Frege, Geach and Modal Expressivism

Another talk that I went to in Geneva was Amie Thomasson’s, which was about modal expressivism. I was really glad I got to hear it, since I’d missed it when she gave it in Leeds earlier this year because, ironically enough, I was over in Geneva giving a couple of papers. Needless to say, Amie’s talk was really good. I wasn’t totally convinced, since her account was obviously inspired by Brandom’s recent work (which I haven’t got round to reading yet) whereas my expressivist sympathies are more rooted in Crispin Wright’s work on the area (e.g. in Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics and ‘Inventing Logical Necessity’). Anyways, here is something about modal expressivism I’ve been mulling over for a while which, with a hat-tip to Amie, I thought I’d give an airing.

Suppose that you are being tempted towards being an expressivist about moral talk. Roughly, you are tempted to accept the negative thesis that moral claims do not function to express beliefs or to state facts (in any substantial sense of ‘belief’ or ‘facts’). Accepting this negative thesis saddles you with an explanatory challenge. You need to say what moral claims do do if they don’t express beliefs or state facts. In order to meet this explanatory challenge, you probably accept a positive thesis according to which moral claims function to express attitudes of approval or disapproval towards particular kinds of action. So when you say “murder is wrong”, you’re expressing a certain kind of negative attitude towards murderous actions. (You might think that you are expressing desires or issuing commands, or something else. Put those differences to one side for now.)

The following objection is familar: even if you have a decent story about what simple moral claims do, you’re going to run into trouble when those claims are embedded in various contexts. This is the Frege-Geach problem. In various presentations of the problem, focus is often upon modus ponens arguments, such as

(1) If getting Elizabeth to murder is wrong, getting Ross to murder is wrong.
(2) Getting Elizabeth to murder is wrong
Therefore (3) Getting Ross to murder is wrong

Even you, qua expressivist, have a good story about (2), the challenge is to say what’s going on when (2) figures in conditional contexts, as it does in (1).

FIRST “OBSERVATION”: The focus on conditionals looks misleading. Classically, (1) is equivalent to a negated conjunction. But there is no obvious problem with conjunction for the non-cognitivist (it’ll just be expressing both attitudes). So the problem is about negation. This is unsurprising, I guess, since a negated context is the simplest embedded context.

SECOND “OBSERVATION”: If conjunction is okay for the expressivist, then the expressivist will be in a good position if she can give us an account of negation. For, as is familiar, once you have negation and conjunction, you can define other constructions, such as disjunction, out of them.

These observations, I think, have conseqences for the Frege-Geach problem for modal expressivism. On this account, modal claims don’t function to express modal beliefs or to state modal facts. They do something else. Perhaps, for instance, they function to express ones acceptance of policies. On this idea, claiming “necessarily p” expresses ones acceptance of a policy of never giving up believing that p and claiming “possibly p” expresses ones rejection of policies whereby not-p is sacrosant.

Now, consider the following claim:

(4) not-possibly P

Remember the first observation: the Frege-Geach problem was about negation. But, familarly, the modal operators are duals, meaning that (4) is equivalent to (5):

(5) necessarily not-p

Notice what we’ve done: we’ve gone from a claim where a modal operator is embedded in a negated context, and moved to a claim where the modal operator is “out front”. So, negation is alot easier if you are a modal expressivist – at least in some contexts, you can simply move from an embedded context to a non-embedded context. And once you’ve done that, you can simply give your expressivist story about possibility claims.

THIRD “OBSERVATION”: Even if the previous points stand, the modal expressivist isn’t home and dry. For not all embedded contexts are as simple as the one outlined above. For instance, we can’t do the same trick when we have claims like (6):

(6): It is not the case that (not-p and necessarily p)

What this suggests is that there was something wrong with the initial two “observations”. Even if you have an expressivistically acceptable account of conjunction and negation, you are not home and dry. Why? Because we’ll be able to come up with a context where those connectives are embedded in more complicated ways and it won’t be obvious how to extend our previous account of negation and conjunction to those cases. I’m tempted to say that there is some sort of compositionality worry lurked around here, but I’m not sure. What seems clear is that the difficulties for the expressivist increase as we increase the syntactic complexity of the claims we’re considering. That’s interesting, I think.

Fundamentality and Ontological Commitment

I just got back from the Eidos Metaphysics conference in Geneva. It was really good fun and a great opportunity to catch up with people. One talk I went to was Robert Schwartzkopff’s, which was about the kind of metaphysical picture that is popular at Leeds. I just thought I’d write a little something about some issues that arose.

Following Kit Fine and others, we might be tempted to draw a distinction between what exists and what fundamentally exists (or really exists, or metaphysically exists, or whatever). Despite initial reticence, I’m quite attracted to this view (if you hang around in Leeds long enough, you end up being sympathetic to lots of funny views like this).

Question: what should we, qua fundamentalists, say about ontological commitment?

One view, which Ross Cameron has suggested, is that the friend of fundamentality should reject the normal Quinean criterion in favour of something else. Why? Well, I guess the idea is that the Quinean criterion will have us being ontologically committed to non-fundamental things (tables, say), because we’re committed to saying that “there are tables” expresses a truth. But fundamentalists, at least as they are often conceived, are tough desert dwellers who don’t want non-fundamental things like tables, and sums, and numbers in their ontologies. Rather, they just want the fundamental things. So, the Quinean criterion gives the wrong results and we better put something else in its place (perhaps something in terms of requirements or perhaps something in terms of truthmaking or perhaps something else). Then hopefully, we’ll be able to say that “there are tables” expresses a truth without being ontologically committed to tables and without the need to mess out with paraphrase or assertoric force or anything like that. On this view, the ontological question is “what fundamentally exists?” and the ontological project is to answer this question and not Quine’s question “what exists?”.

One thing that isn’t immediately clear, however, is that this is what the fundamentalist has to say. Here is how I tend to look at the matter at the moment. Quine asked the right question when he asked “what exists?”. And let’s spot Quine that his criterion for ontological commitment was broadly right. On this view, fundamentalists are ontologically committed both to fundamental things and to non-fundamental things. But this isn’t to say that the distinction between the fundamental and the non-fundamental doesn’t play an important role.

Suppose we have two theories, T1 and T2. T1 and T2 have exactly the same ontological commitments by Quinean standards. But T1 says that many more things are fundamental than T2 does. Both Ross and I will agree that T2 is the better theory. Ross will say that this is because T2 has less ontological commitments than T2 and that this, ceteris parabis, gives us reason to prefer T2 to T1. I can’t say that, because I’m buying the Quinean criterion, but I will say that T2 is simpler in terms of its fundamental ontology and that this, ceteris paribus, gives us reason to prefer T2 over T1. So, for both Ross and I, the distinction between the fundamental and the non-fundamental plays an important role when it comes to theory choice.

At this point, you might think that the difference between Ross’s view and mine is purely terminological. I’m identifying the ontological commitments of a theory with the entities which that theory says exists either fundamentally or derivatively. Ross is identifying the ontological commitments of a theory with the entities which that theory says exists fundamentally. But since we’re both agreeing that on the role that the distinction plays in terms of theory choice, we’re just differing over how to use the word ‘ontological commitment’.

To be honest, I wouldn’t care too much if this was the case. And I don’t think Ross would either. Now I’m going to finally get round to reading Ross’s latest paper on this topic, “Quantification, Naturalness and Ontology”, which is available from his webpage.