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.
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August 13, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Jimmy Lenman
“Even if you have an expressivistically acceptable account of conjunction and negation, you are not home and dry.”
Have you shown this? Your point about necessity and possiblity being duals was that we can eliminate some cases where negation governs modal operators replacing them with equivalant claims where the opposite is true. That tries to handle negated modals by making some of them go away. Then your O3 point is that this doesn’t make ALL of them go away so insofar as we want to call the O2 point an account of negation, it’s a failed one. That hardly shows that a SUCCESSFUL expressivistically acceptable account of negation wouldn’t get us home and dry.
August 13, 2008 at 9:46 pm
richwoodward
Hey Jimmy…
Thanks for this.
I guess the thought was something like this: we need to be careful exactly what the expressivist needs to do in order to solve the Frege-Geach problem. What I’d like to think that I’ve shown is that the issue ISN’T simply to give an account of negation that works in the simplest embedded contexts. If the relevant operators we introduce for the positive and negative attitudes are duals, then we’ll have a simply story about what it is to negate a simple “BOX-p” claim (say). I thought that this observation was interesting, since it showed that we needed an account of negation that could be applied in ANY embedded context. And the only claim I wanted to make was that the duality line couldn’t be extended to those cases.
But, of course, if by a “successful expressivistically acceptable account of negation”, you mean an account of negation that successfully be applied in any embedding, then I haven’t shown that the issue doesn’t simply boil down to “can we give a successful expressivistically acceptable account of negation?”.
As I said, I’m not an expert on this stuff, and I’m still getting to grips with the literature. But at least *I* thought it was interesting to note that, at least in the local case of the modal expressivist, the problem is more acute wrt complex embeddings that it is with respect to the simplest ones. And that seemed to me to be something that wasn’t present in the case of the moral expressivist, where the simplest cases were just as acute as the complex onces. (That might be ignorance on my part and I’d be interested to hear if people had discussed this complexity issue in the literature.)
August 14, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Jimmy Lenman
I don’t disagree with any of that.
Mark Schroeder’s new book, “Being For” looks like it might be interesting on this stuff but I’ve not read enough of it yet to say so with more confidence.