134 Dorit Bar-On and Matthew Chrisman 5 Ethical Neo-Expressivism

نویسندگان

  • Dorit Bar-On
  • Matthew Chrisman
چکیده

A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. Either we can treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that entail something about the speaker’s motivational attitudes (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as having their semantic content constituted by the motivational attitudes they directly express (noncognitivism). In this paper, we argue that there is another option, which can be recognized once we see that there is no need to build the expression relation between ethical claims and motivational states of mind into the semantic content of ethical claims. In articulating the third option, we try to capture what we think is worth preserving about the classical expressivist idea that ethical claims directly express motivational states, and separate it from the wrong semantic ideas with which it has traditionally been caught up. Doing so requires arguing for and deploying a distinction between claims considered as products—such as sentences—and claims considered as linguistic acts—such as utterances. In our view, the former are properly seen as standing in an expression relation to propositions, whereas the latter are properly seen as standing in an expression relation to mental states. In the first section below, we use this act/product distinction to defend a ‘‘neo-expressivist’’ view of the way in which ethical claims express

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تاریخ انتشار 2008