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Accounts of scientific explanation disagree about what's required for a cause, law, or other fact to be a reason why an event occurs. In short, they disagree about the conditions for explanatory relevance. Nonetheless, most accounts presuppose that claims about explanatory relevance play a descriptive role in tracking reality. By rejecting the need for this descriptivist assumption, I develop an expressivist account of explanatory relevance and explanation: to judge that an answer is explanatory is to express an attitude of being for being satisfied by that answer. I show how expressivism vindicates ordinary scientific discourse about explanation, including claims about the objectivity and mind-independence of explanations. By avoiding commitment to ontic relevance relations, I rehabilitate an irrealist conception of explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a response to critics of the book "The Birth of Ethics." The author acknowledges the quality of the critiques and responds to the criticisms raised by Adam Lerner regarding natural properties in moral concepts, moral realism, and why individuals should be moral. The author argues that despite differences in perspectives, there can still be a procedural understanding of multi-lateral desirability that allows for convergence on certain moral issues. The text also discusses the question of why individuals should behave morally and act in accordance with their own moral values, emphasizing the importance of maintaining integrity and fostering mutual reliance. The author clarifies their argument about Erewhonian ethical concepts and addresses other points raised by M&P, including the relationship between genealogy and the functionalist account of ethical concepts. The text explores moral functionalism, counterfactual genealogy, and the concept of genealogy itself. The author engages with critiques and emphasizes the need for speculative accuracy in genealogical analysis, while also introducing the idea of a creature-construction account. [Extracted from the article]

When one communicates that they are in pain, it is often assumed that the speaker is providing an assertion or report. Call this the cognitivist stance of pain utterances. Nevertheless, many sentential pain utterances seem to have both assertive and imperatival communicative content in virtue of expressing both the speaker's pain belief and the pain experience, respectively. I call this view hybrid expressivism about pain. In this paper, I take the imperativist idea of pain seriously and show that, via an expression relation, pain utterances inherit the imperative and motivational force of the pain. A hybrid expressivist stance better explains why pain utterances often have the perlocutionary effect of eliciting care from others, and it can provide a new understanding of what it means to silence one's pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does 'Smith knows that it might be raining' mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which 'Smith knows that it might be raining' is equivalent to 'it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining' or 'Smith doesn't know that it isn't raining'. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein's 'safety semantics' and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on reparative justice focuses for the most part on the grounds and limits of wrongdoers' duties to their victims. An interesting but relatively neglected question is that of what – if anything – victims owe to wrongdoers. In this paper, I argue that victims are under a duty to accept wrongdoers' apologies. I claim that to accept an apology is to form the belief that the wrongdoer's apologetic utterance or gesture has the requisite verdictive, commissive and expressive dimensions; to communicate as much to him; and to recognise that his apology changes one's normative status in relation to him, and to comport oneself accordingly. I then offer a Kantian argument for the duty to accept and qualify that argument in the light of some hard cases. I end the paper by addressing the objection that victims do not owe it to wrongdoers to engage in any form of reparative encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative judgments are practical: they bear a close connection to motivation. Noncognitivists often claim that they have a distinctive explanatory advantage accounting for this connection. After all, if normative judgments just are noncognitive, desire-like states, then it is no mystery why they bear an intimate connection to motivation: desire-like states motivate. In this paper, however, I argue that noncognitivism does not have this explanatory advantage after all. The problem is that noncognitivists cannot provide a characterization of the practicality of normative judgment that allows them to retain this advantage. Noncognitivists either posit a strong and controversial connection between normative judgment and motivation that cognitivists have no trouble rejecting, or they posit a weaker connection that cognitivists can explain just as well. Either way, noncognitivists cannot argue from the practicality of normative judgments to their claim that normative judgments are noncognitive, desire-like states. The practicality of normative judgments does not support noncognitivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious expressivism is the view that religious sentences, like 'God is all-loving' and 'God offers us the gift of salvation', are devoid of cognitive meaning. Such sentences are not truth-evaluable: they cannot be judged as true or false. In Religious Language , Michael Scott asked what explains the seeming logical behaviour of religious sentences if they are not truth-evaluable, as religious expressivists claim. In particular, religious expressivists need to explain (i) how a given religious sentence and its negation seem inconsistent and (ii) how religious sentences could figure in logically valid arguments. In this article, I develop a version of Weak Kleene semantics that could address these two 'logic' challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to connect two debates about the relation among language, reasoning and thought that belong to different theoretical and disciplinary fields, but that are closely linked. On the one hand, the philosophical debate about logical pluralism. And, on the other hand, the linguistic debate around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We propose a hypothesis compatible with a version of logical pluralism and linguistic relativism that makes it possible to explain the differences between thoughts expressed in different languages. This hypothesis, at the same time, supports the possibility of understanding and even translating different logical and linguistic variants. From a position akin to logical expressivism, we claim that there exists a proto-logic underlying all natural languages. The minimal logical operators proper of this proto-logic can be made explicit in a precise way in different formal systems. This gives rise to logical pluralism. We also offered an empirically informed philosophical argument in favor of this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues in favour of a novel interpretation of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations by making its consequences explicit. The aforementioned novel interpretation offers us a new way of understanding Wittgenstein as an expressivist, and as claiming that a particular form of rationality is central to philosophy. The expressivist interpretation of later Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations provides us with tools to, in a way, unite all of the most plausible parts of the strongest disparate contemporary interpretations of the said primary text: the newest and, it seems, the currently most fashionable resolute reading and the realism/antirealism debate stemming from Kripke’s famous Kripkenstein reading. The expressivist reading, thus, offers a way of explaining the therapeutic aspect of Wittgeinstein, maintaining the continuity between earlier and later Wittgeinstein, while also explaining what was so wrong about the project of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In recent years, some authors have shown a renewed interest in interpretivist theories of folk psychological ascription [Hutto 2013. "Fictionalism About Folk Psychology." The Monist 96 (4): 582–604.; Mölder 2010. Mind Ascribed: An Elaboration and Defence of Interpretivism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Sanchez-Curry 2020. "Interpretivism and Norms." Philosophical Studies 177 (4): 905–930.; Mölder 2021. "Interpretivism Without Judgement-Dependence." Philosophia 49 (2): 611–615.; Slors 2015. "Interpretivism and the Meaning of Mental State Ascriptions." Studia Philosophica Estonica, 10 (2): 18–27.]. Part of the virtue of interpretivism lies in its ability to provide an answer to elminativist arguments without falling into the assumptions and problems of intentional realism. However, some recent developments in semantic expressivism applied to normative expressions could help to build an alternative theory to interpretivism that would enjoy the same virtues. The aim of this paper is to present and defend an expressivist approach to the status of folk psychological ascriptions. According to this view, mental states ascriptions are evaluative and non-descriptive statement that express or reflect certain normative standards or values of the attributor. After presenting the view and contrasting it with interpretivist positions, with which expressivism shares important motivations and claims, I present two arguments to favor the expressivist analysis. In line with the first argument, expressivism can account for fundamental aspects of disagreements regarding mental attributions while the second highlights the capacity of the view to explain the widespread justificatory and exculpatory uses of mental states ascriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show that expressivism about attitudes is not a tenable position. Although this claim has been often made in the literature, traditional arguments against attitudinal expressivism assumed a dated form of expressivism. In order to show that ascriptions of attitudes cannot be seen as expressive in either of them, the paper discusses two more recent versions of expressivism: quasi-realism and inferentialist expressivism. Quasi-realism escapes traditional arguments against attitudinal expressivism because it allows expressive statements to be true in a deflationary sense. Nonetheless, it is implausible to adopt quasi-realist expressivism with regard to attitudes because this position cannot avoid substantial psychological commitments, despite Toppinen's recent arguments to the contrary. This conclusion also pertains to quasi-realist hybrid expressivist conceptions. The recently developed conception of inferentialist expressivism arguably creates the most accommodating theory for attitudinal expressivism as it does not make any substantial psychological commitments. Still, the criteria of bifurcation assumed in this framework does not support the claim that attitudes play an expressive role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaethical expressivism faces the perennial objection that its commitment to non‐cognitivism about moral judgment renders the view revisionary of our ordinary moral thought. The standard response to this objection is to say that since the expressivist's theoretical commitments about the nature of moral judgment are independent of normative ethics, the view cannot be revisionary of normative ethics. This essay seeks to evaluate the standard response by exploring several senses of independence that expressivism might enjoy from normative ethics. I develop a taxonomy on which, at least by the expressivist's own lights, normative ethics is not dependent on non‐cognitivism about moral judgment in a way that might render that claim itself normative ethical. The argument will require us to formulate a theory of moral subject matter according to the expressivist, a matter of independent interest. Although this discussion will essentially vindicate the standard response to the perennial objection, it will also highlight a major limitation thereof. This is that even for the expressivist, the taxonomic independence of non‐cognitivism about moral judgment from normative ethics does not guarantee its moral independence from normative ethics; that is, showing that non‐cognitivism about moral judgment is not a moral claim is not itself to show that it is not a morally relevant claim. I conclude by arguing that the question of moral dependence, usually discussed under the heading of objectivity, is ultimately first‐order moral rather than taxonomic, and so can only be resolved on first‐order moral grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that Wittgenstein's later explorations of the meaning of expressive moral judgements reach far deeper than has so far been noticed. It is argued that an adequate description of the meaning of expressive moral judgements requires engaging in a grammatical investigation that focuses on three interwoven components within specific language-games. First, the ethical reactions expressed by moral words and the additional purpose they may fulfil. Second, the features of the actions which are bound up with moral words and are constitutive of our moral evaluations. And, finally, the forms of life in which expressive moral judgements and moral language-games are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nietzsche's views regarding suicide are usually interpreted as a response to Christian, Kantian, and Schopenhauerian ethics. Here, they are defended on the basis of his notion of life as an aesthetic phenomenon in order to provide extramoral responses to such challenges as the following: a) whether the self can deliver the right kind of judgment regarding her life, b) how suicide can be considered an empowerment of the will, and c) whether suicide can be considered an exercise of freedom by the subject who thereby cancels the very grounds and means for will and action. Reconstructed as a response to Hegel's argument against suicide on the grounds that one is not the master of oneself and that one therefore lacks the proper means to judge one's life, Nietzsche's position provides the epistemic footing to ground an alternate notion of self-mastery as well as the necessary insight regarding one's life. It is shown that this reading of Nietzsche's argument is in alignment with his non-dualism and expressivist views regarding agency. Finally, a response is formulated to the socially-grounded arguments prohibiting suicide on the basis of this reading of Nietzsche's position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discursive pluralism, recently fostered by anti‐representationalist views, by stating that not all assertions conform to a descriptive model of language, poses an interesting challenge to representationalism. Although in recent years alethic pluralism has become more and more popular as an interesting way out for this issue, the discussion also hosts other interesting minority approaches in the anti‐representationalist camp. In particular, the late stage of contemporary expressivism offers a few relevant insights, going from Price's denunciation of "placement problems" to Brandom's inferentialism. This paper attempts to show how these expressivist ideas combine well together, composing a unitary and metaphysically sober metaphilosophical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a generalization of logical expressivism. It is shown that, in the wide sense defined here, the expressivist approach is neutral with respect to different theories of inference and offers a natural framework for understanding logical forms and their function. An expressivist strategy for explaining the development of logical forms is then applied to the analysis of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, Gentzen’s sequent calculus and Belnap’s display logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral expressivists think that moral thoughts and sentences don't represent or describe the world, at least not in any interesting sense. Global expressivists think that no thoughts or sentences represent the world; local expressivists think that some do and others don't. Huw Price has influentially argued that local expressivism collapses into global expressivism, due both to the effects of minimalist theories of representation and similar concepts, and to an unappreciated consequence of the success of specific expressivist theories like moral expressivism. In this paper I argue that Price's arguments don't succeed. While they can be fixed, doing so makes them miss their intended target. Local expressivists should therefore not be worried by Price's arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral expressivism suggests that 1) moral sentences lack truth conditions and 2) our purpose in asserting moral sentences is to express non-cognitive attitudes such as desires, approval, or disapproval. Moral expressivism meets a fundamental challenge, known as the Frege-Geach problem. Sentences that express moral judgments can form part of semantically complex sentences. "P" (a moral sentence) contradicts "~P", and "Q" follows logically, by modus ponens, from (1) "P" and (2) "if P, then Q". Geach argued that noncognitivists are committed to denying that moral predicates mean the same thing in embedded contexts as they do in unembedded sentences (atomic sentences). If "P" does not mean the same as the antecedent of (2), the argument would be invalid. The problem is that the above-mentioned argument is obviously valid. Blackburn has argued that the complex sentence expresses a 'higher-order' attitude toward the attitudes expressed by the smaller sentences which make it up. If we accept the premises of a valid argument but deny its conclusion our attitudes clash in the same way that they do if we both believe that P and ~P. Blackburn's metaattitudes approach faces several problems. Someone who endorses the premises but denies the conclusion of the valid argument commits himself to a moral inconsistency, not a logical one. In addition, uttering both 'P' and '~P' seem to be inconsistent but expressivism cannot explain the inconsistency between these two obviously inconsistent sentences. Blackburn's strategy of inventing a new attitude, such as tolerance, is also unable to solve this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent work Allan Gibbard claims to be both a local quasi-realist, in Blackburn's sense, and a global expressivist. His local quasi-realism rests on an argument that for naturalistic discourse but not ethical discourse, the semantic relation of denotation and the causal relation of tracking can and should be identified; that denoting simply is tracking, for naturalistic vocabulary. I argue that Gibbard's case for this conclusion is unconvincing, and poorly motivated by his own expressivist standards. I also argue that even if it were successful, it is doubtful whether the resulting position would count as global expressivism, as Gibbard and I both use that term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quasi-realists have proposed an "internal" reading of the mind-independence claim embedded in our moral discourse, according to which the claim to mind-independence itself is a moral claim. I argue against such a quasi-realist "internal" reading. My objection is that quasi-realists cannot plausibly explain why the majority of us, either implicitly or explicitly, take moral mind-independence to be a metaethical notion. Quasi-realists either must attribute a quite obvious mistake to most metaethical theorists without explaining why they cannot recognize it, or give us an intolerably ad hoc explanation about why ordinary moral speakers fail to understand their own words. Without properly addressing this problem, we have good reason to reject the quasi-realist account of moral mind-independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a renewed concern about the dangers of eliminative materialism, as well as several attempts to discuss alternative positions such as new versions of interpretivism or fictionalism. Although expressivism has also emerged as a possibility, the problems with hybrid versions of expressivism in applying it to attitude ascriptions have led to a strong rejection of the proposal. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it argues that there are still theoretical tools available to defend an expressivist analysis of mental state ascriptions. Second, the article contends that three of the most influential arguments in expressivism in meta-ethics and meta-epistemology are applicable to the case of mental state ascriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the success of the formal approach, within contemporary epistemology, to understanding degreed belief, some philosophers have recently considered its extension to the challenge of understanding intention. According to them, (1) intentions can also admit of degrees, as beliefs do, and (2) these degreed states are all governed by the norms of the probability calculus, such that the rational norms for belief and for intention exhibit certain structural similarity. This paper, however, raises some worries about (2). It considers two schemes for representing degreed intention, and casts some doubt on applying probabilistic norms to degreed intention on each scheme. And it argues that the norms of Intention–Belief Consistency and Enkrasia cannot plausibly be turned into norms prescribing a simple correspondence relation between one's degrees of belief and intention. The results suggest a potential structural discrepancy between the norms of theoretical and practical rationality—at least for degreed belief and intention. This potential discrepancy not only raises interesting questions about the intention–belief relation and rational norms for degreed intention. It also poses a new challenge for intention-based expressivism about normative judgment and cognitivism about practical rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the guilty plea statements in sex crimes cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, this article investigates the ways that defendants re-present themselves, their agencies, and their offenses in response to the legal framework within which they talk. While their acts are at the core of international criminal justice (ICJ), defendants are more often spectators than participants when their guilt is negotiated and judged. They have for the most part also been absent in research on ICJ. As defendants' voices are rarely heard during proceedings, their guilty plea statements produce rare access to war criminal's staging of self and individual agency. At international criminal tribunals, defendants have wide audiences beyond the courtroom, and when they do speak, their stories potentially influence not only the court proceedings but also wider cultural and societal narratives about wartime agency and sexual violence. After identifying a guilty plea script, this article draws attention to a consistent and intriguing silencing of sexual crimes in the past and to how the defendants' imageries of present and future selves align with the ICJ effect narratives about the individually disciplining and rehabilitative character of criminal justice and its general deterrent effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we sketch a new version of aesthetic expressivism. We argue that one advantage of this view is that it explains various putative norms on the formation and revision of aesthetic judgement. We begin by setting out our proposed explananda and a sense in which they can be understood as governing the correct response to putative higher-order evidence in aesthetics. We then summarise some existing discussions of expressivist attempts to explain these norms, and objections raised to them. This will allow us to identify the pitfalls that a good expressivist explanation needs to avoid. Finally, we sketch our preferred version of aesthetic expressivism which includes as a crucial part a hypothesis concerning the distinctive expressive function of aesthetic practice. We then consider how this theory can explain the putative aesthetic norms whilst avoiding the previous objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-expressivism is the view that avowals – first-personal, present tense self-ascriptions of mental states—ordinarily express the very mental states that they semantically represent, such that they carry a strong presumption of truth and are immune to requests for epistemic support. Peter Langland-Hassan (2015. "Self-Knowledge and Imagination." Philosophical Explorations 18 (2): 226–245) has argued that Neo-expressivism cannot accommodate avowals of one's imaginings. In this short paper I argue that Neo-expressivism can, in fact, accommodate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminal trials and proportional prison sentences are generally seen as the most suitable way to deal with perpetrators of atrocity crimes. Notwithstanding, traditionally conceived criminal penalties, such as imprisonment, may discourage active responsibility-taking by offenders, disaffect victims by not meeting their needs and impede meaningful engagement between perpetrators and survivors. Arguably, alternative criminal sanctions may be appropriate punishment even for atrocity crimes when tried in transitional societies. Using the case of Colombia, this article analyses the justifications of punishment for atrocities in transitional contexts and discusses the adequacy of alternative criminal sanctions as penalties for atrocity crimes. It concludes that under certain conditions, alternative sanctions can be a viable punishment option that may promote active responsibility-taking and contribute to repairing harm, reintegrating offenders into the community and (re)constructing relationships while serving expressive rationales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we motivate and develop a new approach to predicates of personal taste within the framework of semantic relativism. Our primary goal is to explain faultless disagreement—the phenomenon where two parties disagree, yet both have uttered something true—which is often thought to arise from the use of predicates of personal taste. We combine semantic relativism with an expressivist semantics to yield a novel hybrid theory which we call Expressive-Relativism. We motivate the theory by rehearsing a famous objection to Relativism from Frege which we interpret as severing the connection between contradiction and disagreement for relativists. Endorsing the objection, we respond by enriching relativism with an expressivist component which explains disagreement over matters of taste as a refusal to share perspectives rather than as resting on contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers have adopted epistemic expressivism in recent years. The core commitment of epistemic expressivism is that epistemic claims express conative states. This paper assesses the plausibility of this commitment. First, we raise a new type of problem for epistemic expressivism, the epistemic motivation problem. The problem arises because epistemic expressivists must provide an account of the motivational force of epistemic judgment (the mental state expressed by an epistemic claim), yet various features of our mental economy seem to show that they can't do so. Second, we develop what we take to be the most promising response to that problem for expressivists. We end by noting that this response faces an important challenge pertaining to the psychology of epistemic criticism and praise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on neopragmatist semantics as a solution to the embedding problem faced by local expressivist views. Topics include how constructive neopragmatist semantics addresses the logical relations among complex sentences account of first-order predicate logic; and Mark Schroeder's initial strategy and proposes an alternative approach that avoids the reliance on heavyweight propositions and offers a representation-free account of belief and negation to mixed language arguments.

Expressivism is supposed to have an advantage over moral realism, in that it can explain why it is a conceptual truth that the moral supervenes on the natural, even though the natural does not entail the moral. I develop an analogy between expressivism and a version of theistic moral realism, and argue that this version of theistic moral realism shares any advantage that expressivism might have. It may be that the alleged advantage that expressivism has over moral realism is overstated. Nevertheless, possible analogies between expressivism and theistic moral realism have received very little attention in the past, and are worth considering for their own sake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look to Amie Thomasson's work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressivism, as applied to a certain class of statements, evaluative ones, for instance, is constituted by two doctrines, only the first of which will concern me in this paper. Evaluative statements, according to this doctrine, aren't propositional (susceptible of truth or falsity). In this paper, I will argue that one of the vexing problems (that I label the "logical problem") this doctrine engenders for the expressivist is equally pressing for some cognitivists (who think evaluative statements do have a truth-value). I will present the difficulty and argue that some constructivists, who are cognitivists, cannot contend with it at all, and others must resort to more complex ways than the one available to other cognitivists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bart Streumer thinks that we cannot believe the global normative error theory. Streumer's argument presupposes a Cartesian theory of belief fixation. The Cartesian theory entails that we can understand a proposition without believing it. But the Cartesian theory of belief fixation is false, and the Spinozan theory is true. The Spinozan theory of belief fixation entails that we cannot understand a proposition without believing it. The present paper argues that Streumer's claim is false, and we can believe the global normative error theory because the Spinozan theory is correct. The paper then applies the Spinozan theory of belief fixation to the "Now what?" problem for global normative error theory and responds to objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper in this journal, Derek Baker (Erkenntnis 83(4):829–852, 2018) raises an objection to expressivism as it has been developed by Mark Schroeder (Being for, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). Baker argues that Schroeder's expressivist (1) is committed to certain sentences expressing rationally incoherent states of mind, and he objects (2) that the expressivist cannot explain why these states would be rationally incoherent. The aim of this paper is to show that Baker's argument for (1) is unsound, and that (1) is unlikely to be true. This obviates the need to explain the alleged rational incoherence, and so Baker's objection to Schroeder's expressivism is undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sensitivity is often spoken of in perceptual terms. However, sensibility theorists have often not been careful to specify how to understand their claims about moral sensibilities as perceptual. In this paper, we distinguish between what we call Attentional Moral Perception and Contentful Moral Perception. We argue that sensibility theorists should endorse Attentional Moral Perception, because it has very powerful empirical evidence in its favor, and it can play all of the explanatory roles that the sensibility theorist needs in her theory of moral sensibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following scenario seems possible: a community uses concepts that play the same role in guiding actions and shaping social life as our normative concepts, and yet refer to something else. As Eklund (2017) argues, this apparent possibility poses a problem for any normative realist who aspires to vindicate the thought that reality itself favors our ways of valuing and acting. How can realists make good on this idea, given that anything they might say in support of the privileged status of our normative concepts can be mirrored by the imagined community? E.g., the realist might claim that using our concepts is what we ought to do if we are to describe normative facts correctly, but members of the other community can claim the same about their concepts, using their own concept of ought. A promising approach to this challenge is to try to rule out the possibility of alternative normative concepts, by arguing that any concepts that have the same normative role must share a reference as well. (Eklund calls this referential normativity.) In this paper I argue that normative quasi-naturalism, a view that combines expressivism about normative discourse with a naturalist metaphysics of normativity, supports referential normativity and solves the problem of alternative normative concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to some contemporary philosophers of language, the Frege-Geach argument raises a genuine objection to semantic expressivism. In this paper it is argued that an effective way to confront and overcome this argument is by modifying the classical conception of expressivism. Both classical and minimal expressivisms are examined and a version of the latter is proposed. This version overcomes the objection derived from the Frege-Geach argument and has the advantage of including within the spectrum of expressionism theories that clearly have the same "spirit" but that the classical characterization leaves out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new form of metaethical expressivism according to which the normative judgment that X should Φ consists in a decision that X Φ. When the judgment is first‐personal—e.g., my judgment that I should Φ—the view is similar to Gibbard's plan expressivism, though the state I call "decision" differs somewhat from a Gibbard‐style plan. The deep difference between the views shows in the account of third‐personal judgments. Gibbard construes the judgment that Mary should Φ as a de se plan on the thinker's part to Φ if she turns out to be Mary (the Subtle View). I construe the judgment as a decision for Mary that Mary Φ (the Simple View). The main argument for Simple Plan Expressivism is that it solves problems for Gibbard's approach, resonates with a new and interesting moral psychology, and better makes sense of certain independently plausible constraints on normative judgment. In the end I argue that this account of normative judgment has implications for first‐order ethics, implying in particular that rational egoism as standardly formulated is incoherent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neurointerventions—interventions that physically or chemically modulate brain states—are sometimes imposed on criminal offenders for the purposes of diminishing the risk that they will recidivate, or, more generally, of facilitating their rehabilitation. One objection to the nonconsensual implementation of such interventions holds that this expresses a disrespectful message, and is thus impermissible. In this paper, we respond to this objection, focusing on the most developed version of it—that presented by Elizabeth Shaw. We consider a variety of messages that might be expressed by nonconsensual neurointerventions. Depending on the message, we argue either that such interventions do not invariably express this message, that expressing this message is not invariably disrespectful, or that the appeal to disrespect is redundant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional change can be produced through judicial interpretation when a particular dictum becomes informally entrenched and creates a new constitutional meaning without the need for a formal amendment. However, scholarship has not yet scrutinized the form of legal reasoning that may be used to push for such a change. The purpose of this article is to analyze the role of expressivism in justifying constitutional change through judicial interpretation. For this purpose, I have developed the expressivist framework into what I call "operationalized expressivism," which refers to constitutional courts interpreting references to constitutional identity in the constitution such as to create a juridical effect. I then use the dissenting opinion in the Indonesian LGBT case as a case study of how operationalized expressivism can initiate a constitutional change. I have selected this particular opinion because of its potential to radically transform the constitutional landscape of Indonesia, as the dissenting judges have declared the Indonesian Constitution as a "Godly" Constitution that requires all laws to be consistent with religious values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view that if-clauses function semantically as restrictors is widely regarded as the only candidate for a fully general account of conditionals. The standard implementation of this view assumes that, where no operator to be restricted is in sight, if-clauses restrict covert epistemic modals. Stipulating such modals, however, lacks independent motivation and leads to wrong empirical predictions. In this paper I provide a theory of conditionals on which if-clauses are uniformly interpreted as restrictors, but no covert modals are postulated. Epistemic if-clauses, like those in bare conditionals, restrict an information state parameter which is used to interpret an expressive layer of the language. I show that this theory yields an attractive account of bare and overtly modalized conditionals and solves various empirical problems for the standard view, while dispensing with its less plausible assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]