satisfactory account. Here, we argue that noncognitivists should exploit the formal analogy between (...)
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  • Hyperintensionality and Normativity.Federico L. G. Faroldi - 2019 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
    Presenting the first comprehensive, in-depth study of hyperintensionality, this book equips readers with the basic tools needed to appreciate some of current and future debates in the philosophy of language, semantics, and metaphysics. After introducing and explaining the major approaches to hyperintensionality found in the literature, the book tackles its systematic connections to normativity and offers some contributions to the current debates. The book offers undergraduate and graduate students an essential introduction to the topic, while also helping professionals in related (...)
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  • The Frege-Geach Problem for Normative Propositions.Richard Anderson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Connecticut
    The aim of this dissertation is to provide support for the following claim: if Hanks’ theory of propositions as act-types is correct, then there exists a plausible extension of this theory that solves the Frege-Geach problem for normative propositions. I assume that Hanks’ theory is correct, and in this framework develop an account of semantic expressivism that addresses three versions of the Frege-Geach problem: the embedding, inference and negation problems. First, I examine in detail one existing attempt to support the (...)
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  • Inferential Expressivism and the Negation Problem.Luca Incurvati & Julian J. Schlöder - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 16.
    We develop a novel solution to the negation version of the Frege-Geach problem by taking up recent insights from the bilateral programme in logic. Bilateralists derive the meaning of negation from a primitive *B-type* inconsistency involving the attitudes of assent and dissent. Some may demand an explanation of this inconsistency in simpler terms, but we argue that bilateralism’s assumptions are no less explanatory than those of *A-type* semantics that only require a single primitive attitude, but must stipulate inconsistency elsewhere. Based (...)
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  • Weak Assertion.Luca Incurvati & Julian J. Schlöder - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (277):741-770.
    We present an inferentialist account of the epistemic modal operator might. Our starting point is the bilateralist programme. A bilateralist explains the operator not in terms of the speech act of rejection ; we explain the operator might in terms of weak assertion, a speech act whose existence we argue for on the basis of linguistic evidence. We show that our account of might provides a solution to certain well-known puzzles about the semantics of modal vocabulary whilst retaining classical logic. (...)
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  • Error and the Limits of Quasi-Realism.Graham Bex-Priestley - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (5):1051-1063.
    If ethical expressivism is true, then moral judgements are motivational desire-like states and do not robustly represent reality. This gives rise to the problem of how to understand moral error. How can we be mistaken if there is no moral reality to be mistaken about? The standard expressivist explanation of moral doubt is couched in terms of our fear that our judgements may not survive improvements to our epistemic situation. There is a debate between Egan :205–219, 2007), Blackburn :201–213, 2009), (...)
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  • Expression and Guidance in Schroeder’s Expressivist Semantics.Derek Baker - 2017 - Erkenntnis 83 (4):829-852.
    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 (...)
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  • Metasemantics and Metaethics.Laura Schroeter & Francois Schroeter - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 519-535.
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  • The Frege-Geach Problem.Jack Woods - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 226-242.
    This is an opinionated overview of the Frege-Geach problem, in both its historical and contemporary guises. Covers Higher-order Attitude approaches, Tree-tying, Gibbard-style solutions, and Schroeder's recent A-type expressivist solution.
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  • A Primitive Solution to the Negation Problem.Derek Shiller - 2016 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (3):725-740.
    It has recently been alleged that expressivism cannot account for the obvious fact that normative sentences and their negations express inconsistent kinds of attitudes. I explain how the expressivist can respond to this objection. I offer an account of attitudinal inconsistency that takes it to be a combination of descriptive and normative relations. The account I offer to explain these relations relies on a combination of functionalism about normative judgments and expressivism about the norms governing them. It holds that the (...)
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  • Prospects for an Expressivist Theory of Meaning.Nate Charlow - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15:1-43.
    Advocates of Expressivism about basically any kind of language are best-served by abandoning a traditional content-centric approach to semantic theorizing, in favor of an update-centric or dynamic approach (or so this paper argues). The type of dynamic approach developed here — in contrast to the content-centric approach — is argued to yield canonical, if not strictly classical, "explanations" of the core semantic properties of the connectives. (The cases on which I focus most here are negation and disjunction.) I end the (...)
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  • Can the Embedding Problem Be Generalized?Caj Strandberg - 2015 - Acta Analytica 30 (1):1-15.
    One of the most discussed challenges to metaethical expressivism is the embedding problem. It is widely presumed that the reason why expressivism faces this difficulty is that it claims that moral sentences express non-cognitive states, or attitudes, which constitute their meaning. In this paper, it is argued that the reason why the embedding problem constitutes a challenge to expressivism is another than what it usually is thought to be. Further, when we have seen the real reason why expressivism is vulnerable (...)
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  • (1 other version)Advice for Noncognitivists.Malte Willer - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (S1):174–207.
    Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this article is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognitivism, including disjunctions. The resulting proposal preserves some of the key insights from (...)
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  • Schroeder on expressivism: For – or against? [REVIEW]Ralph Wedgwood - 2010 - Analysis 70 (1):117-129.
    This is a critical discussion of Mark Schroeder's book, "Being For: Evaluating the Semantic Program of Expressivism" (Oxford University Press, 2008).
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  • Moral inferentialism and the Frege-Geach problem.Mark Douglas Warren - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (11):2859-2885.
    Despite its many advantages as a metaethical theory, moral expressivism faces difficulties as a semantic theory of the meaning of moral claims, an issue underscored by the notorious Frege-Geach problem. I consider a distinct metaethical view, inferentialism, which like expressivism rejects a representational account of meaning, but unlike expressivism explains meaning in terms of inferential role instead of expressive function. Drawing on Michael Williams’ recent work on inferential theories of meaning, I argue that an appropriate understanding of the pragmatic role (...)
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  • Divine hoorays: Some parallels between expressivism and religious ethics.Nicholas Unwin - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3):659-684.
    Divine law theories of metaethics claim that moral rightness is grounded in God’s commands, wishes and so forth. Expressivist theories, by contrast, claim that to call something morally right is to express our own attitudes, not to report on God’s. Ostensibly, such views are incompatible. However, we shall argue that a rapprochement is possible and beneficial to both sides. Expressivists need to explain the difference between reporting and expressing an attitude, and to address the Frege-Geach problem. Divine law theorists need (...)
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  • Norms and Negation: A Problem for Gibbard’s Logic.Nicholas Unwin - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (202):60-75.
    A difficulty is exposed in Allan Gibbard's solution to the embedding/Frege-Geach problem, namely that the difference between refusing to accept a normative judgement and accepting its negation is ignored. This is shown to undermine the whole solution.
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  • Why the Negation Problem Is Not a Problem for Expressivism.Jeremy Schwartz & Christopher Hom - 2014 - Noûs 48 (2):824-845.
    The Negation Problem states that expressivism has insufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. We argue that the Negation Problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. In support of this claim, we argue for the following three theses: 1) a problem that is structurally identical to the Negation Problem arises in non-normative cases, and this problem (...)
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  • Expressivism, Normative Uncertainty, and Arguments for Probabilism.Julia Staffel - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 6.
    I argue that in order to account for normative uncertainty, an expressivist theory of normative language and thought must accomplish two things: Firstly, it needs to find room in its framework for a gradable conative attitude, degrees of which can be interpreted as representing normative uncertainty. Secondly, it needs to defend appropriate rationality constraints pertaining to those graded attitudes. The first task – finding an appropriate graded attitude that can represent uncertainty – is not particularly problematic. I tackle the second (...)
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  • Resolute Expressivism.Nicholas Smyth - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):1-12.
    Over the years, metaethicists have witnessed the rise of a cottage industry devoted to claiming that expressivist analyses cannot capture some allegedly important feature of moral language. In this paper, I show how Simon Blackburn's pragmatist method enables him to respond decisively to many of these objections. In doing so, I hope to call into question some prevailing assumptions about the linguistic phenomena that a metaethical theory should be expected to capture.
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  • The Frege-Geach objection to expressivism: still unanswered.J. Skorupski - 2012 - Analysis 72 (1):9-18.
    I consider a recent attempt by Mark Schroeder in his book Being For to provide an expressivist semantics for the connectives, and I argue that it does not, as it claims, answer the ‘Frege-Geach objection&rsquo.
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  • Recent work in expressivism.Neil Sinclair - 2009 - Analysis 69 (1):136-147.
    This paper is a concise survey of recent expressivist theories of discourse, focusing on the ethical case. For each topic discussed recent trends are summarised and suggestions for further reading provided. Issues covered include: the nature of the moral attitude; ‘hybrid’ views according to which moral judgements express both beliefs and attitudes; the quasi-realist programmes of Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard; the problem of creeping minimalism; the nature of the ‘expression’ relation; the Frege-Geach problem; the problem of wishful thinking; the (...)
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  • The unity of moral attitudes: recipe semantics and credal exaptation.Derek Shiller - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):425-446.
    This paper offers a noncognitivist characterization of moral attitudes, according to which moral attitudes count as such because of their inclusion of moral concepts. Moral concepts are distinguished by their contribution to the functional roles of some of the attitudes in which they can occur. They have no particular functional role in other attitudes, and should instead be viewed as evolutionary spandrels. In order to make the counter-intuitive implications of the view more palatable, the paper ends with an account of (...)
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