Clarity Of Meaning And Frege-Geach Problem

According to expressivists,the source of sentence’s meaning is the speaker’s mental state,which he or she expresses upon its utterance.They think that descriptive sentences express beliefs,and moral sentences express noncognitive mental states.Expressivists must contend with the two-stage Frege-Geach problem when analyzing the meaning of these sentences.The focus of the first stage of the Frege-Geach problem is how moral sentences embedded into complex sentences can keep in contact with their source of meaning.Expressivists claim that either it is not necessary for meaningful sentences to keep in contact with their source of meaning or the Frege-Geach problem is a problem for all philosophers,not only expressivists.Ordinarily,this reply is considered successful.In recent years,the second stage of the Frege-Geach problem has received most of the attention.To solve the Frege-Geach problem,expressivists need to offer clear compositional semantics and explain the semantic properties of sentences.Classical expressivists(Blackburn,Gibbard,and Horgan and Timmons)hold a basic idea that there is more than one moral attitude.Opponents of expressivism think that expressivists cannot supply valid compositional semantics without giving up the basic idea.Some philosophers(Schroeder,Schwartz,and Horm and Silk)think that expressivists can provide good compositional semantics by changing their basic idea and giving solutions.The purpose of this dissertation is to show that expressivists can address the Frege-Geach problem and maintain a connection between a sentence s meaning and its source by providing valid compositional semantics without giving up their basic idea.Chapter one illustrates expressivism briefly and defines the Frege-Geach problem.After this introduction,I will show how expressivists successfully respond to the first stage of the Frege-Geach problem.Chapter two articulates the second stage of the Frege-Geach problem and focuses on the negation problem,disjunction problem,and hybrid sentence problem.Chapter three shows that the second stage of the Frege-Geach problem is not fatal to expressivist semantics.By introducing the "sincere state" and offering up two assumptions,expressivists can provide supportive compositional semantics on their basic idea.