expressivist embeddings and minimalist truth · peter geach, but one also and ... expressivist...

JAMES DREIER

EXPRESSIVIST EMBEDDINGS AND MINIMALIST TRUTH

(Received 30 June 1994)

This paper is about Truth Minimalism, Norm Expressivism, and the relation between them. In particular, it is about whether Truth Minimalism can help to solve a problem thought to plague Norm Expressivism. To start with, let me explain what I mean by 'Truth Minimalism' and 'Norm Expressivism.'

'Truth Minimalism', as I will use it, is the name of a family of theories of truth, which have in common the central claim that there is little of theoretic philosophical interest to say about what truth is. I will be considering three members of the family in particular.

SubstitutionMinimalism says that any sentence of the form 'S is true' may be generally replaced by S itself, without loss or gain in meaning; and that this is all one has to know to know what truth is.

Assertion Minimalism says that to call a sentence true is to assert or affirm that sentence; and that this is all one has to know to know what truth is.

Schematic Minimalism is the theory consisting of all and only the instances of the Schema T, [ 'S' is true iff S*], along with the claim that this is all one has to know to know what truth is.

This last is the version proposed by Paul Horwich, 1 and it will occupy most of my attention. All three versions have in common that they claim to have said all that needs to be said about truth in order to explain what truth is.

By 'Norm Expressivism' I also mean a family of theories, all theories of the meaning of normative expressions, having in common that they attempt to explain the meaning of a normative predicate, P, not by saying what property it denotes, but indirectly, by saying what someone does by calling something P. For example, there is

Philosophical Studies 83: 29-51, 1996. (~) 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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the emotivist view held by Ayer 2 and Stevenson, 3 explaining the meaning of 'wrong' by saying that to call something wrong is to express disapproval of it, and also Hare's theory of the meaning of 'good', that to call something good is to commend it. 4 There are Expressivist theories of other things than norms, but I will mainly be talking about Norm Expressivism, and only incidentally about other sorts.

THE EMBEDDING PROBLEM

Now for the problem. It is a problem most commonly associated with Peter Geach, but one also and independently due to John Searle. 5 Expressivists tell us the meaning of a normative predicate, say, 'is wrong', by telling us what is done when someone calls something wrong. By calling something wrong, I express a negative attitude toward it; or I prescribe only the simplest uses of the predicate. For

(1) Capital punishment is wrong.

may occur embedded in a larger complex, and generally speaking it is not then used to express an attitude or to prescribe against capital punishment.

(2) It is not the case that capital punishment is wrong.

(3) Amnesty International takes the position that capital punishment is wrong.

(4) If capital punishment is wrong, then we ought to abolish it.

(5) If it provides no extra deterrent, then capital punishment is wrong.

If an Expressivist wants to explain the meaning of a normative predicate, then he has to explain what it means in the context of these sentences. Geach put it this way:

In order that the use o f a sentence in which "P" is predicated of a thing may count as an act of calling the th ing"P" , the sentence must be used assertively; and this is something quite dist inct from the predication, for, as we have remarked, "P" may still be predicated o f the thing even in a sentence used non-assert ively as a clause

EXPRESSIVIST EMBEDDINGS AND MINiMALIST TRUTH 31

within another sentence. Hence, calling a thing "P" has to be explained in terms of predicating "P" of the thing, not the other way round. For example, condemning a thing by calling it "bad" has to be explained through the more general notion of predicating "bad" of a thing, and such predicating may be done without any condemnation; for example, even if I utter with full conviction the sentence "If gambling is bad, inviting people to gamble is bad", I do not thereby condemn either gambling or invitations to gamble, though I do predicate "bad" of these kinds of act. It is therefore hopeless to try to explain the use of the term "bad" in terms of non-descriptive acts of condemnation . . . . 6

Thus, Geach argued against what he called 'Ascriptivist' theories, those which attempt to explain predication via the speech act of 'calling'. John Searle similarly thought such theories were on the wrong track. In a section of the Fallacies chapter of Speech Acts, he identified instances of what he called the ' Speech Act Fallacy':

Each of these is of the pattem: "The word W is used to perform speech act A." Furthermore, it was generally the case that philosophers who said this sort of thing offered these statements as (at least partial) explications of the meanings of the words: they offered these statements of the form "W is used to perform act A" by way of philosophical explication of the concept W . . . .

The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation. 7

There are two ways of taking this objection to Expressivism. Accord- ing to the Strong Version, Expressivism is incorrect, because it entails that someone sincerely uttering any of (2)-(5) is thereby expressing condemnation of capital punishment; so it entails something false. According to the Weaker Version, Expressivism is incomplete, since it tells us only how to understand (1), and not how to understand (2)-(5). I will not be concerned much with the exegetical question of which version was originally intended. It seems to me that Geach intended the Weaker Version, and Searle may have meant the Strong Version.

The Weaker Version can be bolstered with an observation about the following argument, taken from Geach. Obviously, the first two lines are the premises and the third line is the conclusion.

(6a) If doing a thing is wrong, then getting one's little brother to do it is wrong.

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(6b) Lying is wrong.

(6c) Getting one 's little brother to lie is wrong.

The Expressivist has already told us what (6b) means, so when he adds whatever a m e n d m e n t he needs to explain what (6a) means, it

had better turn out that the antecedent o f the relevant instantiation

o f (6a) means the same thing as (6b). For if those mean t different things, the a rgument would be a fal lacy o f equivocation, which it plainly is not. This bolstered Weaker Version o f (what I ' l l call) the Embedd ing Problem is the one I will focus on.

THE MINIMALIST RESPONDANTS

Several Expressivists have at tempted to solve the Embedding Problem. 8 Each takes the problem seriously, and each goes to some

effort to produce a workable solution. But recently, a couple of Truth Minimalists sympathet ic to N o r m Express ivism have c la imed that the problem is an illusion. Once Truth Minimal i sm is properly understood, they say, the Embedd ing Prob lem vanishes.

Paul Horwich, in a review of Allan Gibbard 's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, had occasion to r emark on Gibbard 's solution to the Embedding Problem.

That these [embedding] phenomena are consistent with norm-expressivism is something Gibbard expends considerable space and effort to establish. He thereby seeks to rebut the influential objection made by Peter Geach (who attributes the basic insight to Frege) that such phenomena preclude an expressivist position. But ... despite its pedigree, the existence of any real problem here is by no means obvious . . . .

The central point.., is that the expressivist is not obliged to explain, on the basis of his story about what is expressed by 'x is rational,' why 'rational' must have the inferential role of a predicate. All he needs to do is defend the prima facie plausible assumption that to his story about 'x is rational' he may consistently add the supposition that 'rational' has that role . . . .

As for the so-called Frege-Geach embedding problem, one is left wondering why it should be thought problematic at all . . . . [O]nce we have supplemented the expressivist analysis with the principle that "rational" is a logical predicate, there is no reason to suspect that there are constructions involving that term whose deployment cannot be explained. 9

And Daniel Stoljar 1~ attributes to Geach the stronger version. He takes the hear t o f Expressivism to be the c la im that normat ive sen-

EXPRESSIVIST EMBEDDINGS AND MINIMALIST TRUTH 3 3

tences are used to express emotions. Critics, and some supporters, according to Stoljar, have thought that Expressivists were committed also to the claim that normative sentences lack truth conditions. But, while they may lack inflated truth conditions, they do have deflated truth conditions, says Stoljar. For deflated truth conditions are had by any sentence that "is embeddable in the contexts 'it is true tha t . . . ', and 'it is false tha t . . . ', where by 'embeddable' , I mean that placing the sentence in these contexts results in a grammatical sentence of English. ''11 Obviously, normative sentences are so embeddable. So they do have deflated truth conditions.

Notice that Stoljar officially offers only a sufficient condition for a sentence to have deflated truth conditions. He might want to use his embeddability condition as both a necessary and sufficient condition, but this would be a mistake. For many sentences clearly have truth conditions even though they are not embeddable into the contexts 'it is true that . . . ' or 'it is false that . . . . ' A large class of examples are discussed by Lakoff, 12 who notes that the following sorts of sentences are not embeddable into standard propositional contexts:

(7) Here is a counterexample.

(8) Here lies Gabriel.

(9) There goes a fine young man.

It should be obvious that all of these have truth conditions. Another counterexample to the embeddability condition as a necessary condition is the 'double comparative' form, for example 13

(10) The more chips you eat, the more you will want.

Now, Stoljar does not say that embeddability is a necessary condition for bearing deflated truth conditions, so these examples are not counterexamples to his view. But they highlight the fact that he has not actually given the necessary conditions, so we are entitled to wonder just what deflated truth conditions are supposed to be. I will assume this much: when a sentence is embeddable into the context 'it is true tha t . . . ' its deflated truth conditions are also given by that embedding. So, the deflated truth condition of (1) is that capital punishment is wrong. It is true that capital punishment is wrong if and

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only if capital punishment is wrong. A biconditional with a claim about the truth of something on one side, and the something itself on the other, seems like the right sort of thing to give deflated truth conditions.

Stoljar thinks that Expressivists need say only this much about the semantics of normative sentences: that they have deflated truth conditions, and lack inflated ones. And he thinks Geach's objection is that Expressivism is inconsistent with the fact that argument (6) is obviously valid. Stoljar replies that Expressivism is obviously n o t inconsistent with the validity of that argument, for the claim that normative sentences lack inflated truth conditions but do have deflated truth conditions is in no way incompatible with the argument in (6) being valid. He offers this reply to Geach, and also to Blackburn insofar as Blackburn agrees that there is a difficulty to which the Expressivist needs to respond.

Stoljar has at best captured the Strong Version of the objection. I am not certain that he has even done that. But in any case, he seems to have missed the Weaker objection, which is the objection Blackburn was replying to. What is odd, I think, is that Stoljar seems to think that the kind of explanation demanded by Searle and Geach is unnecessary.

Let us take seriously the weaker version, if we can. This is what the Expressivist respondants did. The Minimalist respondants seem to be saying that they were wrong to do so. Why? How might Minimalism disarm the objection?

DOES MINIMALISM HELP TO SOLVE THE EMBEDDING PROBLEM?

The thought might be this. For any sort of sentence that can be true, and expresses a proposition, embedding has an easy explanation. There could be no problem, for the Tarski-style explanation of truth-functional embeddings proceeds by way of truth conditions of the embedded sentences, showing how the truth conditions of the complex ones are built up out of them. Since the Expressivist may admit that normative sentences have truth conditions, the very same explanation is available to him. The problem arose in the first place only because Expressivism was wrongly thought to be committed to the view that normative sentences have no truth conditions.

EXPRESSIVIST EMBEDDINGS AND M1NIMALIST TRUTH 35

Now, I don ' t say this is what the Minimalists have in mind. But it looks a bit tempting. Allan Gibbard (an Expressivist, but no Minimalist) writes:

Suppose we have an adequate account of the state of mind expressed by such simple statements as "It makes sense for Antony to give battle." What are we to say of more complex contexts, like "Whenever Antony does anything it doesn't make sense to do, he clings to his purpose stubbornly." Sentences of indefinite complexity can be built recursively from simpler elements, in systematic ways. For sentences that express truths or falsehoods, we have a rich legacy of accounts that tell us how this happens: Tarski and his successors tell us how the truth conditions of a sentence depend on the truth conditions of its components. Can we do anything of the sort with an expressivistic theory? 14

If it tempts a reader, I urge h im to reconsider. For if there is an Embedding Problem for Expressivism before the gift of Minimalist truth conditions, then the gift will be of no use in any solution. So I will argue.

Consider the two kinds of Minimal ism in turn, the Schematic version first. I think this version is patently useless in solving the Embedding problem. For it tells us that to understand truth as predicated of normative sentences we need only draw up the sublist of instances of the Schema consisting of the sentences with normative predicates. But every one of these instances is a truth-functional complex that embeds a normative sentences. As I shall explain, once the Embedding Problem is solved, the Schematic version of Minimal ism may look very attractive to an Expressivist. But it is

unaccep tab le until the problem is solved. So it cannot be of use in solving the problem.

Next, the Substitution version. It turns out to be equally useless, I think, but for a different reason. We are assumed to be in trouble when presented with such sentences as ' I f Capital punishment is wrong, then abortion is wrong. ' We are told, in the truth-function explanation, that this conditional is true if and only if its antecedent is not true or its consequent is true. That is to say, the conditional is explained by pointing out that it is true just in case 'Capital punishment is wrong ' is not true or 'Abort ion is wrong ' is true. But this explanation is incomprehensible if we restrict ourselves to the understanding of truth derived from Substitution Minimalism. For according to Substitution Minimalism, we understand truth just when we understand that the concatenation of the quotation name of a sentence with the expression 'is true' can be replaced with the sentence

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itself. And if that's all we know, we certainly won't understand the explanation, which embeds strings consisting of the quotation names of sentences followed by 'is true', until we understand how the normative sentences themselves embed in truth-functional contexts.

Notice finally that Assertion Minimalism, once espoused by Strawson 15 and apparently by Ayer, ~6 is itself a kind of Ascriptivism. It is, in fact, one of the samples held up by Searle in his discussion of the Speech Act Fallacy. This sort of Minimalist actually owes an explanation of how predications of truth embed in truth-functional (and other complex) contexts. For from what he tells us, we know only what it is for someone to call something true, and as we now well know, when such a predication occurs in the antecedent of a conditional (for example) nothing is being called true. So the Ascrip- tivist version of Minimalism is very far indeed from providing any explanation of what normative sentences mean when they occur embedded, unasserted.

How is the idea of a truth condition supposed to help explain the embeddings? It is said, from time to time, that one can know a language by knowing the truth conditions of the sentences in the language. Suppose this is so. Then if one wanted to show someone how to understand the language of morns, one could explain the truth conditions of moral sentences. The rules for deriving the truth conditions for complex wholes out of the truth conditions of their parts are given by a Tarskian definition of truth for a language. So once we have explained the truth conditions for the atomic parts, the rest is easy.

Now, Expressivism might be thought to claim that normative sentences lack truth conditions, and then the Embedding problem posed as follows: an explanation of the logically complex sentences by way of the usual Tarskian model is unavailable to the Expres- sivist, so he needs an alternative. And then the Minimalist suggestion would be that normative sentences do have truth conditions, of the Minimal kind, so that Geach's problem does not really arise. How satisfying.

But in the first place, neither Geach nor Searle presented the problem in that way. And in the second place, the claim that the understanding of a language can be achieved by knowing the truth conditions for its sentences is plausible only on a certain conception

EXPRESSIVIST EMBEDDINGS AND MINIMALIST TRUTH 37

of truth conditions, and in particular, it is not the slightest bit plausible on the Minimalist conception of truth conditions.~7 Let us make this clear by an example.

Suppose we were trying to understand a language in which normative expressions occur, and we had for our metalanguage one in which there were no normative expressions. For simplicity, suppose the object language is English and the metalanguage English stripped of its normative vocabulary. An Expressivist offers us some help. Sentences of the form 'x is wrong,' he says, serve to express the speaker's disapproval ofx. Now we face the Embedding problem, for the object language contains embeddings of sentences of the form 'x is wrong' in which the embedded sentence occurs unasserted, so that utterances of the complex do not express disapproval of x. Suppose someone puts the problem this way. "If we knew the truth conditions of 'x is wrong' then we would be able to figure out the truth conditions of disjunctions and conditionals and the like, so long as the atomic components were all of the form 'x is wrong' (or otherwise had truth conditions which we understood). For the truth conditions of a disjunction or a conditional are well-understood functions of the truth conditions of the atomic components. Our difficulty is that we have not been told the truth conditions of the atomic normative sentences." There might be something to this explanation.

Now suppose the Minimalist claims that there is after all no problem. For there isn't much to truth conditions. The instances of the Schema T are all statements of truth conditions, and there is nothing more to a truth condition for a sentence than the Schema T instance of that sentence. Since normative sentences do have (deflated) truth conditions, and explanations of truth-functional embeddings proceed standardly by pointing out how the truth conditions of the complex depends on the truth conditions of the parts, we must be able to understand the truth conditions, and thus the meaning, of complex sentences of our object language in which normative sentences are embedded.

Well, I certainly hope no Minimalist would suggest such a thing! For look what happens when we try to carry out the instructions. We want to understand

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(4) If capital punishment is wrong, then we ought to abolish it.

We know that uttering 'x is wrong ' is disapproving of x. We try to add the second ingredient of the proffered explanation, namely, truth condit ions of 'Capital punishment is wrong. ' We are supposed to look at the relevant instance of Schema T. Obviously, it won ' t help to write down the instance in the object language, since the sentence in the object language is

'Capital punishment is wrong ' is true iff capital punishment is wrong.

and that is an object language sentence which we do not yet understand. We could try to write down the instance in our metalanguage. But what sentence is it?

'Capital punishment is wrong ' is true i f f

The blank is to be filled in by a translation of 'Capital punishment is wrong ' into the metalanguage. But we do not know how to translate that sentence into the metalanguage. We know that speech act is per formed by someone who utters the sentence (in the object language), and we might know a way to per form that speech act in the metalanguage (following Blackbum, we could try 'Boo, capital punishment! '), but clearly this knowledge does not help us.

THE MEANING OF LOGICAL PARTICLES

Here are a few more words f rom Horwich on the Embedding Problem.

It seems to me [... ] that expressivists should maintain that 'right' is defined by means of a combination of two, independent rules of use: very roughly speaking (a) that 'X is fight' expresses a desire, and (b) that 'right' functions logically as a predicate (so that, for example, one may infer 'X is fight or snow is white' from 'X is right'). Therefore the real issue is not whether the second of these rules can be explained on the basis of the first (why should it be?) or whether they are consistent with one another (why shouldn't they be?); but whether the two together suffice to account for our entire practice with the term. 18


Horwich's view of the dialectic seems to be this. Those who find compelling Geach and Searle's objections to Expressivism believe that the Expressivist must explain how normative expressions come to play the syntactic and inferential roles of predicates. Minimalists, on the other hand, see no need for such an explanation. The Expres- sivist should merely say that 'right' and 'wrong' do have such a role; their having it explains why and how normative sentences embed in complexes. If that is how Horwich means to be capturing the essence of the disagreement, then I think he is right. Blackburn, for example, says that the quasi-realist Expressivist must explain why we use realist-seeming constructions when expressing norms, given that realism is (as he thinks) false. So we are left with this: critics (Searle and Geach) and defenders (Blackburn, Hare and Gibbard) alike thought that a certain fact needs an explanation, and Minimal- ists don't think so. What is at issue here? Why is there a disagreement about what needs an explanation?

Horwich has a certain view about what is involved in the meaning of an expression, and especially, about what is involved in giving the meaning. I suppose Stoljar might share the type of view. The view is that the meaning of an expression is (partly) constituted by its logical role, including its inferential properties and embedding features. By contrast, other philosophers of langauge think that the meaning of a term explains its logical role. For example, these latter philosophers might say that logical connectives express truth-functions, and that it is the fact that they express the particular truth-functions they do that explains the validity of the inferences we all know to be valid. The former theorists, including Horwich, think that the meaning of the logical connectives is rather constituted by the rules of inference that are said to be explained by them. So Horwich and his kin think that an explanation of 'wrong' might simply stipulate what its inferential role is in the course of giving its meaning, while others think that the meaning must be given in such a way that we will be able to see how those inferences are licensed.

Maybe connectives can be explained by giving their inference rules. There are some reasons for doubting that they can. 19 But in any case, if the explanation is a sensible one, it is so independently of Minimalism about truth. So consider: if explaining the meanings of the connectives, and thus the meanings of complex sentences whose

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atomic constituents are already understood, by way of the inference rules for those connectives, is a way of solving the Embedding Problem, then it is a way of solving the Embedding Problem without Minimal ism about Truth. Then, if there is a difficulty in solving the Embedding Problem before the arrival of Minimal ism on the scene, there is still a difficulty after the arrival of Minimalism. So Minimal ism does not help to solve the problem.

It would be more surprising still if Minimal ism could show, by means of the inference rule explanation of the connectives, that there never was an Embedding Problem to begin with. For R. M. Hare already gave the inference rule explanation for conditional embeddings in 1970, as a way of taking seriously the problem and offering a serious answer to it. Here is how Hare put it.

To understand the "If. . . then" form of sentence is to understand the place that it has in logic (to understand its logical properties). It is, in fact, to understand the operation of modusponens and related inferences. If a man denies the validity of modus ponens, he must be using 'if ' in a different way from most of us. 2~

How does this observation answer the Embedding Problem? When a normative sentence is the consequent of a conditional, someone who understands ' I f . . . then' in Hare's way will know that f rom that conditional and its antecedent, the normative sentence follows. Accepting the conditional, ' I f it is wrong to tell lies, then it is wrong to get little brother to tell lies,' signals (expresses) a readiness to express condemnat ion of getting little brother to tell lies once one condemns telling lies. And that is all there is to the conditional. There 's no use asking what the conditional means, hoping to find in its meaning some explanation for the validity of the inference; the meaning of the conditional is simply given by the idea that such inferences are valid. Hare puts the explanation of conditionals whose sentential parts are assertions nicely:

To know the meaning of the whole sentence "If the cat is on the mat, it is purring," we have to know (1) the meaning of the hypothetical sentence form, which we know if we know how to do modus ponens; (2) the meanings of the categoricals which have got encaged in this sentence form; and we know the latter if we know (a) that they are (when not encaged) used to make assertions and (b) what assertions they are used to make. 21

And then he asks,

Is there, in fact, anything to prevent us treating "That is a good movie," when it goes into a conditional clause, in exactly the same way as we have treated "The


cat is on the mat"? As before, we know the meaning of the hypothetical sentence form. And we know the meanings of the categoricals that are encaged in it. So we can easily perform the standard maneuver for letting the consequent of the hypothetical out of its cage. 22

It is worth noting, I think, that Simon Blackburn's most recent foray into the Embedding Problem seems to embrace the inference rule explanation of conditionals, too. The full explanation that Blackburn now wishes to give is decidedly more complex than Hare's, drawing on Jaako Hintikka's model theory for deontic logic. But here is what he says by way of introduction:

Suppose then we take the theory of inference as primary. If we ask what these embeddings are for, the immediate answer is that they mediate inference. They show us the deductive relationships between our commitments and our beliefs . . . . Suppose we then treat Geach's conditional "if lying yourself is wrong getting your little brother to lies is wrong" this way. Someone asserting it is tied to the tree of (either assenting to "lying yourself is not wrong" or to "getting your little brother to lie is wrong"). 23

Admittedly the notion of being "tied to a tree" of a tableau deduction (that is what Blackburn means) is not spectacularly clear. He might better have said that someone understands disjunction, whether of factual propositions or of attitude-expressing judgments, when she understands disjunctive syllogism, and that she understands the material conditional when she understands modus ponens.

So Hare and Blackburn gave inference rule explanations of connectives, and thereby sought to answer the Embedding Problem posed by Searle and Geach. Horwich, by contrast, says that the inference rule explanation shows that there was never any problem to begin with. Perhaps the difference is merely one of perspective or emphasis. What is the difference, after all, between giving the solution to a difficulty for a theory and showing that there is no difficulty? But there are still a couple of things to be said.

First, it doesn't appear that Truth Minimalism plays much of a role in the explanation. Blackburn does seem inclined to accept some Minimal conception of truth, but I think he holds that such a conception may be invoked only after the Embedding problem is solved. I shall explain why he thinks so (in a vindicating sort of way, I hope) shortly.

Second, though Hare says: " ' i s a good movie ' behaves grammat- ically like a predicate; but nobody need deny this, and it is perfectly

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consistent with the view that it is a predicate whose meaning has to be explained, by mentioning the kind of speech act, commendation, which is standardly performed in uttering it, ''24 and in so saying he says roughly what Horwich says, Hare does think it is necessary to explain how 'is a good movie' (and more generally, 'is good') can behave like a predicate. And though Blackburn currently endorses the inference rule explanation of normative conditionals, he writes,

We know, or think we know, what the negation, disjunction, and conjunction of an ordinary proposition is. It needs showing that we have any right to extend those notions to cover expressions of a different kind. Thus in the language to come H!p is to be treated as a well-formed formula capable of entering the same embeddings as p. Even if this provides a language which is formally workable, it stiU needs showing that it provides one which is interpretable - in which Hip can still be regarded as fundamentally expressive of attitude. 25

I take it that Blackburn means something like this. We may announce that material conditionals always mediate inference, and claim vic- tory. We can then say that we have explained what the conditionals mean, that the embedded normative sentences still have the same function they have when unembedded, for they still express an attitude, only their expressive function is (as Hare puts it) encaged. And o f course the formal logic will work out right. But will the idea of an inference actually make sense? Can we understand the idea that someone uttering the conditional is committed to the consequent on condition that she accepts the antecedent? We need some assurance. And if that is what Blackburn meant, I sympathize entirely. Let me demonstrate by providing an example in which the inference rule explanation, though formally similar, doesn't make any sense in the end.

I hereby introduce into the language, a predicate, or something that will behave in some contexts like a predicate: 'hiyo.' I decline to tell you what property it denotes. In the robust sense of property, it does not pick one out at all. In the Minimalist sense, it picks out the property that an object has just in case it is hiyo. However, I can give you some help. I will tell you how to use this expression:

Hiyo, Bob.


You should use this expression when you want to get Bob's attention. It will serve the function of getting Bob to focus attention on the speaker. At least, it will as soon as my new convention gains wide acceptance. To put it in a way that sounds more like classic speech act explanations, 'Hiyo Bob'performs the speech act of accosting. Now, so far, it doesn't look much like a predicate. But that is a mere problem of syntax, which I will quickly fix. Let's stipulate that we may always write or say, 'Bob is hiyo,' and this means nothing more nor less than 'Hiyo Bob'. Just by the way: 'I am hiyo' is perfectly grammatical, but it is never appropriate.

I said that 'Hiyo' will function as a predicate. How so? Well, simple: sentences in which 'Hiyo' is predicated of subjects are well- formed, and I have told you what speech act they perform. I now add the standard inference rule story about the sentential connectives 'or' , 'and', and ' i f . . . then.' Thus, the meaning of

(11) If a dingo is near, then Bob is hiyo

is given, as usual, by the inference rule for ' if . . . then,' namely, modus ponens, along with the explanation of the speech act performed by 'A dingo is near.' (which I don't feel is incumbent upon me to explain) and the explanation of the speech act performed by 'Bob is hiyo.' I already gave the last of these speech acts explanations. Note that it is encaged in the conditional under consideration.

So now you know, don't you, what (11) means. No, you don't. It doesn't mean anything intelligible. And the reason is obvious - there is no sense to be made of the idea that someone might use that conditional to infer 'Bob is hiyo' from 'A dingo is near'. It is obvious that the idea of inferring is out of place when the conclusion is a speech act of accosting.

It is equally obvious that the difficulty faced by the theorist who wants to make a predicate of 'Hiyo' is a good deal more grave than the one faced by the Norm Expressivist. I hope it is clear that I am not attempting to cast doubt on the programs developed by Hare or Blackburn. Rather I am trying to explain why their programs are needed, why it won't do simply to have as one's theory the stipulations that 'is wrong' serves to express an attitude of the speaker and also functions as a predicate. Horwich says that "the real issue

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is not whether" these stipulations "are consistent with one another (why shouldn't they be?)." But why should they be? Not every combination of characterization of the speech act performed by an utterance and stipulation that the expression in question functions as a predicate is a consistent combination. We want some sort of guarantee that the stipulation makes sense. In this light, let's consider Allan Gibbard's solution to the Embedding Problem. 26

G I B B A R D ' S STRATEGY

A well known strategy for displaying logical relations in a semantic model takes the contents of sentences to be sets of possible worlds. The sentence, 'Londoners queue for cabs' is assigned the set of all possible worlds in which Londoners queue for cabs; the sentence 'The Prime Minister is a Londoner' is assigned the set of all possible worlds in which the Prime Minister is a Londoner; and the sentence 'The Prime Minister queues for cabs' is assigned the set of all possible worlds in which the Prime Minister queues for cabs. Observe that any world in both of the first two sets will also be in the third set. Possible World Semantics explains entailment in this way: some premises together entail a conclusion just in case the intersection of the sets expressed by the premises is a subset of the set expressed by the conclusion. Other logical relations are explained neatly, too. Inconsistency of propositions is a matter of their intersection of being empty. The (proposition expressed by the) conjunction of a pair of sentences will be the intersection of the (propositions expressed by the) conjuncts. Disjunction corresponds to union, and negation to complementation. Possible World Semantics does explain how to understand what a truth-functional compound expresses once one understands what the atomic parts express, by saying what set theoretic operations are expressed by the connectives.

Expressivists will not be permitted to draw directly on the power of Possible World Semantics to explain how normative sentences embed, because according to Expressivism there is no such set as the set of possible worlds in which capital punishment is wrong. Nor- mative sentences do not, according to Expressivism, have as their function to describe how the world could be, so they don't single out sets of possible worlds. But Gibbard draws on the apparatus of Possi-


ble World Semantics indirectly, by giving a semantic representation of the content of normative sentences that is structurally like the Possible World Semanticists' representation of factual sentences.

Gibbard's idea is to use sets as contents, but not sets of worlds. The elements of Gibbard's sets are pairs, consisting each of a world and a system of norms. The set assigned to (4), for example, will be the set of all those pairs, (W, N), such that N declares capital punishment to be wrong in W. 27 Suppose some normative system, a pacifist system, declares capital punishment to be necessarily wrong; then it will be paired with every possible world in the set assigned to (4). Another normative system might declare capital punishment wrong if and only if it supplies no significant deterrent effect; that system will be paired in the content of (4) with all and only those worlds in which capital punishment doesn't significantly deter crime.

Gibbard-contents work just the same way Possible World propositions do in explaining truth-functional complexes. Disjunctions of normative sentences have as their Gibbard-contents the unions of the Gibbard-contents of their disjuncts; conjunctions have the intersection of the Gibbard-contents of their conjuncts, and so on. Gibbard- contents are specially designed to fit into the Realist machinery which was itself designed for sets of possible worlds. 28

Most significant for our purposes is the following feature of Gibbard's explanation of embeddings. Since every sentence con- taining normative vocabulary is assigned some Gibbard-content by the representation, if we know how to understand which attitude is to be associated with which content, we will have an assurance that each such sentence makes sense according to the Expressivist conception, and we won't have to worry that the stipulation about valid inference turns out to be nonsensical in the way that my stipulation about the Hiyo inferences turned out to be.

BRAKES, BOOKKEEPING, AND EXPLANATION

Suppose someone asks you what a brake is. Well, he might want various sorts of explanations. You might tell him, "A brake is a functional part of a vehicle. It has two states: engaged, and disengaged. The functional role it plays is this: when it is in the engaged state, it prevents the vehicle from moving, and when it is in the

46 JAMES DREIER

disengaged state, it doesn't." This explanation is true, and may be perfectly good for some purposes. Now suppose someone asks you why a certain car isn't moving. You say, "It isn't moving because the brake is engaged." This explanation might be true, and it might be perfectly good. Now suppose the same person asked you both questions, and you gave the two answers mentioned. Your pupil could be forgiven if he thought you hadn't given a very good answer. For here is what he knows about why the particular car isn't moving: something is in a certain state such that when it is in that state the car is prevented from moving. Now, he does know something. He can rule out some possible reasons that the car isn't moving. But he might have wanted a mechanical sort of explanation. If he did want a mechanical explanation, he would be disappointed by your pair of answers.

Here is my point. You could have given the mechanical part of the explanation in answer to either of the question. You could have said what a brake is by giving a description of the mechanism by which brakes stop cars, or you could have said why the particular car wasn't going by explaining what was going on in the hubs. Which is the best place to give the mechanical part of the explanation? There is no intrinsically best place. You might have some good reason to give functional characterizations of parts of cars, in which case the mechanical part of the explanation ought to come in answer to the specific question. Or, you might have some good reason to give a short answer to the specific question (maybe you expect lots of specific questions to come), in which case the mechanical part ought to come in answer to the general question of what a brake is. But, if you are to give an appropriate explanation, the mechanical part has to come at one point or the other. It has to come somewhere. It is a matter of theoretic elegance, or simplicity, or bookkeeping where it comes.

I believe that something very much like this has happened between those who take the Embedding Problem seriously and those who think it is only an illusory problem. We want an explanation of the meanings of embeddings. We think that there is a good general explanation, one that explains meanings of complexes by means of the meanings of the parts along with some composition rules. but, we notice that this sort of explanation is helpful only if the


meanings of the atomic parts are given in certain ways (say, by representing their contents as sets of possible worlds). The favored type of explanation is called a recursive truth definition, and it does provide a real explanation if the truth conditions of the atomic parts are given in the right sort of way. So, 'inflated' truth conditions plus recursive truth definition for complexes will be a good explanation of the meaning of the complexes.

Expressivists are not happy to explain the meanings of complexes embedding normative sentences in that standard way. Gibbard says, the reason is that normative sentences do not "express truths or falsehoods. ''29 But suppose we disagree; suppose we join the Mini- malists, and say that normative sentences clearly do express truths and falsehoods, since after all they embed with syntactic propriety into the contexts 'It is true that . . . ' and 'It is false that . . . . ' That doesn't mean we'll have n o explanation available for embeddings. It only means we won't have the standard one available. There may be an alternative, and an alternative, I take it, is what Gibbard aimed to provide. Somewhere in his theory, an Expressivist will have to give some explanation of embeddings. Where he gives it is a matter of bookkeeping.

EARNING THE RIGHT TO TRUTH

I said that Blackbum seems to accept some Minimal conception of truth, but that he also seems to hold that such a conception may be invoked only after the Embedding Problem is solved. What would incline an Expressivist toward such a position? Blackburn calls him- self a 'quasi-realist.'

I call the enterprise of showing that .~. even on anti-realist grounds there is nothing improper, nothing 'diseased' in projected predicates, the enterprise of quasi-realism. The point is that it tries to earn, on the slender basis, the features of moral language (or of the other commitments to which a projective theory might apply) which tempt people by realism. 3~

The quasi-realist wants to vindicate ordinary language, while deny- ing that the surface features that "tempt people to realism" do really need a fully realist explanation. But, Blackburn thinks, he has to e a r n

those features, he cannot simply claim them. Compare Horwich's remark: "once we have supplemented the expressivist analysis with

4 8 JAMES DREIER

the principle that 'rational' is a logical predicate, there is no reason to suspect that there are constructions involving that term whose deployment cannot be explained. And in that case, there is no reason to deny that norm-expressivism captures our concept. ''31 Now, one realist feature that Blackburn wants to earn is the application of the truth predicate to normative sentences. Such sentences cannot be 'really' true, but, the quasi-realist must say, it can make good sense to call them true. "In effect, quasi-realism is trying to earn our right to talk of moral truth, while recognizing fully the subjective sources of our judgments, inside our own attitudes, needs, desires, and natures. ''32

Here is my suggestion. Quasi-realists may make use of the Min- imal notion of truth. There is nothing more to calling a normative sentence true, they may say, than there is to asserting it. Or, once we understand the normative sentences themselves, there is no harm in predicating truth of them, since the predication may always be replaced, without gain or loss, by the normative sentences themselves. Or even, the concept of truth, as applied to a domain of sentences, is given by instances of the schema, ['S' is true iff S*], where 'S ' is replaced by a sentence from the domain in question and 'S*' by a translation into the metalanguage. Quasi-realists may use one of these Minimal conceptions, but not until they have given a solution to the Embedding problem. For some explanation must be given, and since Expressivists (including the quasi-realist sort) do not want to give a realist conception of truth conditions for simple normative sentences, and then to draw on some standard semantic representation to build up truth conditions for complexes recursively, they have to give their explanation elsewhere in the theory.

"Initially," Blackburn writes, "an expressivist theory stands in stark contrast to one giving moral remarks truth-conditions." But suppose we can solve the Embedding Problem, perhaps by way of a proposal like Gibbard's, or one like Hare's, or one of Black- burn's own. In that case, the obstacle 33 to embracing Minimalist truth is removed. And then, "Why not regard ourselves as having constructed a notion of moral truth? If we have done so, then we can happily say that moral judgements are true or false, only not think that we have sold out to realism when we do SO. ' '34


I have not argued that there is anything wrong with Truth Min- imalism. I have argued only that Truth Minimalism is of no help to a Norm Expressivist in giving an explanation of truth-functional embeddings of normative sentences. I believe that the best way to understand the Embedding Problem is as a burden of explanation laid on the shoulders of Expressivists, and I have mentioned three attempts to shoulder the burden: Blackburn's, Hare's, and Gibbard's. I have given no objections to any of these attempts, but neither am I claiming that any of them is successful. My point is just this: Truth Minimalism provides no explanation of normative embeddings. An explanation must come from some other quarter. And indeed, as Blackburn foresaw, a quasi-realist Expressivist may welcome the Minimalist conception of truth, but only after he had earned his right to it by giving some solution to the Embedding Problem. 35

NOTES

1 Horwich, P., Truth (London: Blackwell, 1990). The 'S*' in the schema is to be replaced by a translation of (whatever replaces) 'S' into the metalanguage. 2 Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1962). 3 Facts and Values (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 4 The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Hare does not mind the idea that prescriptions "express wishes" (p. 9), so long as such a gloss does not "lead the unwary to suppose that what happens when we use one, is this: we have a welling up inside us of a kind of longing, to which, when the pressure gets too great for us to bear, we give vent by saying an imperative sentence." I trust no one would draw a similarly rash conclusion from my inclusion of Hare's Prescriptivist theory of normative judgment under the heading 'Expressivism'. 5 For Geach's statement of the problem, see Geach, E T., "Ascriptivism," in his Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), pp. 250-255, first appearing in Philo- sophicalReview 69 (1960), pp. 221-225; and "Assertion," PhilosophicalReview, 74 (1965), pp. 449-65. For Searle's, see Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 136-141. 6 "Ascriptivism," p. 253. 7 Speech Acts, p. 137. 8 I have in mind especially Blackburn, Gibbard, Hare, and Smart, and I will be discussing the proposals of the first three. For Blackburn's attempts, see his "Moral Realism," in J. Casey (ed.), Morality and Moral Reasoning (London: Methuen, 1971); Spreading the Word (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); "Attitudes and Contents," Ethics 98 (1988), pp. 501-517. For Gibbard's, see his Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 5. For Hare, see his "Meaning and Speech Acts," Philosophical Review 79 (1970), pp. 3-24. For Smart, see his Ethics, Persuasion and Truth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

50 JAMES DREIER

9 Horwich, P., "Gibbard's Theory of Norms," Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993), pp. 67-78; qfiotation from pp. 74-76. l0 "Emotivism and Truth Conditions," Philosophical Studies 70 (1993), pp. 81- 101. 11 "Emotivism and Truth Conditions," p. 83. 12 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), appendix. See also Coopmans, P. "Where Stylistic and Syntactic Processes Meet: Locative Inversion in English," Language 65 (1989), pp. 728-51. 13 I owe the double comparative type of counterexample to I. L. Humberstone. Not every reliable informant finds the embedding of (10) into the context 'It is true t ha t . . . ' ungrammatical, but many do. 14 Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 92. 15 Strawson, P. E, "Truth," Analysis 9 (1949). 16 Language, Truth,,and Logic, p. 88. 17 Paul Horwich happily agrees: "knowledge of the truth condition of a sentence cannot simultaneously constitute both our knowledge of its meaning and our grasp of truth for the sentence" (Truth, p. 71). According to Horwich, it constitutes the latter and not the former.

Nor is the claim plausible on the Tarskian conception of truth conditions. See Soames, S., "What Is a Theory of Truth?", Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), pp. 411-429. Here the point is that Davidson's claim might be sensible if truth is taken as a primitive concept, as Davidson does seem to take it. A Tarskian truth- theory informs me of truth conditions in a relevant, helpful way in case I already have an independent understanding of truth. But Tarski's theory was intended (by Tarski!) to define truth in the object language. The theory cannot simultaneously define truth and play the role in Davidson's program that Davidson wants it to play. Richard Kirkham makes essentially this point in his Theories of Truth (Cam- bridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 223-248, esp. 230 and 246-8. 18 "The Essence of Expressivism,"Analysis 54 (1994),pp. 19-20,quotationfrom p. 20. 19 See for example Theories of Truth, pp. 344-6. Kirkham points out that when we give a soundness proof for a system of natural deduction, we assume that there is something we are proving that isn't trivial. If the meanings of the connectives were exhausted by the very rules of the natural deduction system, it would be obvious that all and only the theorems of the system are logical truths, and it would seem very strange to prove such a thing. He concludes that although the inference rules for the connectives follow from the meanings of those connectives, they do not simply constitute the meanings. 20 "Meaning and Speech Acts," p. 16. Of course, this cannot be quite right. There are several different kinds of conditional. All of them license modus ponens. So understanding modus ponens and related inferences cannot be enough to understand any particular conditional. But for the material conditional, Hare might have said that it is enough to know that modus ponens is the one and only inference rule needed to derive whatever can be inferred from it. 21 "Meaning and Speech Acts," p. 17. 22 "Meaning and Speech Acts," p. 19. 23 "Attitudes and Contents," pp. 511-512. 24 "Meaning and Speech Acts," p. 16. 25 "Attitudes and Contents," p. 511.


26 In Wise Choices, Apt Feelings chapter 5. 27 I am taking some liberty with Gibbard's story. Since in fact Gibbard's Expres- sivism is about the norms of rationality, his story about the content of (4) is actually more complicated, since the normative vocabulary of (4) is from the moral domain, not the rational one. 28 For this reason, I like to think of Gibbard's solution to the Embedding Problem as the 'Nutrasweet Solution.' Nutrasweet was designed specifically to fit into the human gustatory apparatus which was itself designed (by evolution) to detect sugar. Gibbard's normative contents were designed to fit into the machinery of Possible World Semantics, itself designed to explain (among other things) the embedding of sentences into truth-functional complexes. 29 Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 92. 30 Spreading the Word, p. 171. I am not sure what Blackburn means by "on the slender basis." 3~ "Gibbard's Theory of Norms," p. 76. 32 Spreading the Word, p. 197. 33 The only obstacle? Maybe there are others; but they are beyond the scope of this paper. 34 Spreading the Word, p. 196. 35 A version of this paper was read at Monash University, La Trobe University, and the Australian National University. I thank the audiences there, especially John Fox, for helpful comments, and also I. L. Humberstone and Richard Holton for various illuminating discussions of related issues.

Department of Philosophy Brown University Providence, RI 02912-1918 USA

expressivist embeddings and minimalist truth · peter geach, but one also and ... expressivist...

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