In the preface to Being For I defend the book’s preoccupation with what might seem to many philosophers to be matters of detail. The details, after all, are where the devil is, and accountability to details is what makes the difference between a subject and a discipline. It isn’t my goal in the book to focus on details to the exclusion of the big picture; on the contrary I try hard throughout the book to stay focused on details whose resolution is central to the larger questions that are at stake, and to explain their centrality. Still, the book is detail oriented, and it pursues a particular line of inquiry. The main idea, as I explained in the Synopsis, is to constructively develop what I take to be the most promising sort of expressivist theory, in order to illustrate the significant sorts of problems that it faces. One significant consequence of the book’s preoccupation with the details arising along this particular line of inquiry is that the book starts fairly far along in the story, leaving a fair number of upstream issues largely undiscussed. This is in part because the topic of the book, metaethical expressivism, is just one strand of the noncognitivist tradition stretching, at least, from Hägerström, through Ogden and Richards, Schlick and Carnap, Ayer and Stevenson, Hare, Edwards, Smart, Blackburn, Gibbard and Horgan and Timmons. And it is partly because I have discussed some of those other issues elsewhere – particularly in ‘What is the Frege-Geach Problem’, in ‘Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices’, and in my forthcoming Noncognitivism in Ethics. But it is also because the approaches to the ‘negation problem’ that I discuss and criticize in Chapter 3 are only the ones I take to have the greatest promise. Being For includes no discussion at all of an earlier generation of approaches to the Frege-Geach Problem which I’ve argued elsewhere face a quite different set of problems; for purposes of the book, I merely presuppose that these earlier approaches are unsatisfactory.