Gibbard on Normative Logic

Abstract

Evaluative judgements fit into all the classical contexts: negation and disjunction as well as conditionals, and when we consider evaluative predicates, quantification as well: Anthony did something wrong, or whenever Anthony does something wrong he also does something right. we call the good behaviour of evaluative sentences in all these contexts the propositional surface of evaluative discourse, then the challenge for the expressivist is explaining the propositional surface, and this is one of the problems Gibbard claims to solve in Chapter 5 of Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. To those impressed by the Frege-Geach problem it is as if there is an abyss between the simple states of mind the expressivist relies upon, and real judgement. Putting it this way also reveals that the problem is an example of the more general problem of understanding the relationship between judgements and simpler things like pictures or representations, such as animals may manage, but which apparently cannot be negative, or disjunctive, or quanficational. Indeed, it was negation itself that Frege used to point out the depth of the abyss. Images and other substitutes for judgements cannot be negated. They are not in the space of logic at all. The same seems to be true of the motivational states or pressures on action that expressivists wish to build upon. Like many philosophical puzzles this of indirect contexts has a tantalizing aspect. On the one hand it seems as if we habitually allow ourselves a propositional surface even when an expressivist starting point seems almost irresistible: it makes no difference whether I say Yummy!, or That's nice!, yet if I say the latter I can go on to disjoin, negate, hypothesize and quantify. So it can seem as if the phenomenon should be easily explicable, and that the Geach-Frege point cannot really mark an important obstacle to expressivism. On the other hand it can seem to be absolutely critical. For expressivism it seems that there is nothing-no proposition or judgementto hypothesize, or no real predicate to quantify over. When one starts off If killing is wrong.... there is nothing being supposed to be the case; no fact imagined being put into place. To make the absence vivid, we can play it through with another example. Suppose we interpret Hume, as I think we