Expressivism

‘Expression for Expressivists.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76(1): 86-116, January 2008. (Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.)

In this paper I consider what account of the expressing relation is compatible with making good on the core commitments of expressivism, argue against several possible answers, and defend my own answer, on which expressivism amounts to a kind of assertability-conditional semantics.

‘Does Expressivism Have Subjectivist Consequences?’ Philosophical Perspectives 28 (Ethics): 278-290, December 2014.

Many philosophers have had the nagging suspicion that metaethical expressivism is committed to a kind of subjectivism about morality - that it in some way varies with or depends on our own attitudes. This paper gives detailed responses to three of the most sophisticated attempts to make good on this suspicion, arguing that all three fail, and fail for the same reason.

‘How Not to Avoid Wishful Thinking.’ In New Waves in Metaethics, edited by Michael Brady, 126-140. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, January 2011.

Cian Dorr's Wishful Thinking problem for noncognitivism charges noncognitivists with facing a dilemma between licensing ways of forming beliefs about matters of empirical fact that resemble wishful thinking or else failing to make sense of many cases of rational inference. In this paper I survey and collect problems for two resourceful attempts to evade this problem.

'Convergence in Plan.' In Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Philosophy of Allan Gibbard, edited by Billy Dunaway and David Plunkett, Maize Books, 307-318, July 2022.

One of the central virtues of expressivism is often taken to be that it allows us to make sense of reasonable but informed disagreements, because nothing about the meanings of terms given an expressivist treatment guarantees that one answer is better than another. Yet expressivism is sometimes applied to topics where the range of reasonable or expected disagreement is very small. This paper takes a first rough stab at exploring what resources expressivists have for to explain varying degrees of convergence, as Allan Gibbard would put it, 'in plan'.

‘Expressivism and Moral Disagreement.’ With Christa Peterson. Forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement, to be edited by Maria Baghramian, Adam Carter, and Rach Rowland.

‘Synopsis of Being For.’ Analysis Reviews 70(1): 101-104, January 2010.

This is a synopsis of the main contributions and theses of Being For for a symposium published in Analysis Reviews with contributions from Ralph Wedgwood and Andrew Alwood.

‘Getting Noncognitivism Out of the ’Woods.’ Analysis Reviews 70(1): 129-139, January 2010.

This is my response to the critical discussions of Being For in the Analysis Reviews symposium published in 2010.

‘Skorupski on Being For.’ Analysis 72(4): 735-739, October 2012.

John Skorupski published an objection to my solution to the negation problem for expressivism in Analysis. This short article is my reply.

‘Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices.’  Ethics 119(2): 257-309, March 2009.  Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.

This paper offers a comprehensive treatment of the advantages and disadvantages of “hybrid” metaethical theories and argues that the advantages of hybrid theories are real and interesting but subtle rather than dramatic.

‘Tempered Expressivism.’  Oxford Studies in Metaethics 8: 283-314, July 2013.  Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.

This paper was one of two published in the same issue of Oxford Studies in Metaethics to introduce the idea of relational expressivism, a kind of generalization on hybrid expressivism that is more congenial to metaethical irrealism and can solve more of the traditional problems for metaethical expressivism.

‘The Truth in Hybrid Semantics.’  In Having it Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics, edited by Guy Fletcher and Michael Ridge.  New York: Oxford University Press, 273-293, October 2014.

This paper explores some problems with combining hybrid expressivist semantics with attitude ascriptions and a semantics for ‘true’.

‘What is the Frege-Geach Problem?’  Philosophy Compass 3/4: 703-720, June 2008.

This Philosophy Compass article provides an introduction to the Frege-Geach Problem, its history, and to some of the principal constraints we face in solving it.

‘How Expressivists Can and Should Solve Their Problem With Negation.’  Noûs 42(4): 573-599, December 2008.

This article introduces the solution to the Frege-Geach Problem developed at greater length in Being For. It was named to the Philosophers’ Annual and received the APA Article Prize

‘Higher-Order Attitudes, Frege’s Abyss, and the Truth in Propositions.’  In Passions and Projections: Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn, edited by Robert Johnson and Michael Smith.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 228-245, December 2014.  Reprinted in Expressing Our Attitudes.

In this contribution to a festschrift for Simon Blackburn, I take back the lesson that I had earlier argued that we could draw from Mark van Roojen’s objection to Blackburn in his 1996 paper. Instead, I argue, there is a loophole for a particular kind of higher-order attitude theorist to escape this argument, but it requires endorsing a particular view of truth and a particular view of propositions.

'Attitudes and Epistemics.'  In Expressing Our Attitudes.

In this paper I explore whether epistemic modals are sufficiently different from moral words like ‘wrong’ in order to relax some of the important constraints on a good solution to the Frege-Geach Problem. Things, I argue, are complicated in really interesting ways.

‘Getting Perspective on Objective Reasons.’ Ethics 128(2): 289-319, December 2017.

This paper explores two challenges to the view that what we ought to do is systematically explained in terms of reasons, and answers both by appeal to the hypothesis that objective reasons are in a certain sense less “objective” than most philosophers have presumed. This paper introduces the four-envelope problem and revives issues about perspective and ‘ought’ first explored by Kolodny and MacFarlane in unpublished work. It also brings together themes in my work on reasons, ‘ought’, expressivism, and epistemic modality.

‘Rationality in Retrospect.’ Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17: 1-26, May 2022.

This paper argues for a kind of internalism about rationality by situating it in an inversion of the popular picture that rationality is the proper normative concept for prospectively evaluating choice and correctness is the proper normative concept for retrospectively evaluating choice. This picture, I argue, is wrong, and relies on a mistaken view about the role of information in correctness judgments. Correctness is for the prospective evaluation of choices, and rationality is for retrospective evaluation.