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Introducing Ecumenical Expressivism

In this chapter I introduce the main ideas of Ecumenical Expressivism. I begin by explaining how expressivism is well situated to explain the discontinuities canvassed in chapter 2 without the problems facing Ecumenical Cognitivism (section 1). I then consider the objection that expressivism convicts ordinary people of misunderstanding their own thought and discourse (section 2). I then lay out the details of Ecumenical Expressivism, starting with its commitments in the philosophy of mind (sections 3 and 4), and then its commitments in the philosophy of language (sections 5 and 6). I conclude by discussing its attractions and remaining challenges (section 7). 1. The Expressivist Gambit

The easiest way to motivate expressivism is by seeing how it seems well poised to side-step the problems facing cognitivism. Cognitivism asserts that normative claims express judgments with representational contents, such that the content of the judgment is identical to the content of the claim. So the claim that abortion is morally wrong expresses a robustly representational belief, the content of which is precisely that abortion is morally wrong. Representation is understood in terms of tracking features of the world.1 We explain the contents of normative judgments in terms of the states of affairs they function to track. So cognitivism begins with some account of normative states of affairs. There are then two options. Either normative states of affairs are reducible in some way to non-normative states of affairs or not, but each of these options faces familiar problems. Suppose normative states of affairs are irreducible. Because such states of affairs are unlikely to figure in our best scientific theories of the world, such a view does not fit well with a naturalistic conception of the world.2 Metaphysically, such states of affairs are problematic even putting naturalism to one side. In particular, it is hard to see why they strongly supervene on the non-normative/descriptive states of affairs. However, it is a platitude that they do (see chapter 2). Epistemologically, it is hard to know how we might reliably track these properties. Indeed, it is hard to know how we might have enough access to them for our judgments even to be about them,

1 I here make the simplifying assumption that all non-normative belief is representational, but I am not actually committed to such a strong view. For all that has been said here, mathematical discourse, for example, might not be representational either. It will be enough for the contrast I am after that at least some areas of discourse are well understood in representational terms. Some theorists deny even this weak assumption (Robert Brandom, in particular, comes to mind, but also Huw Price), but a proper engagement with these radical global rejections of representationalism would go beyond the scope of this book (though see Appendix 5). 2 I do not here have the space to delve into the huge debate about whether irreducible normative facts would figure in our best scientific theorizing. For a classic argument that they would not, see Harman 1977: chapter 1. Most contemporary anti-reductionists agree that normative properties would be non-natural but try to argue that this is an acceptable ontological commitment. See, e.g., Shafer-Landau 2003, Enoch 2011, Parfit 2011, and Wedgwood 2007. For a form of anti-reductionist naturalism, see Sturgeon 1988.

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depending on how we explain representation. Certainly causal theories of reference and content are unlikely to be helpful here, since it is implausible that normative properties as such have causal powers. Finally, it is hard to see how our representing the world as having such irreducible normative properties could settle the “thing to do,” in the way that normative judgment does (in chapter 2). Suppose instead that normative states of affairs are reducible to non-normative/descriptive states of affairs. On this way of thinking, normative judgment is just a species of factual judgment. This, though, does not fit well with the way in which normative judgment is affect-implicating and action-guiding. Nor does it fit well with the extent of fundamental normative disagreement, or so I have argued (see chapter 2). Sophisticated reductionists might try to avoid this last problem by invoking a causal theory of reference, but I have argued that this does not by itself solve the problem. For such theories do not fit well with the most natural ways of interpreting the speech and thought of alien communities. We attribute normative judgments and claims to such communities based on the practical role of the relevant judgments and claims, and not in virtue of what causally regulates their thought and talk. Recall Hare’s parable of the missionary and the cannibal. For those who find these worries persuasive, it might seem like the cognitivist order of explanation is a dead end. The cognitivist might at this stage take indexical judgments as a model, though. In the case of indexicals, plausibly there no irreducibly indexical states of affairs, but there are distinctively indexical ways of cognizing.

This suggests an isomorphic view of the normative. On this model, there are no irreducibly normative states of affairs, but there are distinctively normative ways of cognizing certain states of affairs. The most obvious deployment of this model is just to embrace an indexical analysis of normative claims, as with naïve subjectivism. However, the indexical approach has a hard time making good sense of normative agreement and disagreement (see chapter 2).

However, indexical cognitivism is not the only way to deploy the idea that normativity might in the first instance attach to ways of cognizing the world, rather than metaphysically to ways the world might be. After all, many of the puzzling features of normative judgment arise out of the way in which it is at once desire-like and belief-like. So perhaps one could understand normative judgment as necessarily involving both belief-like and desire-like elements. In particular, one could embrace a form of what I have called “Judgment Individuating Ecumenical Cognitivism.” To avoid the objections to analytic reductionism arising out of Moore’s “Open Question Argument,” Ecumenical Cognitivism should embrace a form of synthetic reductionism - the so-called “Cornell” approach. This, though, runs straight into the problem highlighted by Hare’s story of the cannibal and the missionary. Because the theory individuates normative claims in terms of what causally regulates them, it makes false predictions about when we would correctly translate another community as making claims with the same meaning as ours.

The Ecumenical Cognitivist can say that the missionary and the cannibal have a “disagreement in attitude,” but this is not sufficient. For on this approach, the propositional contents of their claims are perfectly logically consistent. So it will be semantically fine, and indeed true, for the missionary to say things like, “the cannibal’s moral beliefs are all true, but I disagree with them about the morality of

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scalping people.” This is surely a reductio. Ecumenical Cognitivism cannot preserve the right links between agreement/disagreement talk and truth/falsity talk (see chapter 3). The best diagnosis is that we translate the claims of other communities with normative claims just in case they play the right practical role.

This is where expressivism comes into its own. The expressivist gambit is to reject the cognitivist’s representationalist order of explanation. We do not start with normative states of the world and explain normative judgments as cognizing those states, even cognizing them in a distinctive way. Instead, we start with normative judgment itself, and its distinctively practical functions. Normative judgments function to settle the “thing to do,” and normative conversation allows us to deliberate together about the thing to do and enhance our individual deliberation while also better coordinating our joint efforts toward common goals. We therefore understand normative judgment as being in some way desire-like. We then try to “earn the right” to the realist-sounding things that ordinary folks say by explaining how this expressivist picture is compatible with literal talk of normative truth, the logical validity of normative inferences, and the like. We thereby earn the right to talk of normative states of affairs.3 If the project works, then we can avoid many of the difficult questions facing cognitivist theories as misguided. Simon Blackburn introduced this approach, which he calls “quasi-realism,” and he and Allan Gibbard have elaborated it in some detail. I here develop a form of expressivism which differs in that it incorporates an element of robustly representational belief in its account of normative judgment. I argue that this puts the theory in a better position to accommodate the features of our practice which might have seemed to support a representationalist order of explanation.

Ecumenical Expressivism still rejects the cognitivist’s order of explanation, though, and so is still a form of expressivism. Before developing the details of Ecumenical Expressivism, though, I must first consider an important and instructively misguided objection to expressivism as such.

2. Normative Judgment and Speakers’ Self-Understanding Ecumenical Expressivism holds that a normative judgment just is a certain sort of hybrid state, constituted, very roughly, by a suitably related representational state and desire-like state. The objection I consider here has as its major premise that ordinary speakers simply do not intend to convey any such states when making normative claims, nor do they understand their normative judgments in this way. Rather, the objection insists, ordinary speakers characteristically intend simply to express the corresponding normative belief, and mark no distinction between descriptive and normative beliefs apart from the obvious difference in content. Yet expressivism seems committed to the thesis that ordinary speakers have these more recherché semantic intentions. This objection has been pressed at some length by Terence Cuneo.4 He introduces the point in a crisp and memorable way: 3 The view would, of course, also need to explain why truth/falsity talk and agreement/disagreement talk line up in the right way to improve on Ecumenical Cognitivism. This looks like it might well be feasible, though, given that we will now identify normative judgments as such in virtue of their distinctive practical role - see chapter 7 for my own account of this. 4 In what follows, I draw on my own earlier reply to Cuneo. See Ridge 2009b. Cuneo’s objection was actually to classical forms of Non-Ecumenical Expressivism, but the moves I make in the text, if sound, would work equally well for both Non-Ecumenical and Ecumenical Expressivism.

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Some years ago I heard a well-known professor tell an audience that the best response he had witnessed to expressivism was that of a colleague who pointed to an expressivist paraphrase of a moral sentence on a blackboard and exclaimed, while rapping his knuckles on the board, that this paraphrase did not capture what he meant to say when engaging in moral discourse. On that occasion I recall feeling that this was a simple-minded response to a very subtle position. I think now, however, that this response is in its fundamentals correct… (Cuneo, 2006: p 35)

Cuneo bolsters his argument with some empirical evidence about the apparently realist assumptions of ordinary speakers – in particular, the way in which many speakers’ theological commitments seem to bleed into their semantic intentions.5 In fact, I agree that someone making a normative claim characteristically intends to express the corresponding normative belief. This may seem to give the game away. For now it looks like my view is a form of cognitivism. However, this inference is too quick. It depends on how we understand the concept of belief as it appears in the semantic intentions of ordinary speakers. Let us begin with the working hypothesis that the ordinary concept of belief is a natural kind concept.6 In that case, we might reasonably suppose that an externalist Kripke/Putnam style semantics is plausible for ‘belief’. On this sort of semantics, ‘belief’ purports to refer to whatever natural kind actually causally regulates our use of ‘belief’.7 Suppose we accept such a semantic theory of the reference of ‘belief’, but are then convinced by philosophical argument that there is no single unified natural or psychological kind which causally regulates our use of ‘belief’. On the strength of such arguments, we might rationally conclude that ordinary talk of descriptive beliefs is causally regulated by robustly representational states of mind with a ‘mind-to-world’ direction of fit, whereas talk of normative beliefs is causally regulated (at least in part) by non-cognitive states of mind with a ‘world-to-mind’ direction of fit. The disjunction of these two very different sorts of states of mind does not look to constitute anything like a unified natural kind that would itself figure in an empirically ideal theory of human psychology. Yet we could all the same discover that this is in fact what causally regulates our use of ‘belief’ in these different contexts. What, in that case, should we conclude? In particular, must we conclude that there are no normative beliefs?

5 See also Jonas Olson’s discussion of the “freshman objection” to expressivism in Olson 2010. The objection is not the same, but it is interestingly related to the one discussed in the text. 6 Although I take this account of our folk understanding of belief as a natural kind to be plausible, it will of course be philosophically very controversial. However, I lack the space to defend this hypothesis here. Fortunately, it is not really essential to the account developed in the text. So long as ordinary speakers suppose at least that ‘belief’ purports to refer to some sort of unified psychological kind then that will be enough even if it is not in any interesting sense a natural kind. 7 See Kripke 1972 and Putnam 1973. Or perhaps, ‘belief’ refers to whatever natural kind would figure in the best psychological theory of the instances which causally regulate our use of the term. The details of the theory of reference are not essential here, so long as it is broadly in the tradition of the Kripke/Putnam approach.

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Fortunately, such a dramatic conclusion does not follow. Consider two other terms – ‘jade’ and ‘witch’.8 Before modern chemistry demonstrated the falsity of this assumption, ordinary folks may well have assumed that ‘jade’ picked out a unified natural kind.9 It turns out that jade is not a unified natural kind. Our use of ‘jade’ is causally regulated by two distinct kinds – jadeite and nephrite. From the point of view of mineralogy, these two stones represent distinct kinds. This mineralogical discovery could have led us to decide that there is no such thing as jade, but instead we inferred that jade is not a natural kind after all. The case of ‘witch’ is different. Witches presumably were taken to represent a sort of supernatural kind. It turned out, of course, that there are no women with these supernatural powers, etc. Unlike the case of jade, in the case of ‘witch’, the fact that no entities answered well enough to our theory led to the conclusion that there are no witches. In this case, the theory took precedence over the nature of the stuff which casually regulated our use of the term. This dichotomy makes sense. The point of our discourse about jade in ordinary life was not hostage to whether jade was a natural kind. Jade is an attractive gemstone, and its superficial features matter more than its underlying nature for the jeweler’s purposes.10 By contrast, the whole point of discourse about witches was theory-driven. Consider ‘belief’ again. Expressivism entails that at least some of the states of mind that causally regulate our use of ‘belief’ and cognate terms are rather different sorts of state of mind than the other sorts of states of mind which causally regulate that term and cognates. This might contradict implicit folk wisdom about beliefs, depending on how theoretically committed the folk are on this front. In particular, it would contradict a folk theory of belief as a unified kind across all contexts. The problem is like the ones arising with ‘jade’ and ‘witch’, so we can ask whether we should treat ‘belief’ more like ‘jade’ or ‘witch’. In fact, matters are more complicated. In the case of ‘jade’ and ‘witch’, there was simply no real natural kind which could for principled reasons be taken to be the terms’ real referent. Jadeite and nephrite are presumably natural kinds, but neither has any more plausible claim to be the referent of ‘jade’ than the other, so ‘plumping’ for one would be arbitrary. The contrast, is that it remains plausible for all I have suggested here about normative judgment that there really is a natural kind which satisfies many of our folk theories about beliefs. So we have more live options in the case of ‘belief’. First, we could just conclude that there simply are no beliefs, as with ‘witch’. I take it that this is not a very plausible view, though. Second, we could instead conclude that the reference of ‘belief’ is unequivocally fixed by the distinctively representational unified natural kind which figures in a mature theory of human psychology and vindicates enough of our other platitudes 9 This is a speculative historical hypothesis. However, the philosophical lesson I want to draw here does not depend on the historical accuracy of this claim - just suppose it is so for the sake of argument. 10 See Putnam 1975: 241-2.

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about beliefs. Given the expressivist hypothesis under consideration, this entails there are no normative beliefs. A better analogy than ‘jade’ or ‘witch’ would be ‘motion’. The concept of motion will figure in a mature account of physics, but in a relativistic sense which contradicts pre-scientific conceptions. Should we be so quick simply to give up talk of normative belief, though? Such talk might still be useful insofar as we think the analogies between so-called normative beliefs and descriptive beliefs are important. So-called normative judgments do, figure in rational inferences, stand in logical relations to one another and so on – or, at any rate the expressivist theory I defend here aims to vindicate these ideas. This suggests a third option. Instead of abandoning the idea that there are normative beliefs, we could instead abandon the idea that ‘belief’ denotes a unified natural kind. There would then be (at least) two species of the genus ‘belief’. First, there would be what we might call ‘representational beliefs’ – beliefs which perhaps do form a natural kind. Second, there would be what we might call ‘deflationist beliefs’ – where these beliefs are unlikely to form a natural kind, and might include a non-cognitive component. The idea of representational beliefs might then figure in a mature theory of human psychology, while the broader notion of belief as including both representational and deflationist species, would figure more readily in our everyday discourse. The word ‘belief’ in English would have both sorts of belief in its extension. In my view, this third option is the most plausible.11 From a purely theoretical point of view, the idea that ‘belief’ denotes a unified natural kind which will figure in the best theory of human psychology is less central to our folk conception than the idea that there are normative beliefs. Of course, the folk do not call them “normative beliefs,” but they do implicitly seem to recognize the category. In any event, they certainly think there are moral beliefs, and they are normative. There are also good practical reasons to continue to treat normative judgments as beliefs even if they are quite different from factual beliefs. For, even given Ecumenical Expressivism, normative judgments figure in rational inferences, we can give good and bad reasons for them, and it is important to try to reach normative agreement. By continuing to understand ‘belief’ in a broad enough way to include normative beliefs, we can persist comfortably with an idea of normative assertion and perhaps even normative truth, and thereby preserve useful practices of rational argument and discussion about “the thing to do.” Indeed, given the incredibly central role that such normative thought and discourse play in our lives, it is hard to see how we could do without it. We could in principle carry on with the practice but not call normative judgments ‘beliefs’. However, it is unclear what function such linguistic revision would serve. Return to Cuneo’s objection. The objection presupposed that expressivism was committed to denying that there are normative beliefs, or that people characteristically intend to express normative beliefs when they make normative claims. On the account just sketched, though, there are normative beliefs. They just differ in 11 This represents a slight change from my take in previous work, in which I suggested that perhaps we should understand ‘belief’ as ambiguous. I now think the proposal floated in the text is more elegant, and also better heeds Occam’s Eraser.

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interesting ways from descriptive beliefs. Moreover, ordinary speakers do characteristically intend to express these beliefs when making normative claims. They just do not intend to express them qua hybrid states. Rather, they intend to express them under the description, the belief that so-and-so. The fact that the belief in question is in fact a sort of hybrid state is neither here nor there so long as this need not be transparent to competent speakers. By way of analogy, it is hardly an objection to classical functionalism in the philosophy of mind that ordinary speakers do not intend to express such-and-such functional states.

Perhaps Cuneo would at this stage reply that the thesis of the disunity of belief itself implausibly convicts the folk of another error – of taking beliefs to be a unified natural kind. This is a much less forceful objection than the original objection. For it is not at all obvious that ordinary speakers really have strongly held views, about whether normative judgments are of the same fundamental natural kind as descriptive beliefs.

Of course, I suggested above that ordinary speakers take ‘belief’ as a natural kind term. However, that suggestion was oversimplified, as the example of ‘jade’ illustrates. More plausibly, the folk might defeasibly take ‘belief’ to be a natural kind term, so that if the term was causally regulated by a unified natural kind then that fixes its reference. That leaves it open what commitments, if any, the folk have should this presupposition fails. For the objection that the folk are in error to go through, they would have to be committed to thinking that in that case there are no beliefs – that the intention to refer to a natural kind is non-negotiable. The case of ‘jade’ illustrates that this need not be the case. Or, at least, the commitment to ‘belief’ being a unified natural kind would have to be stronger than the folk commitment to their being moral and other normative beliefs for the objection to go through, but that seems highly unlikely.

Indeed, some fairly robust elements of ordinary thinking explicitly emphasize the distinction between “fact and value.” Almost anyone who teaches an undergraduate course in moral philosophy can attest to these strands of ordinary thought, though undergraduate philosophy majors are admittedly not a representative sample of English speakers. It may well be that ordinary speakers are at most generally agnostic on this highly theoretical question.12

Even if ordinary speakers do have views, even strongly held views, on the uniformity of normative judgment with other forms of belief, there being mistaken about this is hardly a decisive objection. Trained philosophers who have thought long and hard about meta-normative theory disagree about these questions. Indeed, given that the controversies in meta-ethics all have at least some plausible connection to everyday thought, whatever meta-normative view turns out to be correct it will follow that some of the folk (perhaps many of them) are wrong about the nature and even the content of

12 The careful reader will wonder how this paragraph squares with my earlier claim that ordinary speakers take ‘belief’ to be a natural kind term. The answer is that this is at most a highly implicit and defeasible commitment, in the same way that our commitment to the idea that ‘jade’ named a natural kind was implicit and defeasible. It is implicit in that it does not necessarily manifest in any conscious judgment or avowal that beliefs are natural kinds, but in the disposition to defer to empirical science (most notably, psychology) about the nature of beliefs as such. This sort of highly implicit commitment may not be sufficient to count as a theoretical judgment. The commitment is defeasible in that it might be one easily given up in light of clear evidence or even strong philosophical argument. However, my main line of defence here comes in the next main paragraph of the text. I am not all that bothered if the folk are convicted of error on a question of this highly theoretical sort.

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their own first-order judgments. With this objection put to one side, I am now in a position to develop my positive theory of normative judgments.

3. Normative Perspectives: The Power of Negative Thinking I propose that we understand normative judgments in terms of “normative perspectives.” I begin my discussion of normative perspectives with the idea of a standard for two reasons. First, one intuitive way of glossing what it is to find general criteria for deciding what to do in a variety of possible circumstances just is to settle upon suitable standards of practical deliberation. Second, the semantics developed for ‘good’, ‘ought’, ‘must’, ‘reason’ and cognate terms in chapter 1 is framed in terms contextually specified sorts of standards.

Recall that a standard is a rule or principle used as a basis for judgment, and that I follow Hare in understanding rules and principles as sorts of universal prescriptions. To accept a rule or principle, then, is at least in part to be disposed to issue the relevant prescriptions. The disposition is defeasible, and for some so-called “agent-relative” principles the defeasibility will often be invoked. Allan Gibbard’s distinction between accepting a standard (or, in his terminology, a “norm”) from being in the grip of one is a useful one here. Gibbard illustrated the idea with the disturbing real world example of the subjects of the Milgram experiments. Subjects in the experiments were told to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to another subject, though in fact the other subject was not being shocked and was a confederate of the experimenter. Roughly two thirds of the subjects continued administering the shocks even while hearing the other subject screaming in pain, begging for the shocks to stop. The subjects administering the shocks were typically upset and protested, but the experimenter would simply reply, “The experiment requires that you continue.”13 A typical subject experienced inner conflict between two norms – a norm of not inflicting harm and a norm of being polite, or perhaps of following directions or cooperating with an authority figure. Gibbard’s suggestion is that the subjects internalize these norms in different ways. The subjects accept a norm against inflicting harm and, as their evaluation of the experiment in a more detached setting suggests, they even accept a norm which puts the non-infliction of harm ahead of politeness, cooperativeness, etc. However, they are in the grip of a norm of politeness (or cooperativeness) which explains their behaviour. On Gibbard’s account, both accepting and being in the grip of a norm are species of the broader genus of norm internalization. To internalize a norm just is to have a motivational tendency of a particular kind to act on the pattern picked out by that norm. Gibbard further suggests that the kinds of tendencies which constitute norm internalization have an evolutionary purpose of coordination. For my purposes, this evolutionary speculation is not essential. So much for internalizing a norm, but accepting a norm and being in the grip of a norm are different modes of internalization. To be in the grip of a norm just is to internalize it without accepting it. So the crucial question is what is norm acceptance? Gibbard suggests that norm acceptance can be understood only in terms of how thee relevant motivational tendencies are connected to language, and in particular to normative discourse, which on his view aims at consensus. In this context Gibbard

13 Milgram 1974. Gibbard’s discussion is at Gibbard 1990: 58.

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calls taking a normative position in conversation “normative avowal.” To a first approximation, to accept a norm is to internalize it and be prepared to avow it.

This is only a first approximation because people sometimes avow insincerely. Gibbard therefore adds that to accept a norm is to be prepared to avow it when one is being sincere. However, sincerity cannot be glossed as deliberately holding oneself to standards of honest avowal, on pain of circularity. Gibbard instead glosses sincerity in terms of “a childlike openness or spontaneity – speaking without the psychic complications of self-censorship.” (Gibbard 1990: 74)

Apart from the evolutionary spin Gibbard puts on these ideas (about which I shall remain neutral), all of this seems very plausible. However, Gibbard explains the meaning of normative claims in terms of their expressing states of norm-acceptance. My own account, by contrast, is couched in terms of norm – hence the subtitle, “The Power of Negative Thinking.”14 On my account, normative judgments are not well understood in terms of an agent’s accepting particular normative standards. To be sure, individuals often do accept particular normative standards. Some theoretically inclined philosophers may even accept one overarching ultimate standard. For example, a Kantian might endorse the categorical imperative. However, most people do not have such theoretically refined, unified and complete normative views. One might try to get around this objection by appealing to the idea of a maximally specific standard. The idea would be that a speaker might accept a standard whose content is something like, “In circumstances exactly like the ones faced on me on such-and-such date at such-and-such time, perform such-and-such action.” This move is at the very least as being very ad hoc and inelegant. Moreover, the whole point of having standards in this context is to provide general guidance for potentially repeatable circumstances. Such clunky “standards” as this maximally specific one do not fit well with this role-defined conception of normative standards.

A second sort of case that puts pressure on the norm acceptance theory is one in which the agent is deeply agnostic about morality as a whole, and who therefore accepts no moral norms at all. Such an agent might nonetheless intelligibly and sincerely assent to claims like, “If eating meat is morally wrong then eating beef is morally wrong.”15 If making moral judgments like this requires accepting some suitable moral norm, this is impossible. An advantage of my “negative thinking” approach is that it preserves this possibility, and requires only that the speaker is committed to not accepting moral standards which simultaneously permit eating meat but do not condemn eating beef. It is hard to see how someone could sincerely assent to the conditional in question without taking on at least this very minimal commitment. If this is unclear, just consider how incoherent it would be for someone to assert, “If eating meat is morally wrong then eating beef is morally wrong – not that I have any objection to moral standards which forbid eating meat but do not

14 It is hard to know for sure how deep this contrast is. For although Gibbard’s canonical statement of his view holds that normative claims express states of norm-acceptance, he does not obviously unequivocally stick with this line. For he goes on to give an account of what he calls “normative logic” which explains the phenomena in terms of what fully decided states are “ruled out” by the speaker’s state of mind. He unfortunately does not tell us about the nature of these states of mind and how they rule out the corresponding fully decided states, a point to which I return in the following chapter. 15 Thanks to Campbell Brown for useful discussion here.

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forbid eating beef.” The point is that someone agnostic about morality in general might still have a kind of contingency plan of the form: If I ever begin moralizing in earnest, I shall not accept moral standards which simultaneously require me not to eat meat but do not require me not to eat beef. This second sort of case is dialectically relevant not only to my objection to the norm-acceptance form that Gibbard’s theory takes. Interestingly enough, it also bears on the discussion of the amoralist and the anormativist from chapter 2. For the fact that Ecumenical Expressivism is couched in terms of the rejection of norms, rather than in terms of their acceptance, provides additional leverage in that well-worn debate. For the Ecumenical Expressivist can allow that there can be an amoralist and indeed even an anormativist in the sense of there being someone who makes fully engaged moral and other normative judgments without accepting any moral or normative standards whatsoever. To make a normative judgment one must on my account occupy a “normative perspective” in a sense I shall now explain, but having a normative perspective does not require accepting any particular normative standard.16 In light of these worries about norm-acceptance theories like Gibbard’s, I propose instead to understand normative judgment in terms of “normative perspectives.” Normative perspectives involve broadly desire-like states but also constitute a perspective which the agent intuitively endorses. The appeal to the agent’s endorsement understood in terms of desire-like states means I need to confront a well-known challenge arising out of cases of alienation. This challenge was most famously posed by Gary Watson in the context of his discussion of Harry Frankfurt’s original higher-order desire approach to alienation. Watson argued that there is no obvious reason to identify an agent with his second-order (or third-order, etc.) desire rather than with his first-order desire. As Michael Bratman once memorably put it, a second-order desire is prima facie just one more desire “in the psychic stew.”17 At the same time, Bratman argues that we should not give up on the Frankfurt-style strategy in favor of the metaphysically dubious notion of “agent causation” of the sort defended by Roderick Chisholm.18 Chisholm’s idea was that action involves a unique kind of causation, by agents, rather than events, found nowhere else in nature. Bratman makes the intriguing suggestion that we can understand where an agent stands at a moment in time by focusing on those aspects of his psychology which constitute him as an agent over time. Here Bratman relies on a broadly Lockean view of personal identity according to which different stages of a person over time are unified and count as constituting the same person in virtue of the psychological connections between them. Some of these connections are practical. A crucial ingredient in this story is the idea of a policy, which is a kind of general plan to act in a certain way whenever in certain potentially repeatable circumstances. A general policy of taking the bus into work rather than walking if it is raining is an 16 I shall later add an important caveat to this point below once I have introduced the rest of my theory. This caveat complicates my discussion of the anormativist in the text above, but not in a way that robs it of all force. 17 Bratman 2000: 38. 18 Chisholm 1964.

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illustrative example of a policy in this sense. Bratman independently argues that our plans, including our policies, have a certain kind of stability, in that there is normally at least some rational pressure not to reconsider or abandon a prior plan.19 Bratman’s idea that one way in which an agent constitutes her identity over time is by sticking with and executing her prior plans and policies – and by regulating her motivational structures more generally so that they support her plans and policies. Bratman refines this approach. First, he focuses more specifically on what he calls “self-governing policies,” which are higher-order policies concerning which first-order desires to play a role in motivating the agent. Second, he adds that in order to settle where the agent stands, a self-governing policy must be one with which the agent is “satisfied,” in the sense that the policy is not one which is challenged by another of his policies.20 In Bratman’s sense, one policy challenges another one when the two policies conflict, and as a result, the presence of the one tends to undermine the functioning of the other. Third, Bratman specifically focuses on general policies in favor of treating desires “as providing justifying reasons in motivationally efficacious practical reasoning.”21 Fourth, he introduces a distinction between self-governing policies and “ideals,” or “quasi-policies.” Ideals, such as an ideal of good citizenship, function much like self-governing policies but are not subject to the same strong demands of consistency and the like. This leads to a further qualification of Bratman’s account of “satisfaction” – an agent is satisfied with a given self-governing policy only if that policy is challenged neither by any of the agent’s self-governing polices nor by any of the agent’s ideals. Bratman develops his account in the context of action theory. In that context, the issue is that a desire from which the agent is alienated seems in some sense not to be “her own.” Here primary questions include “what is it for an action to be autonomous?” and “what distinguishes human action from more primitive sorts of purposive behavior?” In that action-theoretic context, the problem is that desires from which we are alienated seem not to manifest our autonomy. The context here, by contrast, is meta-normative theory. In the present context, the problem is that desires from which the agent is alienated do not seem to constitute, even partially, the agent’s normative judgment. This difference in context does not, however, imply the irrelevance of Bratman’s ideas. In both contexts, the problem is to provide some account of “where the agent stands” with respect to a given practical concern. I briefly suggested in chapter 1 that acting on one’s sincere and freely determined normative judgment intuitively is a manifestation of autonomy. It would therefore not be terribly surprising if the solutions to these problems drew on similar ideas. At the same time, the difference in dialectical context means my account must depart from Bratman’s. Because 19 Note that this fits well with the empirical evidence discussed here in chapter 6 concerning the nature of the will and willpower in terms of dealing with structural problems involving resolute choice and repeated temptations involving choices each of which has only a negligible impact on one’s long-term plans, and with the theory of rationality developed there. Constantly revising our plans tends to lead to our not achieving any of our ends, and thereby leaves us open to the charge of being less than fully rational. 20 The idea of being satisfied with one’s endorsements is one Bratman takes from Frankfurt, though he elaborates the basic idea differently. Frankfurt’s discussion does not draw on the idea of self-governing policies. 21 Bratman 2000: 54.

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Bratman’s account does not aspire to explain normative judgment, he helps himself to the unreduced notion of treating desires as “providing justificatory reasons.” For my meta-normative purposes, this will not do; I aim to explain the concept of a justificatory reason. The normative judgments of ordinary people typically reflect a perspective that is incomplete. In fact, most people have firmly held normative views on some fundamental normative questions, less firm views on other fundamental normative questions, and have no view at all on yet others.22 I therefore do not gloss an agent’s normative perspective as her acceptance of any overarching normative standard. For most of us, the standards that we accept in practical deliberation at any given point in time, even when we are reasoning in ways that we endorse, are a sort of “work in progress.” As with most works in progress, we have at least some idea of what any satisfactory completion of the work would have to be like. These ideas serve as provisional fixed points, helping to shape our deliberation unless we find what we take to be good reasons to abandon them. I propose to understand an agent’s normative perspective as a set of relatively stable self-governing policies (in Bratman’s sense) about which standards to accept. More specifically, a normative perspective in my sense is a set of relatively stable policies against accepting certain kinds of standards of deliberation. The relevant policy also be one with which the agent is “satisfied” in Bratman’s sense, otherwise alienation looms. Although I do not define normative perspectives, even partly, in terms of our emotions, emotions help explain how human beings manage to have such perspectives. Because such policies function to constitute our identity over time, they must be relatively stable even in the face of competing inclinations and desires. In my view, human beings typically manage this stability, in part, by having policies which are “emotionally tinged.” By “emotionally tinged,” I simply mean that the agent is disposed to emotional reactions which generally help bolster his commitment to the policy in question. Just how the agent’s policy is emotionally tinged in this sense may vary depending on what features of a possible practical stance the agent is considering. For example, a morally decent agent might be horrified and disgusted by the sort of practical stance which animated Joseph Goebbels, while they might merely pity someone who embodies the “slacker” practical stance of the character Jeffrey Lebowski in the film “The Big Lebowski.” As I noted in chapter 1, emotions are not necessary for normative judgment. This reflects the possibility of other ways of maintaining a relatively stable normative perspective. Perhaps Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation makes moral judgments, and hence on my account has a normative perspective, even though he has no emotions. For him, emotions may simply not be necessary for his normative policies to be stable. For he also has no competing inclinations – he is not subject to temptation. Indeed, on many theological views this will also be true of God, who

22 Compare Gibbard on hyperplans versus ordinary agent’s actual plans; see Gibbard 2003: 54 and the surrounding discussion.

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presumably also could make normative judgments. We achieve stability with the help of our emotions. Data and God might function differently. Normative perspectives as I have so far defined them are entirely negative - they rule out standards with certain features. This makes it hard to see how normative perspective could help solve practical problems of deliberation and coordination. It is all well and good to say that one’s normative perspective is a “work in progress,” but one must continue to make decisions and coordinate with others. This is a fair point, and it reveals my characterization of a normative perspective is incomplete. An obvious solution is to insist that normative perspectives also include practical commitments to act and deliberate only in ways which would be consistent with any set of standards for deliberation which have not been ruled out.23 Let us for now call any set of standards whose acceptance as “ultimate” standards of practical deliberation by an agent’s normative perspective “acceptable.” In this formulation, ‘ultimate’ indicates both that the standards are not based on any deeper or more fundamental standards (they are axiomatic), and that the set of standards as a whole is thereby understood as providing a complete guide to practical deliberation. To count as having a normative perspective in my sense, the agent must also take on the following practical commitments:

(1) A commitment to perform (or omit) whatever actions (or omissions) would be required by any acceptable set of standards.

(2) A commitment to deliberate in accord with whatever weights would be assigned by any acceptable set of standards.

These are practical commitments in the sense of themselves being (typically emotionally tinged) Bratmanesque plans or policies. Such commitments make sense, given the idea of a normative perspective as a “work in progress.” For if the point of such a perspective is to solve the problems discussed in section 1 of this chapter, then an agent who has such a perspective should be committed to acting in deliberating only in ways which, by his lights, any acceptable “finished product” would have him act and deliberate. In addition to these firm commitments, a normative perspective must also include the following aspirations and propensities:

(3) An aspiration to perform (or omit) whatever actions (or omissions) would be most highly recommended by any acceptable set of standards.

(4) A defeasible propensity, when being sincere (in the Gibbard’s sense) and candid, to encourage others to perform (or omit) whatever actions (or omissions) would be most recommended by any acceptable set of standards.

23 This addition complicates my discussion of the “anormativist” above. For an anormativist will presumably not be committed to act only on those standards he has not ruled out. This is a fair point, but it does not mean that couching my theory in negative terms does not provide some extra leverage with the anormativist. For one interesting way of being an anormativist is to have a kind of conditional commitment – a commitment of the form, “If I were to start playing the normative ‘game’ then I shall only abide by standards like this, and not like this.” This conditional commitment might be a kind of penumbral case, and it might be easy to see why, given the theory outlined in the text, we are somewhat uncertain just what to say about the anormativist’s judgments. This sort of move is even more plausible in the case of the amoralist, who is a much more intuitively intelligible character, and provides me with a more principled account of what one very interesting sort of amoralist might be like, given my theory. Thanks to Matthew Chrisman for drawing me out on this important point.

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These further aspirations and propensities are also closely linked to the point of a normative perspective. They concern, in part, actions and ways of life which an agent may aspire to as ideals, and may want to encourage others to take up as ideals, yet which they are not necessarily themselves committed to pursuing. They also concern course of action which the agent takes to be required, though. For a standard’s requiring a course of action is a sort of limiting case of its recommending it – intuitively, requiring something is an especially stern and unyielding way of recommending it.24 A complication is that someone might have a self-governing policy adopted entirely for reasons extraneous to the concerns the policy endorses. For example, I might make adopt a self-governing policy in favor of always assigning some weight in my deliberations to the fact that an action would help other people. However, I might adopt this policy simply to maintain a reputation for being a decent person. I believe that if I do not adopt a firm policy of giving weight to the fact that an action would help someone that I will not manage to establish such a reputation. The crucial point for my purposes is that someone who embodies this sort of disjointed psychology had better not thereby come out as an altruist. Fortunately, my account can avoid this unwanted consequence simply by stipulating that a self-governing policy is part of an agent’s normative perspective only if that policy is one to which the agent is committed at least in part for reasons which are internal to the policy itself.25 That is, the agent’s commitment to the policy must be because he either values the ends which the policy itself favors (or favors favoring, or rules out not favoring, etc.) or because he values being the kind of person who embodies such a policy for its own sake. With this account of normative perspectives in hand, I am now in a position to lay out my own account of the nature of normative judgments.

4. Normative Judgment. Normative claims are characteristically made with incomplete predicates like ‘good’, ‘ought’, ‘must’, and ‘reason’, where those incomplete predicates are indexed to standards of a certain sort. On a first pass, the standards to which these predicates are indexed when used to make normative claims were, I suggested, any acceptable standards for deciding what to do (or what to think, or how to feel). I then suggested that ‘acceptable’ is itself, in at least some of its uses, a context-sensitive predicate and that it is used in a normative sense when it is indexed to the idea of wisdom. I then suggested that ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ have come to have a more primitively

24 Admittedly, it would sound odd and misleading to characterize a requirement as a recommendation, but in my view there is a plausible Gricean explanation of this - basically, you are being less informative than you might by using the weaker notion. So this does not undermine the idea that requirements literally are a species of recommendation all the same. 25 Compare Bratman on the relevant higher-order policy being non-instrumental; see Bratman 2002: 77. I would prefer not to put the point in terms of being non-instrumental, in that the policy might well be adopted as a mere means to the ends specified in the policy itself. However, the context makes it clear that Bratman has something similar in mind; my objection is merely to the terminology he uses to describe his view here, which has the potential easily to mislead.

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normative reading on which those predicates are not context-sensitive but instead are primitively normative. A further wrinkle I introduce here is that normative judgments should be understood in terms of what any acceptable ultimate standards of practical deliberation would require, recommend, rank highly, or whatever. What we are after is what would, e.g., be highly ranked by any acceptable fully worked out and axiomatic standard of practical reasoning. Crucially, I am here assuming that any conjunction of simple standards into a much longer and complex set of standards is itself a standard. So there is on my view no deep distinction between a plurality of standards and a single conjunctive standard. Bearing this in mind, I propose that to say the judgments of the form ‘X is good as an end’ can be rendered as equivalent to judgments of the following form:

(1) ‘X would be highly ranked as an end by any acceptable ultimate standard of practical reasoning’

We can allow that this judgment is a belief in the deflationist sense of belief laid out in section 2. However, crucially, any token of that belief type is on my view itself necessarily a hybrid state, and is constituted by a normative perspective and a representational belief whose contents are linked in the right way. In particular, any token of (1) will be constituted by:

(1) (a) A normative perspective. (1) (b) The belief that X would be highly ranked by any admissible ultimate standard of practical reasoning.

Crucially, these two components are logically related in that the concept of ‘admissible’ as it figures in (1) (b) should be understood as adverting to standards of practical reason whose acceptance is not ruled out by the perspective in (1) (a). One nice feature of this approach is that it is easy to see how to extend the theory to judgments of arbitrary logical complexity. Normative judgments are constituted by normative perspective/belief pairs which are related in a certain way. First we paraphrase the content of the deflationist belief in terms of what any acceptable standard of ultimate standard of practical reason would be like in a certain way – chapter 1 provides the needed recipes. We then understand the judgment as a hybrid state, consisting of a normative perspective and a representational belief, where that belief’s content is fixed by replacing all uses of ‘acceptable’ in our paraphrased content and replacing them with the notion of admissibility qua the speaker’s normative perspective. To see how the approach extends to judgments of arbitrary logical complexity, consider a normative judgment with the following content:

(1) If pleasure is good as an end then Socrates sought pleasure. Since the context is a normative one, we can paraphrase this content as follows:

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(2) If any acceptable ultimate standard of practical reason would rank pleasure highly, then Socrates sought pleasure.

On the proposed account, a judgment with this content is constituted by the following pair:

(3) (a) A normative perspective

(3) (b) The representational belief that if pleasure would be highly ranked by any admissible standard of practical reasoning [that is, any such standard not ruled out by the perspective indicated in (3) (a)] then Socrates sought pleasure.

One upshot is that something is good as an end only if it would be highly ranked. So something which would be assigned some positive weight, but not much, would not count as good as an end. I view this as an interesting consequence of the semantics for ‘good’ defended in chapter 1, though I admit this is not how the phrase ‘good as an end’ is typically used by philosophers. Compositional semantics sometimes has surprising implications. Note that ‘highly’ is also context-sensitive.26 It should not be hard to see how this approach can be extended easily enough to other normative judgments. Normative judgments about what one must do will be glossed as claims about what any acceptable standard of practical deliberation would require, and a deflationist belief with this content will, in turn, be understood as a normative perspective/representational belief pair, where the content of the representational belief is a generated by replacing ‘acceptable’ with ‘admissible’ in the usual way. The same story generalizes; see chapter 5 for more details. The only tricky atomic case is talk of reasons. Gibbard’s account again provides a useful foil. In his earlier work, Gibbard invokes the idea of “awarding some weight to” a fact when deciding what to do in explaining what it is for someone to take a fact to be a reason to do something. Jonathan Dancy reasonably complains that without anything more to say about “awarding weight” that Gibbard’s approach is viciously circular:

The real weakness is that the account makes explicit use of some appropriate conception of weight – of normative weight, as one might put it – and that was pretty well exactly the thing we were trying to understand. (Dancy 2004: 58)

26 Interestingly, there is another predicate which can perhaps better capture what philosophers sometimes mean by ‘good as an end’ – where that does not necessarily suggest being all that highly ranked. Moreover, it is a predicate which philosophers very often use to express this very idea. I have in mind the phrase ‘valuable as an end’.26 In my ‘valuable’ is an incomplete modal term whose content depends on context. In my view, ‘valuable’ can, in a given context, mean something like ‘would be assigned some positive value by any acceptable standard of practical reasoning’ where a judgment with this content is then understood as a normative perspective/robustly representational belief pair in the usual way. The crucial point is that on this approach something will be deemed valuable as an end by an agent if every acceptable ultimate standard of practical deliberation by that agent’s lights would assign it any positive weight, no matter how little. This provides an interesting contrast between the semantics of ‘good as an end’ and ‘valuable as an end’ as used in normative contexts.

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However, in his more recent Thinking How to Live, Gibbard has more to say about the crucial notion of “awarding weight.” There he explains weighing a fact (or a factor, as he here puts it) in favor of performing an action in terms of a pattern of decision-making which we could program a robot to embody:

What, then, is this purported state of mind, weighing factor R in favor of doing X? It is calculating what to do on a certain pattern, a pattern we could program a robot to mimic. Let the robot code alternative movements that it is wired up to have emerge from its calculations (acts). This talk of coding ascribes content to configurations of electric charge and the like in the robot’s circuitry, but let’s take this much interpretation as already accomplished; our question is how to go from these ascriptions to ascriptions of its weighing factors in favor of alternatives. The robot, imagine, attaches number representations (call them ‘indices’), positive and negative to factor-act pairs. It then totals up the indices for each act, and performs the act with the highest resulting sum. If the robot is set up in this way, then the index it attaches to factor-act pair R, X then constitutes the degree to which it weighs factor R towards doing X. (Gibbard 2003: 190)

As an analogy, consider chess-playing computer programs. The very best chess software can now play chess as well as the world’s strongest grandmasters even on a humble desktop PC. Such software works by assessing options (various candidate moves), and making a decision (selecting a move and playing it) under real time pressure, where the decision made is based on the values it assigns to those options. It is not hard to see how the functioning of such software might be functionally isomorphic with the functioning of Gibbard’s hypothetical robot. Chess-playing software calculates various lines, but cannot in most positions calculate out everything to a forced checkmate or draw. Ultimately, the software determines the likely position resulting from a given move, assuming the best play from the opponent. The software must then somehow evaluate the resulting position, where this evaluation is not understood in yet more calculation of variations – again, on pain of the usually impossible (even for today’s fastest computers) task of calculating everything out to mate or a draw. Instead, the position is assessed in terms of various features of the position which are assigned different weights by the software. The point of rehearsing this example is to illustrate that, whatever else one might think about Gibbard’s own more recent account, it is not vulnerable to the sort of circularity worry Dancy pressed against his earlier account. The example of the chess-playing computer provides a clear example of what it might be for a system to treat a consideration as a reason without literally making judgments about reasons. Of course, this just provides a sort of model, but a fruitful one. After all, the mind itself is on many plausible views itself understood as a kind of sophisticated computational system.27 Gibbard’s own rendition of this promising idea is problematic for several reasons. Gibbard glosses judging that something is a reason simply as identical with being disposed to treat it as a reason – or, in his terms, weighing it in favor of a course of action. Here is Gibbard again:

27 See Horst 2005.

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We ourselves can settle what to do in a like way, not toting up numbers explicitly, perhaps, but proceeding as if we did. Regarding features of our situation as reasons to do one act as opposed to another, my theory is [sic.], consists in such weighing…An expressivistic style of explanation can start with the psychological notion, and explain the normative one in terms of it. It explains the concept of being a reason to do X via the state of mind, in effect of, of believing it to be a reason to do X. This state of mind is explained as one’s weighing that factor in favor of doing X – and to do this is to form contingency plans on certain patterns. (Gibbard 2003: 190-191, italics added for emphasis)

This is a bold thesis, and in my view one we should reject for several reasons. First, someone can be disposed to treat something as a reason while being alienated from so treating it. Indeed, the failure to note this possibility is an ironic oversight on Gibbard’s part. Gibbard was exceptionally sensitive to this sort of issue in his earlier work, in which he distinguished accepting a norm from being in the grip of one. The crucial negative point here is that it is simply not plausible to count someone who is alienated from their disposition to treat a fact as a reason to Φ as nonetheless thereby judging that the fact really is a reason to Φ. Insofar as Frankfurt’s unwilling addict (e.g.) is alienated from his disposition to treat the fact that grabbing the purse would help him pay for his next hit as a reason to grab the purse, it is perverse to characterize the addict as thereby judging that this fact is a reason to grab the purse.28 So being disposed to count something as a reason is not sufficient for judging that it is. Neither is it necessary, though. Gibbard’s account implies on a kind of naïve additivity, in that he stipulates that any fact which is treated as a reason is assigned some value, and that these values are then all added up. However, our ordinary talk of reasons does not sit well with this assumption. Suppose I judge that the fact that the soup has garlic is a reason to eat it, but this judgment is parasitic on my belief that garlic is tasty. I also judge that the fact that the soup is tasty is a reason to eat the soup. This fits with the looseness with which ordinary speakers attribute reasons. Clearly, though, this had better not mean that I assign separate weights to each of these facts (that it has garlic and that it is tasty) and then add these up when deciding what to do. For that clearly would be to “double-count” the relevant consideration. At this stage of the dialectic, it is important to recall the more general semantic theory of the locution ‘reason to’ developed in chapter 1. On that account, to count some fact as a reason in favor of some response, quite generally, is to judge that the fact in question explains why any standard of a contextually specified sort would assign positive weight to that response. A virtue of a theory with this structure is that it does not entail this sort of naïve additivity. For many facts can explain why an action promotes a given end to a given degree, and thereby count as reasons, without each of those reasons adding any normative weight over and above that which is added by the end in question. In the culinary example from the preceding paragraph, the fact about garlic explains why any suitable standard would assign positive weight to my eating the suit but this does not mean that the fact about garlic itself brings additional positive weight of its own to the table - beyond that provided by the tastiness of the

28 See Frankfurt 1988.

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soup. The standard fixes how much weight is assigned, but different facts might explain why it does so.

In spite of these objections, Gibbard is on to something importantly right. In general, to accept a normative standard is to have a certain sort of linguistically infused motivational profile. In the case of standards assigning positive weight to actions on the basis of their feature, the motivational profile is to be understood along the lines of Gibbard’s computational model. To avoid problems arising out of alienation, we must simply add what Gibbard himself added in his previous work – the distinction between accepting a norm (or standard) and being in its grip. I have already explained how the semantic framework from chapter 1 provides the right kind of indirection to avoid the objection from double-counting. This completes my initial characterization of normative judgments. Note that normative judgments are relational states, and are massively multiply realizable. For speakers might make a given normative judgment by having any of an indefinite range of normative perspectives, and the content of the representational state which also partly constitutes the judgment will be a function of the content of the perspective. This, though, only characterizes Ecumenical Expressivism as a view in the philosophy of mind. To be complete, though, Ecumenical Expressivism also needs to take on commitments in the philosophy of language. I turn to this in the following sections.

5. Pragmatics, Semantics and Meta-Semantics. Ecumenical Expressivism is, in part, a theory of the meanings of normative claims. However, the theory of meanings in natural language has three important subdivisions. First, there is pragmatics, which very broadly concerns aspects of meaning not part of strict and literal meaning. The theory of speech-acts, of irony and metaphor, of speaker meaning in Grice’s sense are all part of pragmatics. Second, there is first-order semantic theory, which aims to provide a systematic characterization of the literal meanings (or “contents”) of words and sentences. The content of a sentence might be understood as a truth-condition, or (more plausibly) as a proposition.29 The key challenge for semantics so understood is to provide a theory which is compact and recursive. This is essential in order to explain how semantic values are compositional, and compositionality is generally taken to be the key to explaining how finite creatures like ourselves can understand and competently produce indefinitely many well formed sentences. Semantic theory usually takes the form of a theory of interpretation, which allows us to go from messy sentences of natural language, which are rife with ambiguity (both semantic and syntactic), context-sensitivity, ellipses, and the like to a more well behaved language which can be understood as obeying some well defined logic. We then use a meta-language to assign referents to singular terms and extensions (or functions from contexts of utterance to extensions) to predicates, and combine this with a theory of logical/grammatical form, and do so in a way that allows the theorist to derive the propositional content of any arbitrary sentence from the semantic values 29 There are other ways of understanding semantics, including so-called “dynamic semantics,” but I will focus on the more orthodox interpretation here to keep things relatively simple.

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of its parts and the way they are arranged. The theory then adds a theory of “force” to explain how non-declarative sentences have their meanings. Third, there is meta-semantics.30 Whereas semantic theory provides an abstract model of the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences in a language, meta-semantic theory explains in virtue of what they have the meanings they do. Lewis draws a similar distinction, albeit not in these terms (Lewis 1970: 19). What I am calling “meta-semantics also sometimes goes under the heading of the “foundational theory of meaning.”31 First-order semantic theory takes such notions as ‘denotation’ and ‘extensions’ as theoretical primitives, and does not say anything about how terms get their denotations or extensions. Nor, for that matter, does first-order semantics as such tell us anything about the nature of the propositions which figure so prominently in their interpretations of natural language sentences. A meta-semantic theory provides a deeper account of these notions. A plausible meta-semantic theory should also explain how literal meanings supervene on linguistic conventions, and should yield a plausible account of how semantic competence is possible for creatures like us. Of these three, it is most clear that expressivism is not a theory in pragmatics. For if that were all that expressivism had to add to the theory of meaning then it would be compatible with a fully representational theory of meaning qua literal content. The whole point of going expressivist, though, was to avoid the problems inherent in a representationalist approach – reversing the representationalist order of explanation just is the “expressivist gambit” (in section 1).32 Indeed, we saw in chapter 3 that paradigm cognitivist views can allow that normative claims pragmatically function to express non-cognitive attitudes. So the key question is whether expressivism is best understood as a view in first-order semantics or meta-semantics. Both expressivists and their critics have often not been clear about this. Allan Gibbard, for example, typically locates his view with remarks like the following:

The term ‘expressivism’ I mean to cover any account of meanings that follows this indirect path: to explain the meaning of a term, explain what states of mind the term can be used to express. (Gibbard 2003: 7)

The problem with this sort of gloss is that we can understand both semantics and meta-semantics as explaining the meanings of terms, albeit in very different ways. The former does so by providing a systematic interpretation of the terms and

30 The phrase ‘meta-semantics’ is sometimes used in a different sense from the one I use here, but I find the label very apt here, and so stick with it all the same. 31 See Speaks 2011. 32 Indeed, expressivists are sometimes accused of committing something its opponents call “the pragmatic fallacy.” The charge is that expressivists have inferred a semantic conclusion (that the meanings of normative claims are somehow constituted by pro-attitudes) from a pragmatic phenomena which applies only in the case of atomic judgments, namely that such judgments are characteristically used to express attitudes and influence behaviour. See Kalderon 2005: chapter 2. See also Searle 1969: 136-141. I hope the text makes clear that, whatever other vices my theory may have, it is not guilty of this sin. I suspect that Kalderon’s critique seems as forceful as it does because expressivists have not paid sufficient heed to the distinction between semantics and meta-semantics.

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sentences of the language in a meta-language, while the latter provides a deeper explanation of that in virtue of what they have the meanings they do. Mark Schroeder is much clearer. He characterizes expressivism as a view in first-order semantics, albeit one which takes on some controversial commitments in meta-semantics. On Schroeder’s view, the expressivist provides a semantic interpretation of normative sentences, but does not understand these as propositions or truth-conditions. Instead, Schoeder suggests expressivists should understand semantics as assigning mental states as the contents of normative sentences (see Schroeder 2008a: 33). This characterization of expressivism is tempting, and fits with many things expressivists say. However, it is not without costs. Schroeder himself is quick to point out that this unorthodox conception of first-order semantics means that expressivists must abandon the more orthodox and broadly truth-conditional approach to semantics to which I briefly alluded before. Insofar as this is the dominant paradigm in modern linguists, this has the philosophers telling the scientists how to do their job. The track record of philosophers’ second guessing science is not encouraging. Here is Schroeder raising this worry:

This is why noncognitivism is such a significant view in the philosophy of language. It is a major departure from the Very Big Idea of truth-conditional theories of meaning. The difference between the idea that meaning can and should be explained by what words are about and what makes sentences true, on the one hand, and the non-cognitivist idea that meaning cannot be so explained, is a very important difference to understand. (Schroeder 2010: 30)

Lest the force of this be unclear, he elaborates on why this “Very Big Idea” is so important:

On the minus side, the departure from truth-conditional semantics also means a departure from all the great successes of truth-conditional semantics at accommodating the compositional constraint and at explaining the semantic properties of complex sentences.” (Schroeder 2010: 210)

Fortunately, we do not have to understand expressivism in this way. In my view, expressivism (including my Ecumenical Expressivism), is best understood in the first instance as a view in meta-semantics. Moreover it is a meta-semantic view which is compatible with a broadly truth-conditional approach to first-order semantics. As I explain below, Ecumenical Expressivism can, when combined with a suitable theory of propositions, explain why and in what sense normative sentences express normative propositions. Since the idea of a propositional content is at the heart of the modern truth-conditional approach to semantics, this provides grounds for some optimism about the compatibility of expressivism with the truth-conditional approach. As I shall later argue (in chapter 7), Ecumenical Expressivism can also make good sense of the idea that normative claims are truth-apt and of talk of the extensions of normative predicates. It follows from the account developed here that speakers who understand normative claims and who are competent with the truth predicate will thereby implicitly grasp

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the truth conditions of normative claims. Crucially, though, they will thereby grasp the truth-conditions only in a very weak and deflated sense. That is, they will thereby know only such platitudes as that ‘abortion is morally wrong’ is true if and only if abortion is morally wrong. They will not thereby be in a position to articulate in naturalistic or descriptive terms the conditions under which such claims are true. That is as it should be. Mere semantic competence with, e.g., the term ‘morally wrong’ should not require a view about how one should live one’s life, much less a fully comprehensive and correct view of such profound matters.33 Nor do partisans of truth-conditional semantics disagree. After all, those who actually practice first-order semantic theory do not try to analyze normative predicates in non-normative or naturalistic terms. They simply provide a way of interpreting those sentences in a language which is free of ambiguity, context-sensitivity, ellipses and the like. Such theorists are happy to rest easy with claims like “the propositional content of ‘abortion is morally wrong’ is that whatever is denoted by ‘abortion’ falls within the extension of the predicate ‘is morally wrong’. Moreover, broadly truth-conditional theories are compatible with a variety of views about what constitutes the meaning of the truth predicate. Of particular relevance to the views defended here, truth-conditional theories are compatible with the idea that judgments about the truth conditions of a given claim might themselves be at least partly constituted by practical attitudes of some kind – states of mind with the “direction of fit” of desire, as it is sometimes put more on this notion in later chapters. I defend just such a view in chapter 7, but I take this view to be perfectly compatible with what is plausible and insightful in a truth-conditional theory of meaning. Because it takes ‘truth’ (like ‘extension’ and ‘denotation’) as a theoretical primitive, truth-conditional semantics is also compatible with a fully “deflationist” conception of truth talk. Modern expressivists have typically defended such views of truth talk and used them to explain how their views are compatible with the legitimacy of talk of normative truth. I explain how deflationist should be understood and how it might be deployed by expressivists if sound in chapter 7. The logical space I am exploring is sometimes obscured by the failure to see expressivism as a view in meta-semantics, or a failure even to draw the distinction between semantics and meta-semantics. The sort of view I have in mind is also sometimes obscured because the truth-conditional theory of meaning is (implicitly) lumped together with an ambitiously reductionist form of representationalism in meta-semantics. These two views can and should be sharply distinguished, though. Indeed, part of the attraction of the truth-conditional approach to first-order semantics is its flexibility – which in turn is a function of how it tries to deliver so much from so little in the way of deeper theoretical commitments. Schroeder argues that expressivism is incompatible with truth-conditional semantics, but not because it cannot make sense of talk of normative truth, or indeed of talk of normative propositions. His objection is that expressivism prevents the idea of truth from doing serious explanatory work in the theory of meaning, but truth-conditional semantics entails that the notion of truth does do such work. (see Schroeder 2010: 107-108)

33 Compare Silk forthcoming.

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There are two problems with this argument. First, it is actually not at all obvious that the notion of truth really does do a lot of work in truth-conditional semantics, the label notwithstanding. For the real theoretical “heavy lifting” in truth-conditional semantics is done by the theory of interpretation, which takes us from the messy natural language sentences to more well behaved sentences. In Donald Davidson’s influential version of truth-conditional semantics, for example, the theory of interpretation requires such robust norms as the requirement that the language used to interpret the sentences obeys first-order logic and the requirement that our interpretations are informed by a robust dose of charity. Once we have these interpretations of the original sentences, we only need the truth predicate as a sort of grammatical device of the sort so-called deflationists about truth have defended. This point has been argued at length in an important paper by Michael Williams:

In specifying the meanings of sentences in another speaker’s idiolect, we associate his sentences with sentences of our own. In doing so, we make use of the truth predicate, which is what lends color to the idea that Davidson explains meaning in terms of truth conditions. But the use of ‘true’ in a Davidsonian meaning specification for a particular speaker is expressive, not explanatory…The appeal to truth in a Davidsonian theory of meaning is not explanatory. (Williams 1999: 557)

Second, Schroeder’s argument presupposes that the expressivist must deploy a deflationist notion of truth. That seems to be the only basis for the claim that expressivism entails that truth cannot do serious work in the theory of meaning. However, there is an important sense in which Ecumenical Expressivism does not understand truth in deflationist way. In fact, in a sense, the theory turns out, rather surprisingly, to be compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth, and one on which truth might well still do a great deal of explanatory work in both semantics and the theory of representational content more generally, for all I shall say here. However, an explanation of how the theory on offer avoids a commitment to deflationism about the truth predicate must await chapter 7. So Ecumenical Expressivism is, in its commitments in the philosophy of language, a meta-semantic view. What meta-semantic thesis does it advance? It maintains that the normative claims have the meanings they do in virtue of their expressing normative judgments, where normative judgments in turn are understood as not being representational beliefs, but instead the sort of deflationist beliefs I have articulated in the preceding section. This characterization, though, immediately screams out for a clarification of (a) what it is for a claim to express a state of mind, and (b) how the expression of a state of mind, so understood, explains the meaning of the claim which expresses it. I turn to these important questions in the following section.

6. Ideationalism and Normative Propositions. The most natural home for an expressivist theory is in a broader meta-semantic framework I call “ideationalism.” Ideationalism, as I understand it, maintains that facts about the semantic contents of meaningful items in natural languages are constituted by facts about how those items are conventionally used to express corresponding states of mind. Rather, that is the thesis insofar as it applies to

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linguistic tokens. As it applies to linguistic types ideationalism instead asserts that facts about semantic content constituted by facts about how linguistic conventions specify functions for those types from contexts of utterance to states of mind expressed.34 Ideationalism has its roots in the work of John Locke, but in the twentieth century, the ideationalist tradition was considerably enriched by the work of H.P. Grice. Grice distinguished “speaker meaning,” on the one hand, from “word meaning” and “sentence meaning” on the other. What a speaker means by a given word on a given occasion of use is determined by that speaker’s intentions at the time of utterance. For example, Shaft’s intention in using the word ‘grass’ might determine that by ‘grass’ he means marijuana rather than the stuff found on lawns. Grice’s idea was to explain word meaning in terms of speaker meaning. The meaning of words and sentences is determined by what they are conventionally used by speakers to mean.

Speaker meaning, in turn, was understood by Grice in terms of a speaker’s intention to get his audience to respond in a certain way by getting them to recognize that very intention. So, for example, the sentence, “Grass is green” means that grass is green. Why? Because it is conventional for speakers to use that sentence with the intention of getting their audience to believe that grass is green in virtue of their recognition of that very intention.35 Here is a nice statement of how this is all supposed to work:

To see the idea as initially outlined in Grice's 1957 article, “Meaning,” imagine you are stopped at night at an intersection, when the driver in an oncoming car flashes her lights. You reason as follows: “Why is she doing that? Oh, she must intend me to believe that my lights are not on. If she has that intention, it must be that my lights are not on. So, they are not.” (Grandy and Warner (2006): section 4)

One problem for Grice’s version if ideationalism is that some sentences are characteristically uttered with no audience at all, or at any rate with no audience to whom we intend to convey our intentions. Most obviously, people talk to themselves. People also talk to young babies and animals with no intention of getting them to recognize their own intention to get them to respond in the right way. Lovers tell their beloved, “I love you,” without expecting that this will come as news. Fortunately, Grice’s audience-oriented approach is not essential to ideationalism. A more promising version of ideationalism simply drops the Gricean idea that the relevant intentions must be audience-oriented. This is the approach Wayne Davis takes in his detailed and impressive defense of his own version of ideationalism (Davis (2003)). On Davis’s account, the relevant intentions are intentions to indicate 34 I here assume that we can provide semantic values for sentence types and tokens simply because this makes the exposition of my theory much less clunky. The more orthodox view is that it is only types which have semantic value, but that semantic competence as such involves an ability to interpret any given token of a type with which one is competent, so long as one knows the relevant facts about the context of utterance. Everything I say here can be transposed into that idiom, with my account of the semantic values of sentence tokens transposed into an account of the interpretive skills of a competent speaker. Thanks to Mark Schroeder and Indrek Reiland for useful discussion here. 35 Arguably defining meaning specifically in terms of intentions, as opposed to goals or some such broader notion is too restrictive. For intentions may essentially involve confidence that one will succeed in one’s aims, and that may be too restrictive in this context. For discussion, see Armstrong 1971. Because these niceties about the details of the best version of ideationalism will not matter to my defense of the general approach or to the meta-normative theory I develop in the rest of the book, I shall here simply put them to one side.

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one’s state of mind, where indicating is glossed in terms of providing an evidential sign that one is in the relevant state of mind. Crucially, one can indicate a state of mind in the relevant sense without intending to convey anything to anyone, even oneself. Smoke indicates fire even if nobody is around to make the connection and would indicate fire even if there was no sentient life in the universe; indication in the intended sense is simply not an audience-dependent notion.

Davis develops a sophisticated theory of sentence meaning on the back of this conception of speaker meaning. The basic idea is that a word expresses an idea in a given language if and only if the use of that word is a conventional indication of that idea (Davis 2003: 203). Likewise a sentence expresses a thought in a given language if and only if the use of that sentence is a conventional indication of that thought – where a thought is a psychological state rather than a proposition which is the content of a thought in the psychological sense. On this account, competent speakers must simply learn how to use words (and smaller meaningful units) to express the associated ideas, and how to use grammatical structures in order to express more complex ideas in the right way. Analogously, competent speakers presumably must know how to interpret the speech of others in accordance with these same conventions. Given that the number of basic meaningful expressions and the number of grammatical structures in natural languages is finite, this need not be unrealistic. Given that these finite resources can generate indefinitely many novel sentences, this is also enough to explain the impressive range of novel sentences which competent speakers effortlessly produce and understand.

Ideationalism can also explain key semantic notions in non-semantic terms. Admittedly, ideationalism must use psychological terms, but those are not properly semantic, a point which I discuss in Appendix 4. There I address what I take to be the most important objections to ideationalism.

An interesting alternative is to Davis’s definition of ‘express’ is understand expression not in terms of what speakers conventionally intend to indicate or convey, but instead in terms of what states of mind they are accountable for having in virtue of making those claims. Accountability is then unpacked in terms of what linguistic conventions dictate about when speakers are appropriately held accountable for being in such states. Consider the following definition:

Accountability Expression: A declarative sentence ‘p’ in sense S in a natural language N used with assertive force in a context of utterance C expresses a state of mind M if and only if conventions which partially constitute N dictate that someone who says ‘p’ in sense S in C with assertive force is thereby liable for being in state M.36

The rough idea in the case of assertion would be that if I assert ‘p’ then I can be held accountable for believing that p. Accountability here is a purely conventional notion, though; talk of accountability in this sense is not normative in the sense in which I am offering an account of normative judgments. One advantage of this definition over Davis’s definition is that it fits well with the idea that semantic competence is a matter of being able to follow certain conventional rules. This might provide a theory with more generality, since in some cases the relevant rules might not actually be well understood in terms of a state of mind at all. 36 This proposal is similar to a proposal which Simon Blackburn proposes in Spreading the Word. See Blackburn 1984: 124-126. See also Schroeder 2008: chapter 2 for a similar view.

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For example, perhaps all there is to understanding the meaning of ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ is understanding that it is a rule of the language that one is to utter them only upon meeting someone or departing from them, respectively. We could try to gloss the meanings of these words in terms of expressing something like a warm fellow-feeling of regard, but this would be strained. After all, it does not make any obvious sense to ask, “He greeted him, but did he really mean it?” in the way such questions do make sense when one’s utterance characteristically expresses a state of mind. For example, we can wonder whether someone who thanked me really felt gratitude, or whether someone who asserted that p really believed it.37 Another advantage of defining expression in this way is that it is not committed to the ubiquity of semantic intentions to indicate one’s state of mind when speaking. Some people find this commitment of a more Gricean ideationalism implausible, though it does not strike me as anything like decisive. After all, the relevant intentions can be implicit, and their psychological reality might only consist in the fact that people would rationally reconstruct their speech-acts in a way that invoked such intentions if pressed in the right ways. Still, an account couched in terms of being accountable for being in the relevant state of mind does not posit such ubiquitous semantic intentions. It is enough that (a) speakers follow the rule by being in the habit of asserting that p only if they believe that p, and such a habit (cases of deception as overriding it notwithstanding) are surely psychologically realistic enough, and that (b) enough speakers in the community are disposed to sanction those who violate the rule, presumably with charges of insincerity or semantic confusion depending on the details of the case. For my broader theoretical purposes, either of these two versions of ideationalism – the one defended by Davis and the one defined in terms of accountability above – would be perfectly sufficient. Moreover, I do not at this stage have a strong view about which is more plausible. If forced to choose, I slightly prefer the accountability approach. So let the accountability approach be taken as the canonical framework for Ecumenical Expressivism, but those who prefer an approach like Davis’s are free to interpret it in that way instead.

I have said that ideationalism is the most natural home for Ecumenical Expressivism, but there are ways of transposing the main ideas of Ecumenical Expressivism into an impressively wide range of other meta-semantic frameworks. The key commitment is that the theory in some sense explains the meanings of sentences in terms of a state of mind with which it is systematically associated. There are interesting and plausible meta-semantic theories which do this, but which are quite different from the sorts of theories I have laid out here. In Appendix 5 I explore how Ecumenical Expressivism can, with a few modifications, be transposed into those frameworks. So those sceptical of ideationalism should not therefore lose interest in Ecumenical Expressivism.

So we now have a framework which maintains that meaning (qua semantic content) is explained by state of mind expressed, and we have some idea of what it is for a state of mind to be expressed by a sentence. The remaining question is just how the fact that a sentence expresses a given state of mind (in either of the senses just laid out) explains that sentence’s having the semantic content it does.

37 The contrast between greetings and sincerity-apt discourse is not original. It was noted e.g. by Searle. See Searle 1969: 65.

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Suppose we understand semantic contents as propositions – a fairly orthodox view. The first question, then, is how the state of mind expressed by a sentence explains why it in some sense expresses the relevant proposition. This is only the first question, because we will then need an account of how semantic contents can be built up compositionally. This will require some account of the how singular terms get their denotations and how predicates get their extensions. We will also need some account of how the truth predicate works, such that we can meaningfully speak of the truth conditions of these propositions. These further questions must await chapter 7, where I explain how Ecumenical Expressivism can more flexibly make sense of truth discourse than its Non-Ecumenical rivals. For now, I simply explain in what sense the state of mind expressed by a sentence explains it expressing the proposition it does, and hence to that extent explains its semantic content.

Actually, we here must carefully mark the distinction between sentence types and sentence tokens. Sentence types get their meaning in virtue of there being a systematic function from contexts of utterance to a state of mind expressed. Sentence tokens get their meaning in virtue of the state of mind they actually express, full stop – insofar as they do express a determinate state of mind, that is. The account on offer is compatible with semantic indeterminacy in particular cases.38 The point, then, is that once we have an account of how the expression of a state of mind by a sentence token can explain in what sense it expresses a corresponding proposition, we will be in a position to explain the meanings of sentence types as well. Rather, so long as our ideationalism is rich enough to provide a conventional function from contexts of utterance to states of mind expressed, we will be able to extend the theory in this way. One answer not available at this stage would be to begin with propositions understood roughly as Russell and Frege understood them – as abstract entities which intrinsically represent the world as being a certain way. While this answer is available to some ideationalists, it is not available to any form of ideationalism compatible with Ecumenical Expressivism. For once we understand propositions in this way, there is no reason such a proposition could not figure as the content of a robustly representational belief, and such a belief presumably would be a normative belief. In short, such a conception of the normative proposition would lead very quickly into a form of representationalism, and hence to meta-normative cognitivism.

I find Scott Soames’ treatment of propositions congenial in this context (see Soames 2010 and Soames forthcoming). I here put to one side the view that propositions are just sets of possible worlds, as that view has a notoriously hard time with necessary

38 In distinguishing the meaning of sentence types from sentence tokens, I here have in mind only sentence tokens uttered by a speaker who is performing a speech-act with that very sentence. Cases in which a speaker merely mentions a sentence (quoting it, or referring to it by name, say), or in which a computer mindlessly generates meaningful natural language sentences are not ones in which there is a useful contrast to be drawn between the meaning of the sentence type and the meaning of the sentence tokens. For those kinds of tokens, we should understand talk of their meaning as simply talk of the semantic value of the type of which they are a token, since such tokens are also not meaningless. These kinds of considerations lead some theorists to assign semantic value only to sentence types, but to insist that semantic competence requires the capacity to move from a context of utterance to a specific interpretation. Ultimately the distinction between that approach and my approach in the text strikes me as nothing more than notational, and I find talk of the meanings of tokens eases the exposition in the text, since my focus here is on specifically normative uses of context-sensitive words like ‘ought’, ‘good’, and the rest, not all of whose uses are normative on my account. Constantly framing the discussion in terms of types interpreted qua normative is simply more cumbersome than taking tokens to also be meaningful. Thanks to Matthew Chrisman for useful discussion here.

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and contradictory propositions. A more tempting view is the Fregean one which understands propositions as structured abstract entities. Soames argues against traditional Fregean conceptions of propositions as abstract, formal entities which have their representational content intrinsically. Soames convincingly argues that nothing can have content intrinsically. Instead, it is only acts of interpretation that can give a formal structure any meaning whatsoever (Soames 2010: chapter 2). So if propositions had to be the sorts of things Frege and Russell thought they were, then we should not believe in propositions. However, there are familiar reasons (reviewed and endorsed by Soames) for thinking that semantic theory cannot do without propositions in some sense, and that an austerely truth-conditional approach like Davidson’s is not defensible. This is because truth-conditions as such do not encode structures. The basic point was made by J.A. Foster in the 1970s, who pointed out that Davidson’s constraints could not rule out deviant characterizations of the meaning axioms. He gave the example,”‘El libro es verde’ is true in Ls iff the book is green and first-order arithmetic is incomplete.” (Foster 1976) Such an axiom seems to satisfy Davidson’s austerely truth-conditional constraints for providing an adequate characterization of what is involved in grasping a sentence like ‘El libro es verde’. Neither, though, will a purely deflationary account of talk of propositions do. On a deflationist conception, talk of propositions is talk of structured complexes which encode the needed semantic content in the right way. Deflationist propositions thus avoid the problem poised for austerely truth-conditional theories. However, deflationist propositions are not here understood a la Frege and Russell. On a deflationist view, propositions are theoretical constructs used to track our thoughts. These constructs have truth-conditions, but they are not intrinsic. Instead they are bestowed by us from a kind of convention (Soames 2010: 94). Thus the deflationist approach is also meant to avoid the main worry raised by Soames for Fregean conceptions. Soames suggests that this makes propositions into nothing more than useful fictions. He brings this out by reminding us that ordinary speakers themselves have thoughts about propositions, as when I judge that it is false that the ball as red. This, though, does not sit well with the idea that propositions are simply theoretical constructs:

The theory’s motivating idea is that propositions are constructions used by theorists to model the structure of agent’s acts of predication. However, since the acts being modeled include those in which properties are predicated of propositions, it would seem that propositions must be part of the reality being modeled, rather than merely components of the model. This challenges the theory’s leading idea. Whether or not it refutes the theory may be contestable. However, it raises a serious doubt about it. (Soames 2010: 97-98)

I find myself both sympathetic to Soames’s worry but also inclined to agree that the worry is not decisive. Perhaps a deflationist can avoid the worry by providing some anti-realist construal of ordinary talk of propositions. However, I do not here have to settle this debate, since my own account could plausibly be combined with a deflationist construal of talk of propositions too (see chapter 7).

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Nonetheless, I am more tempted by Soames’s view. He argues that we should think of propositions as cognitive event types. So long as we are anyway committed to the type/token distinction on general metaphysical grounds, we should be willing to allow that for any token of entertaining that p, there is a corresponding type.39 So the proposition that p should be understood as the cognitive event type of entertaining that p. The proposal inverts the traditional order of explanation. On the orthodox view we inherit from Frege and Russell, we understand instances of thinking that p as deriving their representational content from bearing a relation to some suitable abstract/formal entity, call it a “proposition,” where propositions have their contents intrinsically. Soames argues that we should instead think of acts of thinking that p are more basic in the order of explanation, and that we can understand propositions as being types of the corresponding possible tokens. This view has many advantages. Unlike the Fregean approach, it does not commit us to abstract entities which can have their content intrinsically, independently of any act of interpretation or predication. Once propositions are understood as cognitive event types, we can understand their having truth-conditions derivatively, where this is parasitic on what would be involved in any possible instance of the relevant sort of predication. An event-type has its content in virtue of the fact that every conceivable instance of it is one in which an agent represents something as being a certain way (Soames forthcoming: 8). Indeed, to say a proposition has a given content just is to say that any possible instance of it has that content. Unlike an austerely truth-conditional approach like Davidson’s, we are not forced to do semantics with our hands tied behind our backs – that is, without recourse to structured entities of any kind to play the role of propositions and provide the needed fineness of grain in our theory of meaning. Nor do we run the risk of a deflationist approach of making propositions (and hence meanings) into merely useful fictions. The theory also provides a naturalistic account of our epistemic access to propositions (Soames forthcoming: 19) and can demystify the relationship that sentences bear to the propositions they express (Soames forthcoming: 20). Suppose this theory is right. It should not be hard to see how this would be congenial to the view defended here. For I have argued that we should continue to understand normative judgments as beliefs in a suitably broad sense of ‘belief’. Similarly, we should continue to understand instances of entertaining that p for a normative p as cognitive event types in a suitably broad sense of ‘cognitive event types’. I explain

39 An important complication here is what we should say about types which have no actual tokens. Soames himself has interesting things to say about this, and it is obviously crucial to the tenability of his theory since there will be more propositions than actual thoughts. However, it would be too much of a digression here for me to go into the details of his discussion of this nuance. See Soames forthcoming: 16-17. The key move there is that sometimes predications can be true of things even though the things in question do not actually exist. The predicates ‘is dead’, ‘is referred to by me’ and ‘is admired by me’ can all be true even though that of which they are predicated does not exist. Similarly, Soames suggests, propositions qua cognitive event types with no actual tokens, can correctly predicated as true even when they do not actually exist. In such contexts, we must understand ourselves as quantifying over the merely possible. I would add that it is also not obvious anyway that a type exists in a world only if it has tokens in that world.

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merely entertaining a normative proposition in terms of a merely simulated normative perspective paired with the corresponding thought. Once all of this is accepted, though, we can have normative propositions in precisely Soames’s sense. For once we allow that thinking that abortion is morally wrong is a cognitive event, we can plausibly infer that there is a corresponding cognitive event type, and so on for all such normative thoughts. In chapter 7 I explain how we can make sense of talk of the truth of normative propositions. This does, of course, draw on the idea that propositions are multiply realizable. That, though, is just a feature of Soames’s view anyway, given any plausible view in the philosophy of mind. For plausibly, thinking that p, for any ‘p’, will be multiply realizable. The sort of multiple realizability on offer here is different from the kind that Soames’s theory as such implies. For now we have multiple realizability not only at the level of, say, neurophysiology, but at the level of further content-bearing attitudes (normative stances and corresponding beliefs) which themselves constitute the judgment in question. That, though, is just a feature of my view when combined with Soames’s conception and not itself an objection to it. Moreover, Soames himself is happy that his theory provides a more fine-grained way of typing propositions than one finds in the Fregean tradition. He is happy, for example, with irreducibly indexical propositions as a consequence of this framework. So my extension is broadly in the spirit of the project. Now return to the idea that Ecumenical Expressivism explains how normative claims get their semantic values. If we think of giving the semantic content of a claim as articulating the proposition it expresses in some privileged language, then my modified version of Soames’s view makes sense of what such propositions could be, given Ecumenical Expressivism. Nor does it presuppose that such propositions can figure as the objects of robustly representational beliefs. Indeed, given that such propositions are types of corresponding hybrid states, it will follow that they cannot be the objects of robustly representational beliefs. So the view remains a form of non-cognitivism in my sense even though it quantifies over normative propositions. We are now in a position to see in what sense the relevant propositions being expressed by token normative claims is explained by an ideationalist meta-semantics. For we can now simply hold that what it is for a proposition p to be expressed by a claim in a context of utterance is for that claim to express the thought that p, where the proposition that p just is the cognitive event type of thinking that p. We then combine this with a theory of how the linguistic conventions provide a function from contexts of utterance to states of mind for any given sentence of the language and we get a fully general and recursive meta-semantic account of how each claim gets its propositional content. We do so, moreover, in a way that is, for all that has been said so far, entirely compatible with the orthodox formal approaches to first-order semantics in linguistics. In order fully to vindicate this compatibility thesis I will need to explain how the theory on offer makes sense of talk of truth as well as the other key semantic idioms (in chapter 7). For now I review some of the attractions of the basic approach. 7. Advantages of Ecumenical Expressivism

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An obvious advantage of Ecumenical Expressivism, which it shares with Non-Ecumenical Expressivism, is its ontological economy. Unlike anti-reductive forms of realism, Ecumenical Expressivism is clearly compatible with a robustly naturalistic world view. Other advantages come into view when we revisit the three discontinuities from chapter 2. Ecumenical Expressivism can easily explain why normative judgment is affect-implicating, a feature eluding many of its rivals. For according to Ecumenical Expressivism, normative judgment as such is partly constituted by a normative perspective, which by definition are stable. I have argued that for human beings, at least, we paradigmatically achieve this level of stability by having emotionally tinged self-governing policies. We are far too easily prone to temptation, rationalization, and the sorts of structural problems involving repeated decisions each of which makes only a negligible difference (think again of the smoking example) to get by through a “sheer act of will.” We need the right sorts of emotional accompaniments for our normative perspectives to be stable enough to count as such. Ecumenical Expressivism is equally well suited to accommodate the way in which normative judgment is action-guiding. On the proposed account, normative judgment is partly constituted by a normative perspective, where normative perspectives in turn are constituted by practical commitments (roughly, intentions) and aspirations. Since intentions and aspirations are obviously action-guiding, there need be no mystery about how normative judgment as such is action-guiding, even given a broadly Humean philosophy of mind. I shall later explain how the approach, when combined with my theory of rationality, can also vindicate the idea that failing to do what one judges (in the first person) one must do is irrational (see chapter 8). Finally, Ecumenical Expressivism is well placed to explain the ubiquity of fundamental normative disagreement. Insofar as normative judgments are partly constituted by desire-like states of mind, including one’s emotions and intentions, it should not be terribly surprising that there would be such fundamental disagreement. For both genetic differences and differences in how people are raised can explain differences in character, emotional constitution, tastes, preferences, and the like. At least, it is easy to see why there will be differences of this sort. A vindication of the suggestion that these differences constitute disagreements must await my account of normative disagreement as “disagreement in prescription” (in chapter 6). I also still must explain why my account can make sense of talk of truth and falsity in a way that connects that talk in the right ways to talk of agreement and disagreement (see chapter 7). For this is one of the main advantages of my approach over the best forms of Ecumenical Cognitivism. Conclusion In this chapter I have laid out the main ideas of Ecumenical Expressivism. With this skeletal initial presentation of Ecumenical Expressivism on the table, I am now ready to fill out the details of the account and discuss some critical challenges it faces.

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