Abstract

Contemporary discussions of expressivism in metaethics tend to run together two quite different antidescriptivist views, and only one of them is subject to the objection about compositional semantics pressed most recently by Schroeder (following Dreier, Unwinn, Hale, Geach and others). Here I distinguish the two versions of expressivism and then go on to suggest that those sympathetic to the second sort of expressivism might improve their account of normative vocabulary and the way it figures in reasoning by making what may seem like a somewhat surprising comparison between normative vocabulary and logical vocabulary. I argue that this comparison brings into view the initial steps towards a third antidescriptivist view in metaethics, which we may see as a pragmatist improvement on the second version of expressivism.