Abstract
Contemporary expressivists typically deny that all true judgments must represent reality. Many instead adopt truth minimalism, according to which there is no substantive property of judgments in virtue of which they are true. In this article, I suggest that expressivists would be better suited to adopt truth pluralism, or the view that there is more than one substantive property of judgments in virtue of which judgments are true. My point is not that an expressivism that takes this form is true, but that it more readily accommodates the motivations that typically lead expressivists to their view in the first place.
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Notes
Strictly, this might be better labeled, “judgment-truth monism”. Parallel versions can be stated for beliefs and propositions. See Lynch (2009).
One might worry whether expressivists can actually help themselves to the T-schema without further theoretical work, since claims such as ‘It is true that P’ and ‘<P> is true if P’ involve embedding ‘P’ into complex contents. I waive this worry for present purposes, however.
Nor does is seem particularly attractive to hold that I could believe that murder is wrong (and hence that it is true that murder is wrong) without being able to express that via a judgment.
This version of the argument is inspired by Shafer-Landau’s discussion (2003, p. 121).
Similarly, one might think that expressivists are committed to an ontological difference between values and things like tables and turtles (see Chrisman 2008). But this ontological point could be thought to imply a representational/non-representational divide. Moral properties do not exist, some say, because unlike physical properties, their existence is not needed to explain why we represent the world in the way that we do.
Note that this is what makes pluralism about truth—rather than mere belief—particularly attractive for the expressivist. A mere pluralism in different kinds of belief that did not allude to distinct kinds of truth would fail to have to resources to explain the representational intuition.
See Lynch (2009) for development of this view.
Beall and Restall (2005) defend a non-domain specific version of logical pluralism.
Previous versions of this article were read at the University of Sydney and The New School. Thanks to audiences there and to (in no particular order) Simon Blackburn, Kevin Scharp, Patrick Greenough, Mark Richard, Huw Price, Crispin Wright, Paul Bloomfield, Michael Hughes, Casey Johnson, Jeremy Wyatt, Mark Schroeder, Matthew Chrisman and an anonymous reviewer.
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Appendix
Appendix
Above, I argued that the quasi-realism realism is a poor fit for what I called R-expressivism, because R-expressivists presumably hold that truth depends on representation in some domains and not in others. And this is incompatible with minimalism.
There is another argument available by which to make this point. Whether you judge it sound depends on whether you accept certain other premises. Since these premises are controversial, I think it is best left as an afterthought to the article. I present the argument here in abbreviated, informal, form.
R-expressivists deny that the following holds across the board:
REPRESENT: The belief that grass is green is true because it represents that p and p.
Here beliefs are understood as mental items. “Representation” here is understood to be some sort of metaphysically thick relation: one that is identical to, or supervenient on, a natural relation. The “because” signals a metaphysical grounding relation (you can, if you prefer philosophers’ English, read it as “in virtue of”). Someone who endorses REPRESENT across the board is endorsing that the truth of every belief depends on two factors: (a) the fact that it represents, in a non-trivial way, what it does; (b) and the way the world is. To deny REPRESENT is to hold that there are at least some beliefs whose truth does not depend on their representing some state of affairs. And that’s just the quasi-realist view we are entertaining: ethical beliefs can be true or false without representing. But of course it also contradicts minimalism, for it entails that some true beliefs are true by virtue of possessing some substantive property.
So our quasi-realist endorses REPRESENT only locally. So she takes some instances of the schema to be true. One such instance she will presumably take to be true is:
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1.
The belief that grass is green is true “because” it represents that grass is green and grass is green.
But our quasi-realist, I argued in the article, was a minimalist about belief as well as truth. Consequently, it seems plausible that she is committed to minimalism about belief-truth, that is, she will endorse the view that the following instances exhaust our concept of belief-truth:
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2.
The belief that grass is green is true iff grass is green.
If we grant this, then from 1 and 2 we can conclude via substitution:
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3.
Grass is green “because” the belief that grass is green represents that grass is green and grass is green.
This is a surprising result on its face. The latter half of 3 is a conjunction. Consequently, 3 claims that grass’s being green depends on there being (a) beliefs, and (b) beliefs that represent certain states of affairs. This is presumably not a welcome result for the quasi-realist. She claims that REPRESENT holds in some domains. But it is in those domains we want to be realist. The argument indicates however, that in the domains that REPRESENT holds, states of affairs represented by beliefs in those domains obtain in virtue of there being beliefs that represent those states of affairs. This gets the mind/world fit exactly backward from what one would expect: we get antirealism in those domains where realism was desired.
There are several ways to respond naturally. One might first deny the argument is valid because propositions of the form p “because” q create opaque contexts. If propositions of the form p because q are opaque—where “because” again indicates a metaphysical grounding relation—then one cannot expect to substitute co-referring expressions and preserve truth. So the minimalist can reject the move from 2 to 3. The question is how this move is motivated. Why should we think that propositions of that form are opaque? The following examples do not seem to be:
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Grass is green “because” the Pope says it is.
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Grass is green “because” that’s how the universe is.
In these examples, “The proposition that grass is green is true” can substituted for “grass is green” without loss of truth-value. Likewise, with “The belief that grass is green is true”. Consequently there seems no reason—other than to avoid the argument—to say that propositions of this form are opaque.
Alternatively, one might deny (1). This is tantamount to holding that REPRESENT is never true. Perhaps this is correct; but as I noted above, it seems a bit of a drastic move for an expressivist to adopt.
Finally, one might deny (2). This is to deny belief-truth minimalism. Not surprisingly, this is the route I would suggest. Minimalism is no friend of expressivism.
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Lynch, M.P. Expressivism and plural truth. Philos Stud 163, 385–401 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9821-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9821-3