Being for : evaluating the semantic program of expressivism / Mark Schroeder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schroeder, Mark Andrew, 1977-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Expression (Philosophy).

Semantics (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

xvi, 197 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.

Summary:

Expressivism-the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare-is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy-including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers.

Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been very far developed. As argued within, expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the 'negation problem'-to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true, let alone whether it is.

Being For seeks to evaluate the semantic commitments of expressivism, by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem-but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism. But it also argues that no account with these advantages can be generalized to deal with constructions like tense, modals, or binary quantifiers. Expressivism, the book argues, is coherent and interesting, but false.

Contents:

Introduction

Expression

The negation problem

Its solution

Composition and logic

Predicates and quantifiers

Descriptive language and belief

Biforcated attitude semantics

Assigning truth-conditions

An alternative approach

Nondescriptivist semantics

The limits and costs of expressivism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [188]-192) and index.

ISBN:

9780199534654

0199534659

OCLC:

191763313