Abstract
It has recently become popular to apply expressivism outside the moral domain, e.g., to truth and epistemic justification. This paper examines the prospects of generalizing expressivism to taste. This application has much initial plausibility. Many of the standard arguments used in favor of moral expressivism seem to apply to taste. For example, it seems conceivable that you and I disagree about whether chocolate is delicious although we don’t disagree about the facts, which suggests that taste judgments are noncognitive attitudes rather than beliefs. However, there is also a striking difference between moral disagreements and disagreements about taste. Faced with a moral disagreement, we intuit that (at least) either party is at fault. Disagreements about taste, by contrast, are occurrences where neither party intuitively is at fault. This leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, if a disagreement in attitude is not intuited as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to taste. If, on the other hand, a disagreement in attitude is a disagreement that we intuit as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to the moral domain. The aim of this paper is to examine how an expressivist can avoid this dilemma.
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Notes
A brief note on terminology: Below I will use “attitude” to refer to non-doxastic attitudes, e.g., approval or disapproval—in contrast to doxastic attitude, e.g., belief. The term “judgment” is intentionally used ambiguously. It can be understood as either referring to a speech act (e.g., assertion—in a minimal sense) or a state of mind. When used to refer to a state of mind, it is supposed to be natural between cognitivism and noncognitivism.
It has also been argued that generalizing expressivism to certain domains, e.g., epistemic justification, demonstrates that expressivism is incoherent.
This characterization leaves a number of questions unanswered. One question concerns how the expression relation should be understood. See, e.g., Schroeder (2008) for discussion. Another question concerns the kind of attitude that a moral sentence functions to express. See Eriksson (2014b) for my own approach to these matters.
Ridge (2014), by contrast, primarily thinks of expressivism as a metasemantical thesis that has no direct semantic commitments. For example, expressivism as a metasemantical thesis, Ridge thinks, is consistent with a straightforward truth-conditional approach to semantics.
The debate around internalism is complicated. For example, one may argue that expressivists are committed to a too tight connection between moral judgments and motivation, which undermine the analysis. See Björklund et al. (2012) for an up-to-date survey of different positions and arguments.
See e.g., Eriksson (2014a).
Here sincerity is understood in the Searlean sense, namely, to have the attitude that one gives expression to.
See also, e.g., Tersman’s idea about latitude (Tersman 2006).
This seems to be related to considerations having to do with the open question argument and suggests that it is some other feature than descriptive ones that are most important to understand moral thought and talk. It suggests that moral language is different from prosaically factual language.
This famously doesn’t seem to handle the disagreement between someone who thinks that an act is wrong and someone who thinks that it is permissible. I will not, however, address this problem here.
It may be objected that the open question argument is less compelling regarding predicates of taste. For example, one may think that “I know that putrid meat would taste disgusting to me, but is it really disgusting?” isn’t obviously an open question. Even if the open question argument isn’t equally compelling, for reasons I will not try to delineate here, asking the question doesn’t seem to involve a linguistic mistake. It is not, for example, on par with asking “I know that this is a square, but does it really have four equal sides?”.
Interestingly, in moral matters, things appear to be quite different. Although we are sensitive to the fact that other people judge by different standards (which is important for e.g., what a judge is committed) we don’t give advice regarding what to do based on the advisee’s standard, but our own.
It should be emphasized that there may well be competing analyses of taste judgments. For example, one may think that deliciousness is a response-dependent property. One may think that some kind of contextualist, relativist or hybrid theory is a serious rival. This is true, but the aim of this paper is merely to examine how a pure expressivist can account for the different intuitions regarding taste disagreements and moral disagreements. Examining the relative merits of different views will have to wait for another occasion.
I will not here try to spell out in any detail how we should understand the relevant attitudes in order to distinguish between taste judgments and moral judgments. This is, of course, important to distinguish between judgments belonging to the two domains. However, the difference emphasized below is a way of demarking at least one sense in which the relevant attitudes differ.
Exactly how to understand “faultless disagreement” is controversial. However, for the purposes of this paper, this rough characterization of the phenomenon suffices. See Eriksson and Tiozzo (forthcoming) for discussion.
Similarly, Wright (2006) distinguishes between dispute about facts and disputes of inclinations. If we are faced with a dispute about facts, then either party must have made some kind of mistake.
Given that one has such a disposition one is also likely to expect that chocolate will give rise to certain pleasurable experiences. Moreover, it should be noted that this generic judgment is consistent with exceptions.
See e.g., López de Sa (2008).
For discussion, see Marques and García-Carpintero (2014).
Of course, we sometimes call someone’s judgment into question because it conflicts with the judge’s moral standard or other judgments he or she claims to endorse.
Another use of “you’re mistaken” in matters of taste is when it is said in jest.
It may also be argued that alleged absence of a practical problem is illusory—it is just that some disagreements concern coordination of attitudes in hypothetical situations. Compare, e.g., Gibbard (2003) and contingency planning.
See Ridge (2003) for an argument to this effect. The objections below derive from Ridge’s paper.
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Acknowledgments
An early version of this paper was presented at the University of Gothenburg. I am grateful for the feedback on this occasion. I am also grateful for helpful comments and suggestions provided by two anonymous referees for this journal. Special thanks to Ragnar Francén Olinder and Marco Tiozzo—not only for their comments and suggestions, but also for making work on these matters extremely fun and stimulating. This research was funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2012-988).
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Eriksson, J. Expressivism, Attitudinal Complexity and Two Senses of Disagreement in Attitude. Erkenn 81, 775–794 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9767-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9767-5