Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Expressivism and Stipulation

    Giulia Pravato (University of Venice)

04 May 2016  |  15:00  |  Seminari de Filosofia UB

Abstract

Expressivism about some fragment of language (deontic sentences, epistemic modal sentences, etc.) is standardly characterized as the thesis that the semantic properties of the target sentences and the relations among them (like truth, inconsistency, validity, etc.) are to be explained in terms of properties of the mental attitudes that are conventionally expressed by uses of these sentences, rather than in terms of their contents or truth-conditions (Schroeder 2008; Silk 2014). It is often claimed that by so doing, i.e. by reversing the classical order of explanation, expressivists face explanatory challenges that are instead avoided by cognitivists, and that are only met by stipulating that the relevant attitudes (e.g. the ones associated with accepting the sentences ''gambling is wrong'' and ''gambling is not wrong'') have the properties that the semantic formalism represents them as having (e.g. by assigning two disjoint sets of ''hyperplans'' to the two sentences). In this talk, I examine various specifications of what it means, in general, to ''explain the inconsistency of S and not-S''. I argue that these specifications are either question-begging against the expressivist, or are such that, presumably, standard cognitivist explanations are no less stipulative than expressivist ones.