Talk:Expressivism

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Additional information: Related task forces (core areas): Ethics

I know nothing about meta-ethics, so excuse me if this is a stupid question, but:

'In the second statement the expressivist account appears to fail, in that the speaker asserting the hypothetical premise is expressing no moral position towards lying, condemnatory or otherwise'

the second statement is 'it is wrong to tell lies': surely the speaker is expressing a moral position here? Hopsyturvy 12:23, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

It's definitely not a stupid question - the Frege-Geach problem is very badly explained here. It misses out pretty much all of the formal logic argument for the conclusion. Essentially, though, the point of the argument is that if expressivism is correct, then "It is wrong to tell lies" and "If it is wrong to tell lies" refer to entirely different things and thus do not have an equivalent meaning. This would make the simple inference given invalid, which is obviously wrong. The key part is the "if", which alters the meaning of the sentence.

If you want a more detailed explanation, then the chapter on this in Alex Miller's "Metaethics" is quite good. Ignore his commentary, though; he's better at explaining than he is at arguing. 129.234.4.76 13:26, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

If the explanation is so bad, perhaps you'd like to rewrite it with the logic? But more fundamentally, you miss the key point that the sentence quoted by Hopsyturvy was erroneous - it should have referred to the first statement. I have corrected this now. Raoul2 11:15, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

According to the current article, if someone said "Killing is wrong", then on the expressivist analysis they would really be saying "I approve of the statement "killing is wrong"". I don't think this is what the expressivist had in mind - since if this were the case then all moral propositions would actually be truth apt (in fact, expressivism would be much more akin to metaethical subjectivism on this analysis). The statements which the origonal moral proposition are analysed into must not be truth apt, it must be an expression of something (be it an emotion as in classic emotivism, or some other sentiment) much more akin to "B!x" or "H!y".

I started a rewrite of this article. There were no references/bibliographic information at all, and some of the information was inaccurate (i.e., equation of expressivism with subjectivism). I kept the material on arguments for and against as is; I'll probably replace it later with better stuff.

SCPhilosopher 20:20, 29 October 2007 (UTC)