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Mistaken Expressions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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It is a suggestive feature of English and other languages that an indicative sentence such as ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ can be described not only as an expression of the belief that premarital sex is wrong, but also as an expression of disapproval of premarital sex. Disapproval is plausibly regarded as an attitude that is distinct from belief, in that it does not have truth conditions. What sort of attitude, then, should we take ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ to express: disapproval, belief, or perhaps both? One group of contemporary philosophers advocates the first Option. They hold that evaluative claims serve essentially to express positive and negative attitudes that are more like desires than beliefs, and that cannot be said to be true or false — at least in the robust way in which claims about the ages of trees (for example) can be true or false. Call these philosophers ‘expressivists.’ Seemingly opposed to expressivists are those who hold that evaluative claims express beliefs, and can be true or false.
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1 Many thanks to David Copp for some extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and apologies for any remaining misrepresentations of his view. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for an extremely helpful criticism, and to Al Mele and Victoria Costa. Much of this paper was completed with the assistance of the Stephen Risley Family Fellowship, for which I would like to express my gratitude to Stephen and Dottie Risley.
2 See, e.g., Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press 1993) and Ruling Passions (New York: Oxford University Press 1998) and Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990) and Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2003). Blackburn has tried repeatedly to argue that there is a sense in which we can properly characterize evaluative claims as true or false. But the story he has to tell is a complicated and controversial one. The present paper offers a simpler way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intuitions that Blackburn works so hard to render consistent.
3 See David Brink, ‘Externalist Moral Realism/ The Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986) 23-42 and Peter Railton, ‘Facts and Values/ Philosophical Topics 14 (1986) 5-31.
4 David Copp, ‘Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism/ Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2001) 1-43. See also Oswald Hanfling, ‘Learning about Right and Wrong: Ethics and Language/ Philosophy 78 (2003) 25-41.
5 For a useful collection of relevant papers, see Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color, Vol. 1 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1997).
6 See Blackburn, ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value/ reprinted in Essays in Quasi-Realism and Crispin Wright, ‘Moral Values, Projection and Secondary Qualities/ Aristotelian Society Supplement 62 (1988) 1-26. Wright, however, does not attack the analogy in order to defend an expressivist view.
7 The availability of the present argument for this reconciliation therefore depends on the falsity of extreme subjectivist views of color such as C.L. Hardin's. See, e.g., C.L. Hardin, ‘A Spectral Reflectance Doth Not a Color Make/ Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003) 191-202. This should not worry readers who are willing to grant, for example, that there are such things as red roses and blue violets.
8 See Copp, Realist-Expressivism, 17-18.
9 Interestingly, because color experience results from a dimension-lowering process that takes (roughly put) three input channels to two output channels, and because the three input channels can be calibrated differently in different normal humans, many pairs of colored patches that are indistinguishable to me may be very easily distinguished by you, and vice versa, without any deficiency or abnormality in either of us. Thus ‘similarity in similarity judgments’ is the best we can do in this claim about shared human responses. But it is sufficient.
10 ‘Typically’ on account of the vagueness inherent in color words.
11 This agreement should be understood as agreement about whether or not two colored objects are quite similar, quite different, and so on.
12 By ‘ostension’ I mean to indicate more than the paradigmatic instance of ostensive teaching, which is rather rare. I mean to include also the sort of language learning to which the following is essential: the object, stuff, or property for which a word is being taught is present to the learner in a way that would also allow paradigmatic ostensive teaching to happen.
13 This is true even if the object is not actually red.
14 For a view of value that does take this implausible form, see David Lewis, ‘Dispositional Theories of Value,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 63 (1989) 113-37.
15 Mark Johnston, ‘Dispositional Theories of Value/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 63 (1989) 139-74.
16 In fact, this latter claim is false, but is meant to do duty for a more accurate but prohibitively complex physical specification of the referent of ‘red.’ See C. L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow, expanded edition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. 1993: 7, 62, 64.
17 Compare Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, ‘A Problem for Expressivism/ Analysis 58 (1998) 239-51. Their point tends in the opposite, but perfectly compatible direction: that expressions of attitude can be understood as reports that one has an attitude.
18 Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall 1973): ‘Both things, both the report and the exclamation, are expressions of perception and of visual experience. But the exclamation is so in a different sense from the report: it is forced from us. It is related to the experience as a cry is to pain’ (197).
19 See Edmund Gettier, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?/ Analysis 23 (1963) 121-3; see also Keith Donnellan, ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions/ Philosophical Review 75 (1966) 281-304.
20 See Paul Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989) 22-57.
21 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§243-90.
22 Compare Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§244-5.
23 Is ‘That hurts’ also an expression of the belief that one is in pain? Wittgenstein himself might be inclined to deny this, since he sees little sense in a sentence such as ‘I believe I am in pain/ and also clearly distinguishes the criteria for third-person ascriptions of pain from first-person ascriptions. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§251 and 288. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds.; G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980) §§502-4.
24 ‘Color-blind’ and ‘irrational’ are here functioning as what might be called ‘remainder terms.’ In the case of the notion of harm, this use of ‘irrational’ seems plausible. But this need not be true for all normative notions. For example, it is a controversial — and, in my view, false — claim that those who fail to respond to moral demands are irrational. Rather, they are immoral.
25 It should be clear why expressivism has this implication. Copp's proposal has it for the following reason. Copp holds that moral terms have ‘coloring.’ One of the conditions for a term's having coloring is that if one uses the term in a sentence such as ‘Premarital sex is wrong/ and one knows that one does not have the appropriate attitude, then either there is some pretense involved, or one is misusing the language. Copp calls this the ‘misuse’ test for coloring. See Copp, Realist-Expressivism, 17-20. Copp's view is subtle, however, and it should be noted that the misuse involved need not prevent an utterance from being literally true. Indeed, ‘misuse’ is probably too strong a term; Copp suggests linguistic gaffe,’ ‘semantic offense,’ and ‘violation of semantic proprieties’ — each of a variety that does not touch truth value.
26 The next section explores this possibility for a certain class of evaluative terms: ones that have a conceptual tie to rationality.
27 See Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell 1994), 51, 69-70. See also Christopher Peacocke, ‘Colour Concepts and Colour Experience/ in Byrne and Hilbert Readings on Color, 54.
28 See D.M. Armstrong, ‘Smart and the Secondary Qualities’ in Byrne and Hilbert, Readings on Color, 43.
29 This view of substance concepts is persuasively defended by Ruth Garrett Millikan in On Clear and Confused Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press 2000).
30 What may make them all normative terms might be the link to affective attitudes, and what may make some realistic, and others not, might have to do with the degree of agreement in response among human beings. In ‘Cognitivism, Expressivism, and Agreement in Response/ which should be appearing in the second volume of Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 2, Russ Shafer-Landau, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), I argue that as agreement in response becomes less universal it becomes increasingly important to know what response the speaker has. This explains why the expressive function of the related word becomes more important, and may eventually result in its becoming essential to correct use.
31 I give rationality such an analysis in Brute Rationality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2004).
32 Aversion to a particular harm is compatible with a rational intention to act in a way that will bring one that harm. For it may be necessary to suffer the harm in order to avoid a greater harm, or to gain some great good.
33 See Sigrun Svavarsdottir, ‘Moral Cognitivism and Motivation/ The Philosophical Review 108 (1999): 161-219. For criticism of Christine Korsgaard's attempt to establish this strong result, see my ‘Korsgaard's Private-Reasons Argument/ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002) 303-24. And there are other uses of ‘ought’ that are still farther removed from rational requirements: ‘Bill ought to lose a couple of pounds/ ‘You ought not wear that tie with that shirt.'
34 See my ‘Problems for Moral Twin Earth Arguments/ Synthese 150 (206) 171-83.