Abstract
AbstractWhat makes two sentences inconsistent? Expressivists understand the meaning of a sentence in terms of the mental state it expresses. In order to explain the inconsistency between two sentences, the expressivist must appeal to some inconsistency feature of the mental states expressed. A simple explanation is that two sentences, e.g., “murder is wrong” and “murder is not wrong” are inconsistent by virtue of expressing mental states that disagree. Schroeder (2008) argues that the expressivist lacks a plausible explanation of the disagreement. Baker & Woods (2015) argue that Schroeder is wrong. With these authors, I agree that expressivists have an explanation of disagreement, but this does not adequately explain why two sentences are inconsistent. The reason is that two intuitively inconsistent sentences do not necessarily express mental states that disagree. Moreover, assuming that the expressivist gives a structurally identical explanation for moral and non-moral language, the problem generalizes to non-moral language. It is also argued that the problem extends to thought. How expressivists can and should conceive of inconsistency thus remains a challenge.
Funder
riksbankens jubileumsfond
University of Gothenburg
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Social Sciences,Philosophy
Reference24 articles.
1. Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd Edition. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd
2. Baker, D., & Woods, J. (2015). How expressivists can and should explain inconsistency. Ethics, 125(2), 391–424
3. Blackburn (1988). “Attitudes and contents,” Ethics 98: 501 – 17
4. Charlow, N. (2015). Prospects for an expressivist theory of meaning. Philosophers’ Imprint, 15, 1–43
5. Dreier, J. (1996). Expressivist embeddings and minimalist truth. Philosophical Studies, 83(1), 29–51