A colleague of mine once described the experience of working through a prominent text defending expressivism as similar to that of âwatching a shell game.â Although he didnât elaborate on the comparison, I think I see what he meant. The experience was like that of trying to follow a series of clever and elaborate moves in which one catches only glimpses of what one is interested in seeing. I realise that the comparison is not flattering. But I suspect it voices an experience that some (and perhaps many) of us have had when engaging with the expressivist tradition: we find that the questions that we want to pursue about the existence and nature of normative reality deliberately hidden from view and exchanged for a series of different questions about the character of normative thought and discourse, which are themselves often pursued in a series of highly sophisticated manoeuvres.
Others have offered more optimistic appraisals of expressivismâs methods. In their essay âIs Epistemic Expressivism Incompatible with Inquiry?,â J. Adam Carter and Matthew Chrisman, for example, contend that expressivismâs evasive character is not due to a lack of theoretical candour (Carter and Chrisman 2012) . Rather, it has both a principled rationale and a function whose aims include explaining why the view is immune to certain types of objections.
The rationale is what Carter and Chrisman call the âcore expressivist manoeuvre.â The core manoeuvre has three steps when applied to the normative domain. The first step is to switch the subject: rather than concern itself with traditional metanormative topics such as what normative properties or facts are (or would be), expressivism concerns itself with what it is to express a normative judgement or engage in normative discourse (of a given kind). The second step is to offer a distinctive, expressivist account of what normative thought and discourse are. At a first approximation, this account rejects the claim that normative thought and discourse have normative representational content, maintaining instead that they express attitudes of commendation and condemnation. The third step consists in expressivists concludingâafter having defended their views about the character of normative thought and discourseâthat they (in their role as theorists) can âjust stop talkingâ about normative reality and, instead, issue first-order normative judgements.1 In short, were it successfully executed, the core manoeuvre would enable expressivists to bracket prominent metanormative issues, such as those that concern the existence and nature of values, and focus on the topics that most interest them, namely, the character of normative thought and discourse. That is its function.
Let me add that, as it is presented, the core expressivist manoeuvre is not just one dialectical strategy among others. Carter and Chrisman present it as expressivismâs signature dialectical strategy. Other philosophers such as Mark Schroeder appear to agree.2 Were we to fail to appreciate the core manoeuvreâs role and significance within the expressivist project, our grasp of this project would be seriously incomplete.3
In this essay, I propose to take a closer look at the core expressivist manoeuvre. The primary argument I am going to develop maintains that in order to successfully execute the core manoeuvre, expressivism must jointly satisfy two desiderata. The first is that it provides an account of normative thought and discourse that has sufficient expressive power. Such an account must be capable of explaining the workings not only of some subset of normative thought and discourse (such as evaluations) but the full range thereof (and explain it in a unified way). Iâll refer to this desideratum as Expressive Power. The second desideratum is that it provides an account of normative thought and discourse according to which they lack normative representational content. (Iâll say more about this concept in Sect. 3. For present purposes, think of it as content that concerns or is about normative reality.) After all, if such thought and discourse were to have such content, it would make sense to inquire whether there are normative properties or facts that they represent, and what they are like. I will refer to this desideratum as No Normative Representational Content (or âNo Normative Content,â for short).
I shall assume that every satisfactory expressivist position must satisfy Expressive Power, given their aim of providing an account of ordinary normative thought and discourse. In contrast, I will not assume that every expressivist position must satisfy No Normative Content. It is a desideratum that must be fulfilled only by expressivist positions with certain aims, such as those that endeavor to execute the core manoeuvre. The central claim for which I will argue is that it is difficult to jointly satisfy these desiderata, as they pull in opposite directions. It might be that some expressivist views satisfy Expressive Power. But Iâll argue that they are thereby poorly situated to satisfy No Normative Content. And it might be that some expressivist views satisfy No Normative Content. But, Iâll contend, they are thereby not well-placed to satisfy Expressive Power. I will refer to this dynamic as the central tension.
The central tension bears upon the core manoeuvre in the following way. On the one hand, an expressivist view that satisfies Expressive Power will be well-positioned to execute the first two steps of the core manoeuvre. But such a view, Iâll contend, will be poorly suited to move to the third step wherein expressivists can legitimately âstop talkingâ about normative reality. On the other hand, an expressivist view that satisfies No Normative Content will not be able to execute the core manoeuvreâs second step, which is that of furnishing a satisfactory account of normative thought and discourse. And, so, such a view will also not be able to execute the core manoeuvre. The overarching conclusion at which Iâll arrive is that expressivists are presently not well-situated to appeal to the core manoeuvre in order to avoid certain types of theoretical burdens and deflect various types of criticisms of their view.
Let me emphasise two points at the outset. There is no agreed upon understanding of what expressivism is. In what follows, I will be working with what I take to be a widely accepted understanding of the view, although I am confident that some will reject it. Second, I will not be arguing that expressivism as such cannot execute the core manoeuvre. The history of expressivism is, after all, that of a position which has proven to be extraordinarily resourceful when responding to challenges. I expect that it will be equally resourceful in this case too. Nonetheless, I do contend that the most prominent versions of the view are not well-positioned to execute the manoeuvre. The conclusion I reach is that being positioned to execute the manoeuvre will require supplementing and perhaps developing expressivism in ways that involve modifying some of its central ambitions and commitments.
1 Section 1
A more precise account of the core expressivist manoeuvre requires some stage-setting. Iâll begin by regimenting some terminology.
In what follows, Iâll use the phrase ânormative domainsâ to refer to domains such as ethics, epistemology, practical reason, and aesthetics. These domains are normative (in part) because they include thought and discourse that is evaluative (âx is goodâ), directive (âone ought to x,â âone is required to xâ), reason-expressing (âx is a reason for actingâ), and fittingness-expressing (âx is apt or appropriateâ).4 Iâll use the term âmetanormative inquiryâ to concern inquiry into the character of what belongs to these domainsâwhere that includes not only normative thought and discourse but also (perhaps) normative properties and facts.
We can distinguish two broad projects within metanormative inquiry, one concerning mind, the other concerning world. The first project concerns itself only with the nature of normative thought and discourse. This project asks questions such as: Are normative thought and discourse such as to represent normative reality? Or do they play some other role? Call this the mental/linguistic project. The second project concerns itself with the character of normative properties or facts. This project concerns itself primarily with questions such as: Are there normative properties and facts of a given kind? And, if so, what are they like? Call this the metaphysical project.5 According to the core expressivist manoeuvre, if we start with and ask the right questions when engaging in the mental/linguistic project, this would thereby âundermineâ the metaphysical project (Carter and Chrisman 2012, 334).
When Carter and Chrisman maintain that executing the core expressivist manoeuvre undermines (what I am calling) the metaphysical project, I take it that they have the following in mind. Successfully executing the first two stages of the manoeuvre would imply that there is insufficient reason to pursue the types of questions that animate the metaphysical project. More specifically, I take the leading thought to...