Expressivism And Rational Inference

Metaethical expressivism claims that moral statements like “stealing is wrong.” express certain conative attitudes or being in some desire-like states,such as “disapproving of stealing”(Blackburn 1984),“internalizing norms forbidding stealing”(Gibbard 1990),“making a contingent plan that not stealing”(Gibbard 2003),“being for blaming stealing”(Schroeder 2008),rather than express beliefs that certain action instantiates certain property.Expressivists endorse a kind of semantic ideationalism to explain this thesis,according to which the meanings or semantic contents of moral claims are in some sense given by the mental states that those claims express.Since expressivism takes a different stance on the meanings of moral language,it requires plenty of work to construct a distinctive semantics for moral sentences.One of the hardest challenges may be the well-known and troublesome Frege-Geach Problem.But some optimistic philosophers believe that a certain kind of well-developed expressivism theory can solve the Frege-Geach Problem.However,in his paper Non-Cognitivism and Wishful Thinking,Cian Dorr(2002)argued that even if the Frege-Geach problem is solved,expressvism still faces a distinct problem called the Wishful Thinking Problem: Within an expressivism theory,some intuitively rational inferences appear to be wishful thinking,which is a kind of irrationality.Published responses to this problem all seems to be based on an evidentialist framework of justification.Some concede the problem exists,and try to accommodate expressivism with epistemic evidentialism by arguing that in every seeming-wishful-thinking case,Edgar gets ordinary descriptive evidence for C in some way,which can justify his concluding C without it being a case of wishful thinking.(Enoch 2003;Lenman 2003).This kind of approach is proved to be unpromising in the literature(Schroeder 2010).Some deny that there is actually a problem here,either by claiming that any expressivist theory that is able to solve the Frege–Geach problem and is otherwise acceptable would not face this problem(Mabrito 2012),or by arguing that expressivists can endorse the same explanation of the rationality of such inferences that cognitivists should endorse(Budolfson 2009).This kind of defensive approach fails to grasp the core idea of the wishful thinking problem.In my paper,I will argue that the key point of this problem is our commitment to epistemic evidentialism of justification.The alleged wishful thinking problem for expressivism derives from the incompatibility between expressivism and evidentialism.Instead of remaining steadfast in evidentialism,I argue that expressivists could endorse a unified justification theory of our mental states to avoid the problem.