EPR2 — Expressivism, Pluralism & Representationalism

Abstracts & drafts


Bob Brandom
Global Anti-Representationalism? [draft paper]

Stephen Barker
What Global Expressivism Might Be

I offer an account of what global expressivism (GE) might be. GE is the thesis that every domain of assertion is treated in expressivist terms: so claims about values, about truth and validity, about the empirical world, about meaning, and so on, are all analysed expressively. In GE, expressive is not a contrastive term for kinds of assertion, but a term designating the kind of analysis provided for all assertions. Global expressivism is not some kind of universal non-factualism, non-cognitivism, or non-truth-aptism: that would be absurd. It is perfectly cognitivist and factualist. I consider ways of making sense of the possibility of GE using conceptual tools from quasi-realism, minimalism and inferentialism. I reject these and offer an alternative idea according to which expressivism must be thought of as a kind of speculative cognitive science, but one in which representation lacks any explanatory role. GE puts in question the whole idea of semantics, and of a pragmatics that subserves semantics.

Matthew Chrisman
Metaethics and the Philosophy of Language

There is a curious disconnect between debates in metaethics about the theory of meaning for ethical claims and debates in the philosophy of language about the theory of meaning of claims more generally.  In metaethics, the debate largely divides between (a) descriptivists (naturalists, non-naturalists, fictionalists, error-theorists), who hold roughly that ethical claims mean what they do on virtue of their purporting to describe (or their parts purporting to represent) some feature of reality (e.g. the fact that something has the property of wrongness), and (b) expressivists, who hold roughly that ethical claims mean what they do in virtue of their expressing a specially motivational state of mind (e.g. a moral attitude).  By contrast, in the philosophy of language, the debate largely divides between (a) descriptivists who hold roughly that all claims mean what they do in virtue of their purporting to describe (or their parts purporting to represent or refer to) some feature of reality, and (b) inferentialists (including conceptual-role theorists) who hold roughly that all claims mean what they do in virtue of the dynamic and inter-connected role they (or their parts) play in the language game of which they are a part.  On the assumption that one's views about the theory of meaning of ethical claims should fit with one's views about the theory of meaning of claims more generally, in this paper, I explore problems generated by the apparent tension between expressivism as a theory of the meaning of ethical claims and either descriptivism or inferentialism as a theory of the meaning of claims more generally.  I think that forcing expressivists to choose a more general theory of meaning can help to answer certain interpretative questions in metaethics, generating different versions of the overall expressivist program and pointing the way towards some under appreciated problems, as well as perhaps new kinds of accounts of the meaning of ethical claims.

Henry Jackman
Pluralism, Truth and Use

The paper will focus on the question of whether differences in the norms governing the use of various parts of our language should be reflected in the type of truth predicate applied to those parts, or whether they should instead be understood as underwriting a  pluralism about semantic notions like representation and correspondence which would then feed in to a more unitary account  of truth.  Further, in presenting a version of the later option, it will discuss various ways in which realms of discourse, even as  pluralistically understood, can still fail to be truth evaluable.

Robert Kraut
Expressivism About Ontology

The initial goal is to explore Carnap's bold suggestion that ontological questions are “external questions”: practical questions about the advisability of adopting one or another “linguistic form.”  His remarks on the topic are susceptible to three readings: eliminative, reductive, and expressive.  The first counsels elimination of ontological discourse and its replacement by practical considerations; the second recommends the reductive analysis ("explication") of ontological discourse in explicitly pragmatic terms.  The third interpretation construes Carnap's strategy as “irrealist” or “expressivist”: ontological claims are portrayed as expressions of commitments to deploying certain fragments of discourse.  Such commitments stand in need of justification, thereby introducing a pragmatic dimension.  This expressivist Carnap provides an explanation of what we are doing when engaged in ontological disputes, and--perhaps--of the criteria to be deployed in settling them.  

Irrealist explanations—Humean theories of causation, projectivist theories of morality, etc.—are notoriously problematic; additional issues come into focus when seeking to apply irrealist explanatory strategies to ontological discourse.  Most troubling is what I dub the "No Exit" problem: any effort to provide an expressivist explanation of ontological discourse deploys ontological discourse in the background theory.  If this is not a problem, it is important to see why it is not a problem.  Customary homage to Neurath's ship notwithstanding, the situation provides a fruitful basis for reflection upon the prospects and limits of irrealist explanation.

Michael Lynch
Expressivism and Plural Truth

Expressivism is the idea that value judgments don’t represent the world. They function instead to express non-representational states of mind, such as sentiments or plans. The most prominent current versions of this view nonetheless take it that value judgments can be true. Moreover they take this to be unproblematic. Their reason for confidence is their commitment to semantic deflationism, according to which truth—and related semantics properties—are easily had by value judgments—indeed, by any judgments. In this paper, I argue that this confidence is misplaced. The raison d’être of expressivism is ill-served by a purely deflationary semantics. The expressivist is better served to adopt a view which allows truth to take more than one form.

Huw Price
Two Conceptions of Representation

My talk will be based on the third of the lectures available here. 

Mark Schroeder
How to be an Expressivist About Truth [draft paper]

In this paper I explore why one might hope to, and how to begin to, develop an expressivist account of truth – that is, a semantics for ‘true’ and ‘false’ within an expressivist framework. I do so because certain advantages of deflationism in dealing with paradox seem to me to require some sort of nondescriptivist semantics, because of all nondescriptivist semantic frameworks which are capable of yielding definite predictions, expressivism is that with which I am most familiar, and because I believe that certain problems about truth and particularly about paradox seem to me to look different, when seen through the lens of an expressivist theory. I don’t mean to defend such a theory in this paper, and indeed I have cast doubts on the ultimate prospects of the framework I will be employing here elsewhere. But I do think that seeing what an expressivist theory of truth would look like helps to shed light on both expressivism and on truth.

Crispin Wright
Brandom, Truth, Assertibility and Objective Content: Still not Explicit?

Michael Dummett's work on the metaphysics and epistemology of meaning has bequeathed an outstanding challenge to contemporary philosophy of language: to show how a pragmatist (broadly, a use-based) or assertibilist conception of linguistic competence can underwrite a satisfying account of language-mastery and of the full range of norms and contents that it embraces, or to show—once and for all—that it cannot, and that in order to do so, more traditionally Realist (representationalist) materials are needed. Bob Brandom's landmark researches  offer a more thoroughgoing answer to this challenge than can be found in the writings of any other contemporary philosopher. I will review one crucial aspect of his answer—better, his answer to one aspect of the challenge—which seems to me continuingly problematical, and attempt to explain why the rather different assertibilist approach canvassed in Truth and Objectivity may yet better serve the purpose.