TITO MAGRI

LECTURE NOTES 2013

THE SEMANTICS OF EXPRESSIVISM

The most developed program, in the area of the semantic conditions for moral inference

and reasoning, is that of the different forms of Expressivism. We have discussed Expressivism as

a kind (possibly the most articulated and refined one) of moral anti-realism. I mentioned, the

problems that arise for Expressivism in relation to the semantic and inferential relations of

expressively understood moral claims. Now the moment has come for discussing these matters,

since contemporary Expressivism has done a lot of work to ground the possibility of moral

reasoning on an appropriate conception of content.1

The general problem raised by moral reasoning is to identify, and to connect in the

appropriate way, the moral aspect of content that is preserved in inference and the formal

conditions that ensure its preservation. The notions of truth and validity provide an answer in the

theoretical case. The task is to find out whether counterpart notions can be found for moral

reasoning. Of course, all varieties of first-order moral realism are in position to predicate moral

claims of truth or falsity – after a minimalist fashion. But this is far from solving the problem. On

this view, truth and falsity of moral claims are first-order predicates that rely on the independent

availability of a conception of what is to rationally engage in first-order moral practice and

discourse. The philosophical program of contemporary Expressivism is to give an explanation of

the truth- and justification-aptness of moral claims that is itself thoroughly moral, that proceeds

by identifying in various ways, at all levels, conceptual, epistemological, metaphysical

conditions on moral thought and discourse with conditions on sound, good, rational morale

1 The contrast with Constructivism is, from this point of view, remarkable. It has to do with the different concerns and scope of the two families of theories, despite their common allegiance to first-order moral realism. Since I think that the problems faced by Expressivism generalize easily to any position that takes seriously (as Constructivism does) the non-reducibility of moral though, I think that it is a shortcoming of Constructivism that it fails to address this sort of questions. Contemporary philosophers working in the tradition of Intuitionism, of non naturalist cognitivist realism, are reluctant to admit that moral thought is sui generis and tend to concentrate on the structural features of (first-order) ethical theory. But this is not to say that they can evade the issue of moral content. Rather, they fall back on referentialism and factualism, thus losing sight of something essential about moral thought, its distinctive array of concepts or modes of presentation.

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practice - that are themselves not understood as the recognition of certain truths or facts. This

takes the general form of an account of what moral claims mean, of the meaning of the

predicates that allow forming judgments of a moral sort, and of their other semantic features in

terms of what is done, of the kind of action that is performed by means of such claims and in

terms of the mental states the subjects who engage in such actions. The proposed explanation is

pragmatic all the way down, the notion of claim being itself pragmatic: it is a sort of expressive

speech-act. What is expressed in a claim is a stance or commitment, and thus the expressing

itself is a kind of activity which involves a mental state of the agent. The task is thus incumbent

on Expressivism of explaining, starting from the resources offered by a non-conceptual

understanding of the mental stances underlying moral claims how these manage to behave like

ordinary descriptive claims and also their bearing on inference. The task (in Blackburn’s apt

phrasing) is that of «earning the right» to truth and to reasoning in connection with moral

discourse. This is a task that strictly arises only for Expressivism. It is doubtful how well

Expressivism can manage to perform it; but it is certainly a highly generative philosophical

program.

Embedding The central problem for Expressivism, in this regard, is the Problem of

Embedding. Let suppose, with Expressivism, that the content of a moral claim is a certain

function of what is done in making that claim. Let suppose, also, that the relevant speech-acts do

not already have content of a sort that grounds their correctness and inferential relations. Rather,

speech-acts have explanatory weights simply as doings that are ultimate either in their impulsive

experiential character or in their pragmatic-functional role. And their contents are not determined

as propositions but rather are a function of mental states.2 But a problem is raised by the (strictly

2 There is a complication here. Projection and Expression have a dual theoretical role in contemporary Expressivism, as arguments for the content-constituting function and as that function itself. They are part of the primitive, underlying, non-semantic moral engagement; they are, under this guise, an aspect of the attitudes or stances of the subjects. But Expression and Projection also stand for the inner structure of the function that takes from attitudes or stances to contents. This is a crucial, and very delicate, juncture of contemporary Expressivism - the (thin) interface between pragmatic grounds and semantic superstructures - that would require careful discussion. This said, I will take a much more simplistic approach, and take Projection and Expression only as features of the content-constituting function. That is, for an engagement or moral commitment to be projected or expressed is for it so to figure within a structured discourse or pattern of thinking as to come to respond normatively to objects and to stand in general inferential relations. On this understanding, Embedding (and the difficulties it raises) is neither accessory nor subsequent to Projection or Expression, but forms, rather, their core.

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and strongly) pragmatic and mentalist character of this account. If moral content is completely

determined by the pragmatic significance of certain doings (claiming something, endorsing

something), it is not clear how we are to account for embedded moral contents that are

pragmatically neutral. If there is nothing more to moral content than what is provided by this

derivation from the pragmatic force of an episode, more precisely, if moral content is, at its root

and in its essence, not content but linguistic practice and mental activity, then there is a difficulty

about non-assertive (generally, non-committive) contexts necessarily arises. But with this

difficulty goes that of establishing something like a «logic of attitudes».3 To see why a logic of

moral claims is difficult to obtain for Expressivism, we may concentrate on a presumptive form

of moral argument (that is, whose premises and conclusion ostensibly have moral import), one,

for instance, that has the appearance (and the rational allure) of modus ponens:

(1) One ought to honor his fatherIf one ought to honor his father, then one ought to honor his mother

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One ought to honor his mother

This seems to be a very good argument, one we should undoubtedly accept. That is, it

seems to be valid, so that, if the premises are true, so the conclusion is. But, now, we should raise

the question: Is this argument truly a case modus ponens? This is to ask whether it recommends

itself, as a step to take in reasoning, because and just because it exemplifies the scheme

(2) (p & (p → q)) → q

Modus ponens consists in a syntactic structure that, in turn, makes certain minimal

semantic demands on its components. Thus, for an argument to be recommendable as a valid

instance of modus ponens, it is required that, in (2), p occurs in the two premises with the same

meaning. But suppose that the meaning of p is given through an expressivist analysis, according

to which what is meaningful, and imparts meaning, is the making of the claim that p as this is

expressive of the actual mental states of the concerned subject. Now, the occurrence of p in the

second premise is embedded in the antecedent of a conditional. Thus, such occurrence cannot

count as the making a claim (what is claimed is the conditional, and this does not entail that the

antecedent is claimed). In effect, it does not at all count as an act, thus, a fortiori, as an act of

3 This apt phrase comes from B. Hale, Can there Be a Logic of Attitudes?, in Reality, Representation, and Projection, J. Haldane and C. Wright, edd., Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York, 1993. Of course, much the same difficulties are raised by other indirect contexts, like intentional ones.

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expressing an occurrent mental state. On the expressivist account, then, p does not have the same

meaning in its second as in its first occurrence (which, by contrast, amounts to a claim) in (2).

Possibly, in its second occurrence, p has no meaning at all, since the pragmatic, expressive

requirements for meaningfulness seem not to be met. The consequence of this seems to be that

(1), under an expressivist analysis of its components, is not, against all appearances, valid as an

instance of modus ponens. It fails for equivocation in the premises. This is the Problem of

Embedding, or the Frege-Geach Problem.4 The problem is easily generalized, for Expressivism,

to other inferential schemes, given only that they include embedded and non-embedded

occurrences of a proposition. So

(3) p----------------------

p v q

is not valid, under an expressivist account of the meaning of p, since to claim a disjunction is not

to claim any of the disjuncts. By contrast,

(4) p & q--------------------

p

is valid, since to claim or assert a conjunction is to claim or assert each of the conjoints. But, in

effect, given the connection between conditionals and implication, we can safely limit our

discussion to the case of modus ponens. An even more compelling theme would be that of

negation, since Expressivism meets serious difficulties in explaining how moral sentences which

are one the negation of the other – “Murder is wrong” and Murder is not wrong” – are

inconsistent the one with the other. And inconsistency is the key to logical consequence: a

sentence logically follows from others is its negation is inconsistent with the negation of their

4 The problem is discussed by P. Geach, who refers back to Frege’s distinction between sense and force, between grasping a thought and asserting it (or other kinds of commitment): “A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition”, “Assertion”, The Philosophical Review, 74, 1965, p. 449. My discussion is strictly limited to point out the contrast, in this regard, between Expressivism and the position I am advancing. For an insightful discussion, highlighting the difficulties of expressivist theories to explain the semantic and normative structure of moral reasoning, see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Expressivism and Embedding”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research”, 61, 2000, pp.

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conjunction. But I will not address here this issue.5 In general, unless something is done,

Expressivism cannot account for the validity of various inferential schemes and for the general

relation of logical consequence with reference to moral claims. But, on the other hand, it seems

that moral or prudential reasoning is a fact and that it cannot be divorced from standard, valid

inferential schemes, nor fail to instance the relation of logical consequence among its

constituents. Unless we accept that, by embracing Expressivism, we are deprived of any ground

to construct, and assess, arguments from, and for, moral authority, the Problem of Embedding

has to find a solution.

Two Approaches Contemporary Expressivism has dealt with this task along two, strictly

related but quite distinct, lines of argument. One consists in the program of framing a syntactic

structure for attitudes (Logic of Attitudes), the other focuses of the idea of a consistent set of

attitudes (Normative Logic). There are, obviously, common threads - besides the general

expressivist tenet. The prominent one is that, given the essential connection between validity

(necessary truth-preservation), logical consequence (the inconsistency of the set of premises and

the negation conclusion), and truth (which is involved in the definition of validity and logical

consequence), the task of providing for logical relations is inextricably linked with that of

explaining content. But the two programs diverge in interesting ways.6

The Problem of Embedding can be discussed from a fundamentally syntactical or from a

fundamentally semantical perspective. It can be seen as the problem of how Expressivism can

account for the patterns of relation among claims and contents that make possible appropriate (if

logicality is attained, valid) transitions of thought. Or it can be the problem of how Expressivism

can account for the normative property of claims whose preservation makes for the inferential

import of thought-transitions (in the logical case, validity). The problem can thus be viewed as

one of normative constraints on content that spring from inferential patterns, or as one of

normative inferential patterns that are made possible by properties of contents. On the first view,

the task is that of providing a non-truth-functional interpretation of logical connectives, so as to

extend correspondingly the scope of inferentially valid schemes, and thus make sense, without

5 See, for a magisterial discussion of expressivist negation and of all the semantics of Expressivism, M. Schroeder, Being For, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. 6 In what follows I take up and rearrange ideas and arguments from the theories proposed by Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard. For convenience of the reader, in the footnotes I make reference to their works (and to those of their critics) but I am not absolutely confident that they would acknowledge as their own everything I put forward and discuss here.

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assuming truth-aptness from the start, of context-invariant properties of content. On the second

view, the task is to show that pragmatically determined attitudes can stand in certain primitive,

non truth-functional, relations of content, that make sense in a uniform way of the conditions of

consistency of sets of norms, and thus give an interpretation to valid inferential transitions

among claims without cognitive import. Another, very recent approach is that of addressing both

the logical and the semantic issues from the standpoint of the requirements of the semantic of a

moral fragment of natural language; and of assessing from this standpoint whether there is a

mandatory interpretation of moral expression, inference, and attitudes. But I will not take this up

for discussion. 7

Layered Stances The program of a Logic of Attitudes is syntactically oriented (that is,

gives priority to the account of logical connectives and patterns of implication, rather than to

properties and relations of content) and, in a certain respect, more markedly pragmatic than the

alternative, normativity-oriented one. Its original move is that of turning apparently non-asserted,

embedded, occurrences of purportedly moral contents into asserted ones, into commitments to

those contents. This is obviously a pragmatic move.8 The idea is that the syntactic structure

underlying inferences from or to moral conclusions, reflects combinations of lower-level

attitudes (coming to expression in the inferential constituents) and of higher-level attitudes, taken

towards those combinations. More precisely, inferences of such a kind get their normative fabric

(and thus conditions for its validity, and for whatever force they can have) from the fact that

moral stances can be taken toward combinations of moral stances, a stance of acceptance or

refusal toward having them together. The latter stances, in turn, can consist (like the second

premise of (2), above) of narrower-scope combinations of stances and of related higher-level

attitudes, all the way down to individual, lowest-level, constituents. This nested, roughly

recursive, structure of first-order commitments comes to expression in the logical syntax of

inference from and to moral claims. To endorse or to reject having certain attitudes together is to

treat them in a way that expressively comes out as consistency and inconsistency. And if the set

of attitudes that occur as constituents in a certain pattern of commitments (some of them

involving the others) is consistent, then such a pattern licenses logically valid transitions among

them. This view may be supported by facts of our moral experience. It is a fact that moral stances

7 See Schroeder, Being For. 8 See Blackburn, Spreading the Word, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1984, p.195.

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and commitments tend to occur as more or less regular complexes, making for recognizable,

generative patterns of behavior and characters - what might be called sensibilities.9 It is also a

fact that, given the general functions of moral authority, attitudes taken toward sensibilities are

significant and important. Suppose such an attitude is taken against the sensibility that consists

in combining attitudes so as to disrupt a regularity of the kind exemplified in (2). The ground for

this could be the «clash of attitudes» that such sensibility comports, its being a «fractured

sensibility» that cannot fulfil the general purposes of practice nor a fortiori be invested of

authority. This would come to expression in normatively assessing such sensibility as if it

involved endorsing the premises and rejecting the conclusion of moral modus ponens. The blame

of being inconsistent in one’s moral or prudential commitments - a moral condemnation of a

particularly serious kind - would take us to reject as invalid a step of moral reasoning.10 This may

be held to provide non-cognitive, non truth-functional, counterparts to syntactical structures

permitting or forbidding propositional combinations and inferential transitions, that is, non truth-

functional counterparts to consistency (approval of a combination of attitudes) and to validity

(the inconsistency of approval of the premises and rejection of the conclusion).11

A Logic of Attitudes The logic corresponding to this view aims to specify of the rational

relations of moral claims by proceeding from the outside to the inside.12 Higher level, first-order

commitments form the syntax of the complexes of lower level attitudes that they take as their

objects and assign meaning to the connectives holding them together. With this structure in

place, the expression of attitudes is constrained by its taking place in the context of an activity of

framing and assessing moral arguments. Within this structured practice, and the roles and the

9 Blackburn, Spreading the Word, p.192.10 Blackburn, Spreading the Word, p.195. A clash of attitudes should be a very serious defect in sensibility, a sure object of disapproval, if it has to play a role like that of consistency of beliefs. It might not seem that having conflicting attitudes is per se such an awful thing: it could just raise a problem of choice. But if a conflict disrupted the possibility of practice, so that there would not be even a point in calling for a choice, it would be a seriously bad thing. Hale, “The Compleat Projectivist”, p.74, highlights the moral dimension of the projectivist account, by substituting clash of attitudes with a potential clash of attitudes and actions. 11 «What I have done here is to explain how conditionals can be regarded as ways of following out implications, although it is not imperative that the commitments whose implications they trace have ‘truth-conditions’», Blackburn, Spreading the Word, p.195.12 In the original presentation of quasi-realistic projectivism, the expressivist account of moral truth follows that of the logical syntax of moral-evaluative thinking we are now considering. See Blackburn, Spreading the Word, pp. 196-7.

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pressures it embodies, individual attitudes come to expression “as if they were judgments” and,

consequently, as if they advanced claims to justification and truth. This, of course, does not leave

unaffected their contents, rather confers to them the objectivity that amounts to (quasi-

realistically) “projecting” attitudes, so as to make sense of their appearing to respond to features

of the world, and of the standard, quasi-truth-conditional interpretation, of the relevant

predicates.13 A Logic of Attitudes is a part, rather than a consequence, of the general quasi-realist

program. If this pragmatic account of logical consequence were really successful, the Problem of

Embedding could be easily sidestepped. Ascription of content to moral claims, on this

expressivist proposal, takes place only modulo the higher-level, first-order pragmatic rendering

of inferential roles. In other words, the general kind of commitments, involving (inter alia) p,

that come to expression in (2), or in other potentially inferentially relevant contexts involving p,

contribute allover to the meaning of p. Therefore, there is no principled distinction between

pragmatically neutral and pragmatically committed occurrences. Rather, we have always to do

with commitments having different scopes and different, but interrelated, structures.

Determination of content, thus, can be uniform through asserted and non asserted contexts, just

because all contexts (governed by logical connectives) are, at some level, context of moral

commitment, and the determination of content for attitudes is governed from outside in, that is,

form higher to lower level. This seems to make available an expressivist explanation of meaning

that is uniform across syntactically and pragmatically different contexts, and that underpins

inferential relations among contents.14

Problems However, the program of a Logic of Attitudes is beset with serious problems.

The program can be developed in different ways. The main divide is that between replacing

logical constants (by giving a directly moral meaning to sentential complexes linked by

connectives, without relying on their truth-functional interpretation) and retaining them (and

giving an appropriate interpretation of attitudes embedded in sentential compounds constructed

13 Blackburn, Spreading the Word, p.195.14 This should (in part) answer to the worries about whether this kind of account really provides for identity of meaning that are expressed in N. Zangwill, “Moral Modus Ponens”, Ratio, 5, 1992, pp.188-90, although I also do not think that the expressivist account is ultimately successful. This approach is obviously a form of inferential role semantics (and faces the standard problems related to holism and indeterminateness). Under this more general guise, it is preserved also in the later developments of Blackburn’s approach. See Hale, “Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?”, p. 347.

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by means of ordinary connectives).15 Even bracketing all technical issues, the first alternative

(the one I have been following in my presentation), that puts higher-level attitudes directly into

the content of conditionals and syntactic compounds, seems to be confronted with a general

difficulty. It has been repeatedly observed that in this way moral arguments could not be

established as logically valid. A clash of attitudes, fracturing our sensibility, can be a moral

shortcoming, can defeat the governance of conduct and even the possibility of practice. But it

does not count as a logical fault. There can be merits in reasoning along the lines of moral modus

ponens, and demerits in not accepting its conclusion while embracing its premises. But they are

moral, not logical ones. Thus, moral modus ponens cannot be established as a logically valid

inference.16

On the alternative proposal, moral conditionals, or other compounds, result from

combining moral commitments (and also other attitudes, like beliefs) and embedding them in

complexes governed by ordinary logical connectives. Higher-level attitudes are not determinants

of the meaning of connectives, but are part of the explanation, or of the reason, for the shape of

one’s overall moral position, whose logical form is what should be made explicit.17 This task

consists in showing that the truth-functional meaning of connectives can be preserved, even

under an expressivist interpretation of the elements that they combine.18 This is attempted by

applying to all such compounds and inferential complexes (in normal form) the method of

tableaux, so as to make explicit their structure and follow their implications, and by proposing an

expressivist semantics for attitudes, so as to make available a notion of consistency that can be

applied in testing inferences for validity.19 (Thus, in the case of moral conditionals, one is “tied to

a tree”, to a disjunctive commitment, that is, to endorse one branch, if he cannot endorse the

other. This instructs about how to check consistency.) The main idea underlying the proposed

15 S. Blackburn, “Attitudes and Contents”, in S.Blackburn, Essays on Quasi-Realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York, 1993, pp.191,197. The two approaches are put forward, respectively, in Spreading the Word and in “Attitudes and Contents”. A convenient summary of Blackburn’s account can be found in Ruling Passions, pp. 69-73.16 See B. Hale, “The Compleat Projectivist”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 36, 1986, pp.73-4; G.F. Shueler, “Modus Ponens and Moral Realism”, Ethics, 98, 1988, pp. 495-496.17 Blackburn, “Attitudes and Contents”, pp.192-4.18 Blackburn is commendably firm about this: «Even if this provides a language that is formallt workable, it still need showing that it provides one which is interpretable - in which H!p [endorsement of p] can still be regarded as fundamentally expressive of attitude», “Attitudes and Contents”, p. 192.19 Blackburn, “Attitudes and Contents”, pp. 193-197.

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semantics, and rendering of the notion of consistency in attitudes, is following sets of attitudes

through their realization in possible situations, in order to test whether they can be jointly

satisfied.20 It is interesting to observe that, when it comes to characterizing the semantic

properties of commitments, their relation to the world, specified in terms of the situations that do,

or do not, count as realizing them, comes to the fore.21

However, it is fair to say that this second way of developing a Logic of Attitudes faces its

own difficulties. It is not at all clear that we can have the ordinary meaning of logical

connectives, satisfy the syntactical constraints they put on the validity of arguments, and give an

expressive meaning to the commitments that are their constituents. The aim of the Logic of

Attitudes, on this version of it, is to establish an internal link between the expressive

interpretation, the expressive content, of commitments, and an extension of the standard logical

behavior of connectives, in order to achieve a full and fundamental expressivist explanation of

the logicality of moral argument. But the constraints that the expressive interpretation of

commitments puts on the meanings of connectives drive such meanings away from the truth-

functional standard, which (by contrast) had to be retained, in order to make sense, in a standard

way, of the validity of moral inferences.22 The meaning of logical connectives and the nature of

inferential relations that articulate moral positions does not remain unaffected by the expressive

interpretation of the content of these latter (which is, to repeat, ultimately of a first-order,

pragmatic, character ). The Logic of Attitudes, on the alternative interpretations we have

considered, seems caught in an inescapable dilemma.23 If we recast moral arguments in terms of

standard propositional operators, linking commitments, the logicality of those arguments seems

20 «The broad idea is that we break open an original set by imagining the ideals realized ; if their realization [...] is impossible, then the original set was inconsistent», S. Blackburn, “Realism, Quasi, or Queasy?”, in Reality, Representation, and Projection, p. 380.21 «‘Realization’ gives a mapping from attitude to situation, enabling standard logic to get a foothold», Blackburn, “Realism, Quasi, or Queasy?”, p. 380.22 This is forcefully argued for in Hale, “Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?”, especially at pp.352-3 and note 27. Hale contends (on the proposal we are examining) that the disjunction-tree one is tied to by endorsing a conditional does not give (since the commitment is essentially disjunctive, does not distribute across the disjuncts) the standard meaning to the conditional, as required by modus ponens. But the non distributive interpretation is to be the only appropriate, if the meaning of the conditional compound is to be expressively understood. Only a disjunctive commitment, and not a disjunction of commitments, is a commitment in its turn; and only a commitment has the properties, as an attitude, that are required by Expressivism. Blackburn’s rejoinder in “Realism, quasi, or queasy?”, pp. 379-83 does not seem to take up exactly this issue. 23 See Blackburn (1992), p.950; Hale, “Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?”, p.339.

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to be easily established. But this would require abandoning the expressivist account of the

commitments that figure in moral compounds and arguments. On the other hand, if conditionals

and arguments are understood as expressive of dominant higher-level commitments, an

expressivist explanation of the relations among moral claims fares very well. But then it is not

clear how the logicality of arguments from and to moral claims can be vindicated.24

The Deeper Problem A substantive issue underlies the predicament of the Logic of

Attitudes. A logical representation of moral reasoning is required only in so far as moral thought

can display necessity and objectivity. Necessity and objectivity of thought both need and warrant

formal articulation. But the expressivist, pragmatic approach that we have just considered, just

seems to lack an appropriate conception of moral conceptual content. The fault is that of

proceeding from a primitive activity of engaging in, and expressing, attitudes, and then trying to

add structure (and content) to it, from the outside in, either by means of the apparatus of

sensibilities and higher-level attitudes or by attempting an extension of the truth-functional

connectives. Unless practice is itself conceptually constituted, counts as thought in its core, any

kind of engagement in, and any kind of expressing of, moral attitudes can result (by way of one

of above procedures) in some kind of Logic of Attitudes, in some system of moral inferential

patterns. This is not to say that commitments and engagements can be unconstrained and still

count as episodes of some kind of significant and important activity. But it is to say that

pragmatic constraints are not identical to semantic, conceptual connections that can only find

appropriate representations in patterns of logical consequence. Conversely, if moral significance

and importance are such as to determine normative conditions for logical consequence, then they

must already be implicitly conceived in terms of conceptual content, as properties of (objective

and necessary) moral thought. This may be possible. But, unless a way of providing such a

conception is at least outlined, the all too real danger is that of conflating pragmatic with

conceptual properties, and moral authority with the normativity of reasoning. This is what comes

out in the often repeated criticism that the Logic of Attitudes cannot explain the logical

24 This is the line of thought recommended by Hale. See his “Postscript”, in Reality, Representation, and Projection, p. 386: «My claim was that a satisfactory representation of the logical form of compounds with evaluative components, if it is to allow of an expressive interpretation, would have to treat them as involving a dominant attitudinal operator». This recommendation is in keeping with his option in favor of modest (“as if”) quasi-realism, as against the strong form of this position (that aims to distill from Expressivism a full-blown conception of truth).

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relationship among connectives as a reflection of an appropriate, internal relationship among

suitably conceived attitudes.25

We can also put the substantive issue in different terms, more directly related to the

semantic dimension of the program of a Logic of Attitudes. It is crucial to that program to gain

hold on a notion of consistency that does not presuppose the truth-aptness of the candidate items.

The leading idea is that the consistency of a set of commitments or attitudes can be understood as

the possibility of their joint realization. This idea is certainly on the right track, just because it

draws our attention from the subjective dimension of commitments or attitudes to the objective

one of the situations that realize them. But this clearly requires a previous understanding of what

is for something (some situation) to be the realization of an attitude or commitment. More in

particular, attitudes or commitments figure in Expressivism as essentially practical episodes, or

(so to say) intention-like, meaning by this that they consist in ways of deciding what to do and of

setting oneself to act: they can only be realized in action, and by what is done by acting, if they

are to find realization at all.26 Therefore, to grasp what is for an attitude or commitment to be

realized is, in the present context, to grasp what is for action to be realized, or to take place. This

is no simple matter. It is certainly one that cannot be settled simply by way of referring to some

fact or situation, since no such reference (nor any set of extensionally equivalent reference-

determining descriptions) allows to distinguish between a state of affairs realizing or fulfilling

action and its functionally extinguishing whatever motive one has to act. And it is certainly one

that cannot be settled without a previous determination of the content of action, with an

important role not only for considerations of intensionality, but, more demandingly, for

conceptual specifications of the appropriate, practical kind. In this regard, the program of a Logic

of Attitudes seems to put the chariot in front of the horse, insofar as it leaves undiscussed a

crucial dimension of moral content. This is not to say that one can do without an account of the

consistency and consequence of moral thought. But it is to say that such an account (and the

intelligibility of moral reasoning) cannot be grounded without an independent account of

concepts that support practical conditions of correctness and inferential forms. (We will see that

25 See Nicholas Unwin, “Quasi-Realism, Negation and the Frege-Geach Problem”, Philosophical Quarterly 50, 1999, (196), pp. 337-352; B. Hale, “Intuition and Reflection in Arithmetic”, 2003.26 See Schroeder, Being For, p. 84, for a clear statement of the idea that the mental states involved in the expressivist semantic are mandatorily of a practical sort.

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the alternative, norm-expressivist proposal faces a similar difficulty, since it helps itself as non-

problematic of the notion of realization of a plan.)

On a more positive note, it is common ground to both its proposers and critics that, if

there is to be any chance for a Logic of Attitudes, it lies in giving a more substantive

characterization of the contents of the relevant inferential transitions. The idea is that it is not by

interpreting what has logical form and stands into inferentially relations in purely propositional

terms, as contents abstracted from, or independent from, attitudes, that we can formulate the

relevant notions of consistency and validity. Quite the contrary, the structure and conditions of

correctness of moral reasoning can only be made intelligible on the ground of a view of moral

commitments that incorporates attitudes and contents into a unitary conception, one that draws,

ultimately, on the nature and normativity of mental states and on their responding to the world,

or making the world respond to them.27 This is a line of thought which picks up an important

theme from Expressivism: the priority of states of mind in the account both of content and of

inferential relations (putting into brackets the scope of such an account: whether it would have to

involve all sorts of discourse and in essentially the same ways – or not). The crucial difference,

or improvement, should be that states of mind would have to be understood and accounted for, in

their turn, in fully intentional and, since we are dealing with moral discourse, conceptual terms.

Furthermore, the conceptual character – content and mental articulation – of the relevant mental

states, those which are good candidate for explaining the meaning and inferential significance of

moral claims, should be inclusive of their practical import. This is a tall order, which requires,

inter alia, not ascribing content and attitude, sense and force, to radically different categories.

Norm-Expressivism and Normative Logic Similar considerations apply to the expressivist

program of Normative Logic. It is convenient, even without engaging in a proper exegesis, to

outline a development in Gibbard’s views. The thrust of this development, it could be said, goes

in the opposite direction to Blackburn’s, moving from a less to a more decidedly and explicitly

pragmatic grounding of the logic of moral reasoning. And there is this general difference

27 See Hale, “Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?”, pp. 353-4. See also Blackburn, “Realism, quasi, or queasy?”, p. 382: «The background to any such logic is not exactly the ‘Fregean’ universe of pure propositions. Assessing a set for consistency is conceived as imagining the commitments involved as belonging to a particular subject, and then working out whether such a subject contravenes logical norms». N. Zangwill, “Moral Modus Ponens”, pp. 182-7, suggests to revise the notion of the normativity of modus ponens along similar lines, and to pay due attention to the way attitudes, as well as contents, are involved in this issue.

13

between the two programs, that Blackburn’s ascribes a certain explanatory priority to syntactical

considerations (by proposing a non-truth-functional interpretation of connectives), while

Gibbard’s is more directly committed to revising and extending the concept of semantic content.

However, the similarities between the two programs are stronger than that, so that they can be

profitably discussed together.

In its first configuration, expressivist Normative Logic is principally engaged in

proposing a solution to the Problem of Embedding by extending the notion and the properties of

semantic content (in the first place, in regard of inferential relations) from the factual to the non-

factual realm, from descriptive to expressive claims. The starting point for this extension is

provided, reasonably enough, by a notion that is also fundamental for the expressive account of

normative meaning, that of a system of norms (according to Gibbard, the state of mind that

comes to expression in normative claims is that of accepting a system of norms). A system of

norms is a set of norms (rules, prescriptions, imperatives) with an internal structure that warrants

talking of their having force, and outweighing or overriding each other. Most important, a system

of norms has such a structure as to be possibly represented by the «end result» of the interactions

among individual norms, that is, a system of permissions and requirements, for actual or

hypothetical situations. This representation generates, in turn, a family of basic predicates, like

«N-permitted», «N-forbidden», «N-required», that have descriptive character and simply refer to

what is permitted (and so on) by a system N of norms. A system of norms is complete if, in any

relevant situation, it warrants application of one of such predicates. An incomplete system admits

different possible completions, that is, complete systems that preserve everything that it

definitely settles. The set of its completions characterizes an incomplete system.28

This characterization of the notion of a system of norms is, of course, required by the idea

that the state of mind whose expression constitutes normative meaning is itself normative, which

is a major thesis of norm-Expressivism – and of Expressivism in general. But it is at the same

time the basis for developing a representation of normative content. If this is true, there is an

internal link connecting the expressivist ground of normative meaning with its articulation into a

normative logic. A complete system of norms determines, for any situation it applies to, what is

the normative status it assigns to any option. If we pair a complete system n of general norms

with a completely determined way w the world is taken to be, we get the notion of a factual-

28 All this comes from Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, pp.86-9.

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normative world w,n: a complete description of states the world can be in and of how normative

predicates apply to those states. Given this idea of complete factual and normative

characterization, a normative judgment is warranted for any situation, since, for any such

judgment, it is a matter of logic whether it holds or not in a possible factual-normative world.

This can be maintained with perfect generality, since all systems of norms admit of completions

and can be represented in terms of sets of complete system of norms. (Under the appropriate

nomic and historical constraints, the factual description of a world can be made complete too.)

Thus, for any normative claim, its content can be understood and explained starting from the set

of all factual normative-worlds for which it holds, that is, the set of ways the world can possibly

be, and the set of complete systems of norms, that together warrant that claim. This is the content

that individuates and is endorsed in the states of mind which come to expression in making

normative claims. This explanation of content makes possible relations of consistency and

entailment among normative claims (consisting, respectively, in their having factual-normative

worlds in common and in one claim holding in all the factual-normative worlds in which another

holds), that can further be articulated in terms of the general, context-uniform, inferential roles of

normative (morally normative) predicates. The apparatus of factual-normative worlds is thus put

forward as providing a conception of content that is general enough to comprehend both factual

and non-factual states of mind and the corresponding claims in direct and embedded contexts.29

Problems This account of normative content and normative logic, however, seems to be

objectionable on various accounts. In the first place, just as it was the case with the Logic of

Attitudes (in its second configuration), it is not clear that the apparatus of factual-normative

worlds succeeds if giving a full specification of the content or meaning of moral claims (and of

the relevant concepts). Formal semantics, applied to non-cognitive states and their expressions,

29 Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, pp.95-97. Gibbard, in “Reply to Sinnott-Armstrong”, in Philosophical Studies, 69, 1993, p. 317, observes that his solution to the Problem of Embedding comports an element of indirection for Expressivism, since (mostly) states of mind come to expression in normative claims on modulo inferential relations. (This is similar to the first configuration of Blackburn’s Logic of Attitudes.) Gibbard has no deep commitment to the apparatus of possible worlds (see Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 95 fn. 6). A revision and generalization of the semantic broached in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, with the (commendable) aim of ensuring a more fine grained specification of content, is proposed in J. Dreier, “Transforming Expressivism”, Nous, 33, 1999, pp. 560-562. But I am not sure that the general program of interpreting normative claims in terms of descriptions of what is permitted by a system of norms gives (no matter how well developed) the kind of fine grain that is right for explaining moral normativity.

15

does not appear sufficient, even when the connections of such states to other states and to action

are specified, to determine meanings that then can figure in compounds and in inferences.30 This

difficulty stems from two roots. First: The pragmatic understanding of the truth and justification

of moral claims (which licenses first-order, minimalist, realism about these notions) is mistaken

for a specification of content, or meaning, determining sense and semantic value for moral

thought. The depth and scope of and inferential account of concepts in general, and of moral

concepts, in particular, are exaggerated and misunderstood. While conceptual content is not

intelligible independently from inferential power, inferential power is necessary as an aspect of,

but is not sufficient as a condition for, conceptual content. These mistakes combine in creating

the illusion that the mental and pragmatic significance of non cognitive states and of their

expression, combined with a apparatus of inferential forms, can put us in possession of content,

or meaning, in non-truth-conditional cases. Second: The very idea of starting off with the notion

of a system of norms seems at odds with the general aims of Expressivism, that involve that of

giving a fundamental explanation of semantic and syntactic properties, when such properties are

vindicated for the non-factual realm.31 A somewhat different, and perhaps less obvious,

difficulty, might be the following. Normative Logic is the program of extending logical relations

to normative claims, by way of an appropriate explanation of their content. Normative claims

are, in the present account, equated with non descriptive, non-factual ones, and non-factual

claims are understood in terms of expression of states of norm-acceptance. But the view we are

discussing draws on a conception of states of norm-acceptance according to which such states,

by being referred to systems of norms, per se have syntactic structure and semantic properties

like consistency. But then we seem to lose our grasp on the distinction between factual and non-

factual claims - not, of course, in the sense that we cannot make the suitable distinction among

different sorts of subject matter, but in the sense that such distinction seems to be shallow, if

30 This is forcefully pointed out (also in connection with the Logic of Attitudes) in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. “Expressivism and Embedding”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 61, No. 3 (Nov., 2000), pp. 677-693, which makes the “Hiyo” argument proposed by J. Dreier (“Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth”, Philosophical Studies 83:1, 29-51) to take a further step). Of course, the standard of meaningfulness is ultimately intuitive. But a fundamental explanation of meaning should just not only be consistent with intuitions (what can always be made to be the case) but also explain and vindicate them. 31 This is pointed out in S. Blackburn, “Gibbard on Normative Logic”, pp. 948-9. Gibbard was ready to concede it, see A. Gibbard, “Reply to Blackburn, Carson, Hill, and Railton”, pp. 972-973.

16

confronted with the shared, underlying semantic and syntactic structure. But if the factual-non

factual distinction loses in this way most of its depth and importance, then it seems that the

whole program of Expressivism lacks a clear theoretical rationale. In other words, if the main

task of Normative Logic is that of making Expressivism cross the boundary between factual and

non-factual claims and reasoning, then, on the basis of what we have just seen, there is no

interesting boundary at al to cross, and no interesting work for Normative Logic (and

Expressivism) to do.32

Further Developments Gibbard’s revision of Normative Logic consists in two moves.

One is shifting from the explanatory priority of generic states of norm-acceptance to that of first-

personal, present-time commitments to act, thus giving more importance to directly practical

states.33 The other is identifying the task of Expressivism and of Normative Logic not as that of

crossing the factual-non factual boundary, but as that of bridging «Frege’s Abyss», the

categorical distinction between psychological states and contents and judgments.34 In assessing

this further layer of Normative Logic we should start from the first idea, that of the expression of

directly practical states. This is the punch-line of the whole argument: «Thinking what I ought to

do is thinking what to do».35 The most fundamental facts, in the explanation of moral authority,

are not states of norm-acceptance, but rather essentially practical states, «concluding what to

32 This is consistent with Schroeder’s point (Being For, p. 18) that the «Basic Expressivist Maneveur» is to explain normative language with the same fundamental resources which explain descriptive language. The ground for this objection to Normative Logic is the notion of a system of norms (and the potential for syntactic and semantic properties that is given with it). It might be retorted that this notion is not without an explanation, since it is linked to the idea of a norm’s being avowed in a situation of normative discussion, which plays a function of coordination, involves specific demands of consistency, and exerts a pressure towards their acceptance and satisfaction (Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, pp.73-75). However, even bracketing any doubt about the pragmatic import (and adaptiveness) of being responsive to consistency demands (See W. Sinnot-Armstrong, “Some Problems for Gibbard’s Theory of Norms”, Philosophical Studies, 69, 1993, p.301), it does not follow, from the fact that a capacity (like entertaining a system of norms) would bring certain benefits, that it is in effect available. What has to be independently established is, minimally, how that kind of capacity is possible in the relevant context. In our case, this amounts to explain how something like normative conversation can take place with regard of non-cognitive states like norm-acceptance, so that they result in a system of prohibitions, permissions, and related predicates. Reference to pragmatic support is clearly insufficient.33 See Gibbard, “Reply to Sinnott-Armstrong”, p. 318.34 Gibbard, “Reply to Blackburn, Carson, Hill, and Railton”, pp. 970-971. I am not sure that this is a distinction that properly applies to any state of mind. But the proposed move, suggesting the need of a fundamental explanation of content, seems to go in the right direction.

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do», «settling on what to do». The viewpoint is that of us «as planners, able to think what to do

now and in future contingencies»; the context is that «of practical reasoning, of thinking what to

do».36 This theoretical viewpoint licenses a remarkably strong and deep version of first-order

moral realism (one that, while drawing a clear distinction between normative properties and

concepts, and restricting what is right in normative realism, or intuitionism, to the special nature

of normative concepts, makes possible to entertain the notion of the objectivity of normative

judgments, of the supervenience and factual constitution of normative concepts, and of moral-

normative knowledge). The pragmatic turn of Norm-Expressivism is very explicit and sharp:

«We should explain thinking what to do as moving toward action, and then explain the term

‘ought’ accordingly, as one I can use to couch my frame of mind when I decide».37 Still, that of

moving to action may not be same notion as that of the movement from sense to reference, which

would fully account for the content of practical states. And to couch a frame of mind is to

express, rather than to constitute it. Recourse to an ultimate practical state is a move fully within

the framework of Expressivism, it is, in effect, having recourse to a state (judging what to do,

moving toward action) of a kind for which «Expressivism must be right».38 Thus, the question of

the grounds of moral reasoning and of the logical behavior of concepts and claims expressing

states of decision making is open also for the present approach.

Planning and Disagreement Normative Logic is also, at least in part, reshaped according

to the explanatory priority of deciding what to do. Here the master thought is, again, that the

special features of normative concepts derive «from their place in a broad kind of planning we

carry out».39 But how does this general hypothesis apply to the logical features of concepts and

35 See A. Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 2003, pp. ix-x, 7-8.36 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. x-xi, 4.37 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, p. 10.38 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, p. 7. At p. 181, fn. 3, Gibbard suggests that the shift from norm-acceptance to planning is «not a change of position» but a shift of expository purposes». While Gibbard’s view are remarkably consistent in their development, and there is such a change in viewpoint, still I think that this understates the situation. Taking planning, rather than accepting norms, as explanatorily prior seems to aim to give firmer ground to Expressivism (moral decision is ostensibly different from theoretical assessment and seems to make an expressivist account more plausible) and to make way for a more fundamental explanation of the content of normative judgments and of their logical relations. This was, in effect, Gibbard’s first explicit reason for abandoning the priority of norm-acceptance.39 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, p. 21.

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concept-constituted claims? The point is that to think or to decide what to do is to make a plan

and plans are something with which we can disagree. Disagreement with plans is the primitive

phenomenon that comes to expression and finds articulation in the conceptual content of moral-

normative claims and in their logical relations. The possibility of disagreeing with states of mind,

together with that of assessing their coherence, are the threshold of conceptual thinking (in

effect, they are the constituents of the Fregean criterion for identity of sense). Gibbard vindicates

these possibilities as elementary conditions for conversation.40 This pragmatic argument, as far as

it goes, is sound. But it does not go far enough, both because it does not explain what makes

disagreement in the first place possible and because it does not instruct how to extend this

explanation to the case of deciding and planning. In effect, the problem is not one of extending to

moral states an account that would be, so to say, safely in store for the cognitive case, but rather

that of gaining a sound conception of disagreement and coherence for states of belief and

planning. (The problem is spanning Frege’s Abyss, crossing the border between mere

psychology and full meaning.) Thus, assuming for a moment that we have a sound notion of

what is to disagree with a plan, what is the role of such disagreement in grounding normative

content and normative logic? The fundamental thought here is that (in keeping with the semantic

orientation of Gibbard’s program) we can systematically connect states of mind and mental

contents in terms of the concept of disagreement. To disagree with a state of mind is to reject it

(not just to remain in suspension, or undecided, about it) and to rule it out is to commit to reject

it, that is, to disagree with it. If disagreement is at the root rejection, then it makes sense to say

that one disagrees with a plan, or with an action, as well as with a belief. 41 To disagree, or to

reject (or to commit to disagreeing or rejecting) are forms of mental activity, are entering or

entertaining states of mind. But a state of committing to disagree can take as their objects sets of

particular settled combinations of plans and beliefs (decided states). In this case, the decided

states which are ruled out constitutively individuate the content of that state. (This can also be

represented in terms of the possible worlds for which desided states obtain or not.)

40 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. 25-6.41 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, p.45. This is a view that does not seem to differ sharply from that underlying the Logic of Attitudes. But it should be kept present that the focus of the proposed account it is not syntactic form, but conditions for content. In particular, planning and disagreeing are important for their intrinsic nature as states of mind, and not that for how they can figure within a tree-structured pattern of mental engagement.

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Disagreement and Content Under the function of disagreement, thus, decided states have

the same content-constitutive role that factual conditions have under the function of truth. This

pattern of disagreement also determines the inferential, logical import of the state under

consideration, since it determines what further decided states it rejects and what it does not, so,

what further states are (non truth-functionally) consistent with it. An adequate expressivist

explanation of content and logical form and consequence, however, requires a more extended

and complex view of the activity of making plans, as contingency planning, making plans not

only for actual, but for expected and even counterfactual situations. Planning, that is, de facto not

only licenses disagreement, but also productivity and generality. It thus makes sense, «for logical

purposes», to think of plans for any possible contingency, «hyperplans», and of corresponding

maximally decided states, or «hyperstates». Such plans and states are complete: for any

alternative that is open in any situation, they either rule out or permit that alternative. Given

completeness, to reject or to reject rejecting are exhaustive attitudes taken toward plans, or the

operation of disagreement partitions the set of plans. This seems to give an expressivist rendering

of negation, and thus to allow to take a step toward the logical representation of planning and

toward an account of moral reasoning.42 In this way, an interpretation of moral-normative mental

content can be gained (within an expressivist framework) by holding «mental operations»,

centrally disagreement or rejection, to apply to other mental operations (contingency planning)

«which then have content»: content, that is, and inferential import, and bearing of inferential

import. This might seem enough to solve the Problem of Embedding and to span Frege’s Abyss

(which is a task both for the factualist and for the non-factualist), «carrying planning across to

the judgment side».43

42 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. 48-58. This is Gibbard’s answer to a worry about negation (Expressivism fails to distinguish between attitudes of rejection and of indifference) raised by N. Unwin, “Norms and Negations: A Problem for Gibbard’s Logic”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 51, 2001, pp. 60-75. The same worry is raised for Blackburn’s Logic of Attitudes in N. Unwin, “Quasi-Realism, Negation and the Frege-Geach Problem”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 49, 1999, pp. 337-352. See also B. Hale, “Can Arboreal Knotwork Help Blackburn out of Frege’s Abyss”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65, 2002, pp. 144-149, who makes a closely related point (Blackburn’s answer is published in the same issue). James Dreier, “Negation for Expressivists: A Collection of Problems with a Suggestion for their Solution” (forthcoming) amends Gibbard’s proposal so as to make place for a certain kind of attitude of moral indifference. For a restatement of the issue and a deepening of the difficulties it comports for Expressivism, see Schroeder, Being For, pp. 39-55.

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Constraints It is thus fair to sum up the present version of Normative Logic, by saying

(with Gibbard’s own words) that «disagreement and ruling out are what underlies the possibility

of logic».44 Such mental operations are held to be equivalent (in the role of constituting content

and inferential import) to hyperdecided states and to the formal apparatus of fact-plan worlds.

But it is quite clear that, in the context of Normative Logic, recursive mental operations are

explanatorily prior.45 Disagreement is the key to semantic nature. States that have content and a

potential for inferential relatedness and for figuring in, and have some bearing on, reasoning, are

just the states it is intelligible to disagree with (to reject or rule out), like (in our case) plans,

decisions, or actions.46 Planning and disagreeing with plans are the mental states, the attitudes,

that (if the appropriate constraints are satisfied) explain normative content and normative logic.

But some concern may arise about the relevant constraints. The possibility, or the intelligibility,

of disagreeing with a state of mind, like planning, goes together with other properties of plans

that are crucial for the possibility of moral reasoning.

One is the stability of such a state over time and across persons, so that one can agree or

disagree, or discuss, about the same plan, change or not one’s mind. The content-constitutive

property of states of mind that matters for inferential import and logical consequence, thus, is

more precisely agreement or disagreement over time and across persons. This is because stability

and publicity of attitudes of the right kind are essential to disagreement with attitudes counting as

content-constitutive (that is, is disagreement is not to be just any kind of opposition, like I could

have to headache) and because the right kind seems to be one ensured by the perspective agents

can take on their attitudes over time and across persons.47

43 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, p. 79. See pp. 81-2 for a limpid statement of Gibbard’s overall positi: «Once a being is capable of agreeing and disagreeing with possible states of mind, both factual apprehendings and straight attitudes become members of larger classes: factual apprehendings become a special class of factual judgments, and straight attitudes become a special class of purely attitudinal judgments. Factual judgments and attitudinal judgments, moreover, are special cases of judgments in general».44 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, p.61.45 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. 46-7, 58, 60. Gibbard is (rightly) emphatic that the whole point of Expressivism is explanatory, and that mental states are explanatorily prior. 46 This is, in fact, the lesson that Gibbard draws from Dreier “Hiyo”, antiminimalist, argument. See Thinking How to Live, pp. 64-5, and J. Dreier, “Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth”, Philosophical Studies, 83, 1996, pp.29-51.47 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp.65-6, 68-70. This may be reminiscent of Brandom, and underlies the distinction between (perspectival, agent-centered reasons based) disagreement in plan and (straight, Stevensonian) disagreement in attitude.

21

Another property, more elusive, is that what I come to disagree with is something that

expresses a state of mind, and that expresses it in the way beliefs and decisions (as opposed to

headaches) can be expressed.48 It is a perfectly legitimate move that of starting with states of

mind, like belief and decision, understood as natural states. But what discriminates the kind of

disagreement we are after from mere conflict or clash of attitudes is not appropriately

characterized in terms of what expresses and what comes to expression. We can disagree in the

relevant way with actions, as Gibbard recognizes and as it is only plausible, without actions

having to express anything or having to be expressed by anything. This suggests that it is not in

virtue of expression, but of something deeper about states of mind, that we can have recourse to

disagreement in order to represent inferential import.

Third, in order to determine the content and inferential import of a state of mind we have

to look at what further decided states it rules out. Ruling out entails disagreeing, but it is not the

same as it. It is committing to disagree. Now, I have suggested that the intelligibility of

disagreeing can simply come out a reflection of the nature of states of mind like belief, decision,

and action, but that this does not seem to be easily accommodated in an expressivist framework.

What are we to say about committing? The initial definition of commitment, or ruling out, as

rejecting rejecting, or disagreeing with disagreeing, simply does not work, because to reject

rejecting, or to disagree with disagreeing gives us at most agreement, not commitment. Gibbard’s

definitive account of commitment is in terms of hyperplans.49 What a «thinker-planner» is

committed to is what he would accept without changing his mind if he could become fully

decided on everything, if he could settle on a complete universal plan, or, equivalently, no

matter what hyperstate he could be in.50 Commitment, thus, is agreement (disagreeing to

disagree) with plans which is stable across their completions, it is what we would go on to agree

48 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp.64,67. 49 I only mention by passing that Gibbard’s notion and representation of commitments should be kept well distinct from Blackburn’s. On this latter’s predominantly syntactic approach, focused on evaluative attitudes, commitment is a matter of form, of tree-structure, that should then be translated into the content of evaluative attitudes (with the ensuing difficulties, hinted to footnote 87). On Gibbard’s predominantly semantic approach, focused on moral states, commitment is a function of the content of a moral state of planning, that supports a pattern of logical consequence. 50 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. 90-1. This is the ground for Gibbard’s “principle of commitment” which plays an important role in his theory of the supervenience of normative concepts.

22

on in planning no matter how all possible contingencies might be partitioned by the operation of

disagreement (with plans).

More on Planning and Disagreement This is a quite powerful representation of

commitment. But it may be questioned whether we have in this way all what is required for an

expressivist explanation of normative content and of Normative Logic. This in part depends on

how we understand the role of completeness or of hyperplans. By identifying commitment with

agreement in planning that is stable across hyperplans are we constructing a new (distinctively

normative) state of mind or are we only making explicit a normative feature of planning and

disagreeing as such? I think that the answer can only be the second one. Moving to hyperplans,

that is, requiring completeness of its content under the operation of disagreement, certainly does

affect the nature of the results of that operation. In particular, as we have seen, it entails that for

any alternative open to the thinker-planner in any contingency, it will be either permitted or ruled

out. But this does not reflect back on the mental operation itself of disagreeing. Rather, what we

do is just to keep fixed its nature and to exploring the cases in which it (monotonically) partitions

the whole set of possible contingencies.

Thus, the expressivist credentials of Normative Logic, in all the three respects I have

individuate, depends on the appropriate conception of disagreement in planning being available.

No amount of syntactical form can substitute the natural core that makes of planning a fitting

object (or context) for disagreement or that makes intelligible disagreeing in planning or about

plans. Now, Gibbard holds that the intelligibility of disagreement in planning should be taken as

primitive (as a specification of the notion of disagreeing with a state of mind). It is a mental

operation that we perform in planning, that we recognize, and that we can understand in its

marks.51 I agree that there is something ultimate about the nature of certain states of mind, that

ultimately accounts for the normativity of action or thought, and for our capacity to recognize,

assess, and observe, moral or theoretical claims. What may be questioned, however, is in what

sense we have to do, in the case of Normative Logic, with a position that is still distinctively

expressivist. Gibbard identifies his Expressivism with two negative theses, rejecting the

«apparatus of substantial truth» and «apprehensions of a peculiar class of facts» in giving an

account of normative logic (content, reasoning).52 What may be still distinctively expressivist is

51 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. 72-3. 52 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, pp. 73, 82.

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the idea of starting with «straight attitudes» and then crossing Frege’s Abyss, that is, solving the

Problem of Embedding in its purest form. This however is a misunderstanding of the conceptual

situation, as Gibbard himself describes it. There are no «straight», primitive attitudes (or states)

of planning, or of disagreeing in planning, that somehow lack the resources, or fail to satisfy the

conditions, for figuring in logical contexts, or for attaining the status of judgments. Insofar as

inferential import, logical consequence, and judgmental standing are at all to be explained, the

explanation has to start from, or to take as primitive, properties of content. After all, attitude and

content (both for Gibbard and for me) do not belong to different categories; and treating

attitudes, planning and disagreeing in planning, as indissolubly and primitively contentful is just

what Gibbard does.

Expressivism and the Presupposition of Content By saying that «straight» attitudes

cannot play the explanatory role that Expressivism assigns them I am neither denying that there

is the relevant explanatory task nor that it cannot be performed by having recourse to a

“peculiar” class of truths or facts. Moral realism can only be conceived of as first-order (or

pragmatic). Such a conception presupposes the appropriate construal of moral states of mind, as

ultimately world-involving and conceptual in content. No straight attitude can be construed in

this way. The problems for the expressivist proposal of a Logic of Attitudes or of Normative

Logic ultimately spring from this source. Both on the predominantly syntactic approach (start

from forms or connectives and show how their standard interpretation extends to valuing) and on

the predominantly semantic one (start from planning and show how it self-deploys into standard

forms and connectives), the expressivist program of accounting for consistency or validity, or of

reinstating contexts like negation, disjunction, or conditional, meets the difficulty of having to

keep fixed the straight understanding of attitudes.

What ultimately emerges from the discussions about Expressivism and negation (or other

logical contexts) is that a straight understanding of evaluative or moral attitudes would lack the

structural complexity that is deployed in logical relations and that deferring to realization in a

perfect world or to disagreement in hyperplans does not mend this defect (actually, it has point

only on the assumption that attitudes have contents of the right sort).53 But the conception of

53 This is the main theme of N. Unwin, “Quasi-realism, Negation and Frege-Geach Problem” and “Norms and Negations: A Problem for Gibbard’s Logic”. See for instance p. 342 of the first text: «Acceptance of the negation of a sentence must involve something positive, something more than just a commitment not to do something else. Yet it is unsatisfactory if all that can be

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attitudes that does the real work in the expressivist construal of logic is (implicitly) already of the

right sort for the task that is attempted. This conception should be amended, made explicit, and

given further articulation. Therefore, in a certain way, the Problem of Embedding is rather to be

dissolved than to be solved. Better: there is a side to the Problem of Embedding that is simply an

artefact or reflection of Expressivism and that will be dissolved by dropping it. But there is also a

side to it that demands a positive solution. This is the problem of explaining inference and

reasoning so as to ensure that practical import is transmitted from the premises to the conclusion.

That is, it is the problem of legitimating practical content, inference, and reasoning without

assuming that they transmit truth from their premises to their conclusion. This is not because of

any general anti-realist or non-cognitivist program. But because, first, moral claims involve, as a

conceptual matter, a practical dimension of content and inferential import, and, second, practical

content and inferential import, which is grounded on and internally regulated by action, seems

not to be amenable to truth, judgment, and knowledge. The program of expressivist logic, while

rightfully taking this problem seriously, threatens to aggravate it. To amend the expressivist

stance to this problem, and to push further the program of explaining moral reasoning, one would

have to drop any general non-cognitivist and anti-realist stance and revise the conception both of

the practical contents and states, securing from start their objectivity and rational potential; and

how they rationally bear on moral claims and inferences.

Back to Mental States Moral thoughts and moral claims have practical import. This is a

conceptual, constitutive matter; and it must be accounted for in the context of accounting for

said in case [of what might be interpreted as non-commitment] is that A has some alternative positive attitude toward p, because unless we can also demonstrate a suitable connection between it and the original attitude, the logical relationship [...] will be lost. [...] More generally, it is not enough to have a different attitude for each logical context. Unless the attitudes are connected in some systematic way, then we shall lack anything approaching a logic or a recursive semantics». Dreier, “Negation for Expressivists”, develops Unwin’s point, rightly emphasizing that completeness is not sufficient to give an understanding of the state of mind that is expressed in normative content. The solution he proposes is (in part) terms of planning as «by its nature a decisive activity», halfway between intending and preferring, that partitions into what is forbidden and what is permitted (p. 6). This is a move in the right direction, that of a more robust understanding of the nature, and of the determinateness of content, of the relevant, moral, state of mind. Dreier goes on pointing out at some difficulties this view can raise, when coupled with the requirement of completeness. (Part, at least, of Dreier’s solution to these difficulties seems to rely on excessively strong assumptions about the agents’ structure of preference.) Schroeder, Being For, pp. 58-59, remarks that articulating the structure of expressed mental states is the way out of Expressivism from the problem of embedded contexts – and at the same time its doom.

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their contents. It is all right to propose such an account from the viewpoint of the nature of

practical mental states and of how they are manifested in conduct of different sorts – including

committing morally and engaging in moral claims and arguments. But if practical import

ultimately consists in acceptance of, or engagement in, in a primitive, content-insensitive and

content-unresponsive, attitude, it is understandable that, on either account, moral reasoning may

come in question. On account of the purely, or ‘straightly’, attitudinal conception of moral

import, which seems more or less mandatory for Expressivism, we lose our grasp on the

fundamental normativity of action and other practical states (the broad issue of content and

inferential import). On account of the requirement that the attitude be actually engaged, we can

make no sense of the stability of meaning across contexts (the narrow issue of embedding). Since

the practical import of mental states is resolved into attitude and acceptance, the broad and the

narrow issue de facto coincide. But they have different roots and demand different theoretical

moves. However, there is a factor which is common to these views: it is precisely that practical

import, the practical character of mental states – which, either expressivistically or not are

strictly connected with the content of moral claims and their inferential relations – are identified

with a dimension of attitude or acceptance, rather than of content. That is, the practical character

of such states is not a function of their content – of the way they present some possible or actual

state of affairs, some object, some property – but of the relation in which the subject who is in

such state stands to that content. I think that this is not the right way of understanding the nature

of practical states and their differences and similarities with cognitive ones. But rather than

developing this view, I want to outline some implications it could have for the issues so far

discussed.

Hare’s Account It is interesting that, at an early stage of the discussion sparked by

Geach’s indictment of Expressivism, a way out of the Frege Problem had been looked for just in

dismantling the attitude and acceptance view of moral import and in reinstating a conception of

moral inference as close as possible to standard, truth-conditional logic.54 Some interesting

suggestions to this effect can be found in Hare. Hare, of course, talks in terms of sentences and

moods, of the «logic of imperatives», rather than in terms of mental states and mental operations

and this means that we can draw on his work only by analogy. But there are lessons to be drawn.

Hare has always been adamant that there is no contrast in principle between the «logical

54 See Schroeder, Being For, pp. 19-22, who might be a bit too tight in his assessment of Hare.

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behavior» of imperatives and that of indicative sentences; and that the former is «in many

respects as exemplary» as the latter. Therefore, there is no support for the theory that there is a

separate logic of imperatives: rather, «imperatives are logical in the same way as indicatives»,

nothing is peculiar to practical inferences, although it is «harmless, and even useful, to speak of

practical inferences in a rather modest sense»55

I reject the idea that practical content is imperative, or even marked out by the imperative

mood. Practical content is essentially the content of action, and it would make no sense to say

that the content of action is (in itself or in the mood it takes) imperative. (Of course, there are

states with imperative content and that can only be expressed by sentences in the imperative. We

can give commands or advices to ourselves and to others. But these are not primarily, but only

derivatively, practical states.) Therefore, the idea that imperatives are logical exactly in the same

way as indicatives, while somewhat alluring, cannot be taken up literally. But there is room for

remarkable complexity (and there has been development) in Hare’s views. Think, in the first

place, that a rapprochement of the logic of imperatives and of the logic of indicatives can mean

two very different things. It can mean that imperative and indicative sentences share a common

core of content and that it is only in regard to this core that they take logical connectives and that

bear inferential relations. This, Hare’s initial position, implies that practical import is only a

matter of the mood that a sentence takes in its being use - or of the attitude that is engaged with

in entering a state of mind. This is the position I am inclined to reject. But it can also mean that

imperatives and indicatives - sentences or states - have contents that are overall different, that

is, that include moods or attitudes as their own proper parts or that are constitutively determined

by mood or attitude; but that they nonetheless can take logical connectives and bear inferential

relations in the same general ways. This is a position that I think has some interest, since it

involves that practical - imperative, in Hare’s view - import is internal to, and a specification of,

contents and that it is in this regard that states or sentences can stand into rational relations.

Content and Force Interestingly, this is Hare’s final position on this matter. Think of his

view of logicality. The identification of imperative and indicative inference through mood-

neutral contents (what Hare called “descriptors” or “frastics”) requires that the conception of

logicality in terms of truth-preservation be rejected, since it would constitute a “concession to the

55 R.M. Hare, Moral Inferences, Macmillan, London and Basingtstoke, 1971, pp. 2, 15, 68 (the fist quotations come from his 1949 “Imperative Sentences”, the last one from his 1969 “Moral Inferences”).

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indicative mood” and substituted with the view that what matters for logic is consequence,

inclusions among descriptions.56 Hare came to see that this characterization of logicality, while

on the right track, is insufficient. It is all too clear that relations of inclusion among descriptions

cannot tell us everything that is to be said about relations among morally characterized sentences

or states. What has to be added is how what is described is related to actions and, through action,

to imperatives - which have actions as their objects. It was suggested to understand practical

inference in terms of a «logic of satisfaction or fulfilment», that is, of the relations of inclusion

among what fulfills or satisfies an imperative, that is among what can be variously said (in

consideration of the logical complexity of commands, or of the possibility of indirection) to be

what is done when what is commanded is done.57

Logical consequence, as it is relevant, and constitutive, of practical inference, therefore,

cannot be topic- or content-neutral: rather, it consists essentially of contents of possible or actual

doings. Correspondingly, Hare, who at first denied that there was any substitute to truth as what

is preserved in practical inference, ended by recognizing that in practical inference - which is

now seen as exploring the necessary conditions for satisfying or fulfilling a command - there is a

value that is preserved, just as truth is in theoretical inference, that is, satisfaction.58 The burden

of the logical structure of practical reasoning, then, is borne by relations not among mood- or

attitude-neutral contents, but among contents with an essential practical specification, that is, by

descriptions of states of things, but only presented as the satisfaction an imperative or as the

performance of a certain action. Logical consequence supports practical inference only in that it

consists of logically connected, intrinsically practical contents, that play the same normative role

of truth-apt, intrinsically theoretical contents. Force or attitude is inextricably joined with

content, when it comes to accounting for the inferential and rational structure of practical or

theoretical reasoning; and when such account is regarded as constitutively connected with the

individuation of mental states or speech acts and of their normative conditions.

The Articulation of Force Hare came also to see the need of complementing this view of

practical logical consequence with a revised general conception of content, so as to ensure the

necessary stability of meaning across contexts. This is in fact the most interesting aspect of his

56 Hare, Moral Inferences, p. 18 (this is 1949 Hare). 57 Hare, Moral Inferences, p. 42 (this is 1967 Hare). The suggestion came from A. Kenny, see discussion below. 58 Hare, Moral Inferences, p. 63 (this is 1969 Hare).

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overall position. His solution to the problem of embedding hinges on a distinction in the concept

of force. In order to provide for the differences and similarities between imperatives and

indicatives, Hare initially distinguished between frastic (descriptor) and neustic (dictor). The

former was identified with sense, the latter with force.. His further reflections of the logic of

moral inferences motivated a shift away from this position. The instability of meaning of moral

claims across embedded and non-embedded occurrences has to do with only one dimension of

force, that of engagement or acceptance, rather than that of mood, of the character, we could say,

of the mode of presentation. (Hare now restricts “neustic” to designate this dimension of

meaning, and introduces “tropic” for the mood dimension of force or attitude). The neustic of a

claim – force or attitude as engagement, as acceptance - of course, is not preserved across

embedded and non-embedded occurrences. But it seems that the tropic, the character or import

of the mode of presentation which is manifested in the claim, is preserved; and that it concurs

with the frastic, the purely descriptive element, to fix the inferential import of the claim, the way

if contributes to reasoning.59 This would be the kind of stability of meaning that would be

relevant to solve the Problem of Embedding and to make sense of logical connections among

moral claims.

Hare’s argument for the preservation of the tropic is based on the possibility of general

knowledge of the nature and object of a speech-act. Very simply, in order to grasp the meaning

that is conveyed by a claim, it is enough to know that it is used to make a certain kind of speech-

act, to know its tropic, and what speech-act in particular it is - to know what it is about. Once

this is known, we are given everything there is to the meaning of a claim, no matter whether the

relevant speech-act is performed or not. The tropic of a claim is invariant across contexts no less

than its descriptive meaning is.60 Both contribute to define the inferential import of a claim and to

frame accordingly, for a given class of inferences (for instance, practical inferences), a concept

of logical consequence. It is, in effect, knowledge of this contribution that grounds the possibility

of grasping the same meaning of a claim across different contexts (and not the other way

around). But then it stands to reason to regard the tropic as a feature of the content of a claim, to

regard sense as always including a part of force.61 I would add, as Hare does not, that this

59 Hare, Moral Inferences, pp. 90-92. 60 Hare, Moral Inferences, pp. 87-89.61 Hare, Moral Inferences, p. 107. Against this approach, A. Kenny suggests that imperative (“fiat”) sentence-formation requires mood operators to apply to sentence-radicals only from

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argument can be very neatly extended from speech acts and meanings to mental states and

contents. And that something like this is required not only to make intelligible how moral claims

stand in relations of logical consequence one to another, but also how they can be related to the

world, have any sort of semantic import. The troublesome part of the explanation of the content

and inferential import of moral claims, whether we are expressivist or not, is the practical import

which as a conceptual matter goes with their content and role. Something like Hare’s articulation

of force, together with the inextricable connection of force and sense, might provide a

interesting background for addressing this problem.

Of course, we can only draw a general suggestion from Hare’s work. And the onus is still

that of providing an adequate account of the content of moral claims on this basis. Recent

discussions, like Schroeder’s, have clearly shown how burdensome this onus is. But still two

remarks are worth making. First, it can be doubted that an approach like Hare’s is still

recognizably a form of Expressivism. Expressivism is broadly characterized by non-cognitivism

and antirealism; but some finer distinction can be drawn which alter the landscape. One is that

non-cognitivism can be either a general philosophical thesis – like typically is for Expressivism –

or a much more particular claim about a certain kind of thought or mental state. Assume that

outside logical connectives. This is to hold that the attitudes mood operator express do not affect from the inside the contents that are expressed in sentence-radicals and taken up by logical connectives. This move makes possible to give logical connectives their standard interpretation and to avoid any complicated formation rule for mood operator, see A. J. P. Kenny, “Moral Reasoning and Rational Appetite” (1975), in J. Raz, ed.., Moral Reasoning, Oxford University Press, 1978, pp.63-66. These are clearly important advantages. However, shifting our attention from the formation rules of the sentences regimented for moral reasoning to the relevant transformation rules, it should be recognized that, at any step of reasoning, the correctness (if any) of earlier commitments has to be preserved. Now the situation is quite different. A distinction should be drawn between the rules that preserve the truth of propositions, or sentence-radicals, or descriptive contents, and those that preserve the correctness of the sentences, or of the overall commitments, that figure in our reasoning. The former rules are, simply, the rules of deductive logic, as the “one logic, which is neither assertoric nor imperative, but propositional” (Kenny, “Moral Reasoning and Rational Appetite”, p. 73). But if we are interested in the rules of inferences involving assertions or imperatives, we would be wary of trying to identify them with some application the rules of deductive logic. Even in the case of assertoric reasoning, the truth of assertion is the kind of correctness to be preserved through all steps, should not be identified with the truth of the relevant propositions. Modal truth, as the property of a sentence in the mood of assertion, is the rightness of a move in a certain language-game, according to the rule: Produce an assertion only if the sentence-radical is a true proposition. The same holds of imperatives, that are correctly used only by following the rule that the sentence-radical of an imperative is to be made true.

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action and knowledge are the two basic mental kinds: then one would have to distinguish

between the conditions and nature of the one and those of the other; and they would be radically

different. But this would not have any effect as to the objectivity and rationality which are

available in the one or in the other case, since they would have anyway to be different; and thus

could achieve the same status in their radically different ways. Given that knowledge and action

are different, it is no wonder that the content and rationality of action is non-cognitive. But this is

just as it should be. So one can be non-cognitivist without being expressivist, if one just grounds

his non-cognitivism on the sui generis charater of action. Another distinction has to do with

realism: one can be realist, in the area of action, in terms, on grounds, and with implications

which are radically different from those which are appropriate in the theoretical domain. So we

could be non-cognitivist without being expressivist, and reject the interpretation of realism in

terms of truth, of mind-indepence, and correspondence of mind to the world, without ceasing to

be a realist (and without minimalizing one’s realism, for that). The other remark is that an

account of the content and of the nature of action, intention, is incumbent on everyone who is

interested in explaining the content and rationality of moral claims, given only that one accepts

that there is a conceptual connection between such content and rationality and practical

normativity. So it is not only expressivist, but virtually everyone who is engaged in metaethics,

that must provide such an account, in view of clarifying the links between moral contents and

action. Also in this respect, some sort of deep revision of the theory of content might be worth

looking for.

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