Expressivism and Language Learning

Abstract

Expressivists hold that when we make normative claims about actions, agents, feelings, and so on, we are not making descriptive claims about those things—claims that can be true or false. Rather, they hold that when we make a claim such as “killing is wrong” we are expressing a certain sort of attitude toward killing, or toward norms that prohibit killing. And this attitude, whatever it is, is not one of belief. For beliefs can be true or false. If normative claims expressed the attitude of belief, then such claims could themselves be true or false also. The attitudes expressed by normative claims are therefore pro and con attitudes such as desire, approval, disgust, or more sophisticated versions of such things. The inability of normative claims to be true or false—at least in the representational way in which naturalistic claims are true and false—is not an accidental feature of expressivism. Rather, one of the attractions of expressivism is precisely that it avoids the messy problem of explaining what sorts of things our normative claims could be about, such that they could be true or false. That is, it avoids the problems of