Expressivism
When I began teaching at the University of Maryland, I began to think more seriously about the family of metaethical theories known as noncognitivism, and particularly about the more influential contemporary such theory, known as expressivism.
This work led to my second and third books, Being For (Oxford 2008) and Noncognitivism in Ethics (Routledge 2010) and the papers collected in my second volume of papers, Expressing Our Attitudes (Oxford 2015), as well as papers honored with the APA Article Prize for the best paper published in all of philosophy in 2008 or 2009, and three selections for the Philosophers’ Annual, for papers honored as among the best ten papers published in all of philosophy in 2008, 2009, and 2011.
This strand of my research also led to thinking about the nature of linguistic meaning and about truth, conditionals, and epistemic possibility. The main argumentative line of Being For is to constructively develop a positive expressivist theory and then to draw out its limitations.
Since writing Being For I have been concerned with the classification and evaluation of alternative more promising forms of expressivist theory, with applications of expressivism to conditionals, epistemic modals, and especially for the purposes of giving paradox-resistant accounts of truth, and with the comparative merits of expressivism, contextualism, and relativism for similar applications. A recent representative of this strand of my research is my paper ‘Getting Perspective on Objective Reasons’, published in 2018 in Ethics.
Expressivism - General
‘Expression for Expressivists.’
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76(1): 86-116, January 2008. (Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.)
In this paper I consider what account of the expressing relation is compatible with making good on the core commitments of expressivism, argue against several possible answers, and defend my own answer, on which expressivism amounts to a kind of assertability-conditional semantics.
‘Synopsis of Being For.’
Analysis Reviews 70(1): 101-104, January 2010.
This is a synopsis of the main contributions and theses of Being For for a symposium published in Analysis Reviews with contributions from Ralph Wedgwood and Andrew Alwood.
‘Getting Noncognitivism Out of the ’Woods.’
Analysis Reviews 70(1): 129-139, January 2010.
This is my response to the critical discussions of Being For in the Analysis Reviews symposium published in 2010.
‘Skorupski on Being For.’
Analysis 72(4): 735-739, October 2012.
John Skorupski published an objection to my solution to the negation problem for expressivism in Analysis. This short article is my reply.
‘Does Expressivism Have Subjectivist Consequences?’
Philosophical Perspectives 28 (Ethics): 278-290, December 2014.
Many philosophers have had the nagging suspicion that metaethical expressivism is committed to a kind of subjectivism about morality - that it in some way varies with or depends on our own attitudes. This paper gives detailed responses to three of the most sophisticated attempts to make good on this suspicion, arguing that all three fail, and fail for the same reason.
‘How Not to Avoid Wishful Thinking.’
Cian Dorr's Wishful Thinking problem for noncognitivism charges noncognitivists with facing a dilemma between licensing ways of forming beliefs about matters of empirical fact that resemble wishful thinking or else failing to make sense of many cases of rational inference. In this paper I survey and collect problems for two resourceful attempts to evade this problem.
'Convergence in Plan.'
Forthcoming in festschrift for Allan Gibbard.
One of the central virtues of expressivism is often taken to be that it allows us to make sense of reasonable but informed disagreements, because nothing about the meanings of terms given an expressivist treatment guarantees that one answer is better than another. Yet expressivism is sometimes applied to topics where the range of reasonable or expected disagreement is very small. This paper takes a first rough stab at exploring what resources expressivists have for to explain varying degrees of convergence, as Allan Gibbard would put it, 'in plan'.
Epistemic Expressivism About Reasons and ‘Ought’
‘Getting Perspective on Objective Reasons.’ Forthcoming in Ethics. Posted September 2017.
‘Rationality in Retrospect.’ Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
The Frege-Geach Problem
‘What is the Frege-Geach Problem?’ Philosophy Compass 3/4: 703-720, June 2008.
‘How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem With Negation.’ Noûs 42(4): 573-599, December 2008.
‘Higher-Order Attitudes, Frege’s Abyss, and the Truth in Propositions.’ In Passions and Projections: Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn, edited by Robert Johnson and Michael Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 228-245, December 2014. Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.
'Attitudes and Epistemics.' In Expressing Our Attitudes.
Hybrid Expressivism
‘Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices.’ Ethics 119(2): 257-309, March 2009. Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.
‘Tempered Expressivism.’ Oxford Studies in Metaethics 8: 283-314, July 2013. Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.
‘The Truth in Hybrid Semantics.’ In Having it Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics, edited by Guy Fletcher and Michael Ridge. New York: Oxford University Press, 273-293, October 2014.
Truth
‘How to Be an Expressivist About Truth.’ In New Waves in Truth, edited by Nikolaj Jang Pedersen and Cory Wright, 282-298. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, September 2010. Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.
‘The Moral Truth.’ Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook to Truth (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, in production) edited by Michael Glanzburg.
'Hard Cases for Combining Expressivism and Deflationist Truth: Conditionals and Epistemic Modals.' Forthcoming in Meaning Without Representation: Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, in production), edited by Steven Gross, Nicholas Tebben, and Michael Williams. Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.
Other Philosophy of Language
‘Showing How to Derive Knowing How.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85(3): 746-753, November 2012.
‘Reversibility or Disagreement.’ With Jake Ross. Mind 122(1): 43-84, January 2013.
‘On Losing Disagreements: Spencer and Attitudinal Relativism.’ With Jake Ross. Mind.
‘Two Roles for Propositions: Cause for Divorce?’ Noûs 47(3): 409-430, July 2013. Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.
'Is Semantics Formal?' In Expressing Our Attitudes.