🚀 go-pugleaf

>From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)

MZ:
>Is anybody still taking emotivism seriously?

Yes, someone is.

>J:
>>As well you know, Simon Blackburn thinks that MANY predicates
>>should be paraphrased out that way. He thinks these predicates
>>express NO property, and yet that they are meaningful.
>
>Is anybody still taking Simon Blackburn seriously?

Well, now THAT I'm not sure about. I suspect so.

>J:
>>Even if you hate Blackburn, there are more respectable examples.
>>De Finetti was an expressivist about probability predicates, for
>>example. Allan Gibbard has a pretty good expressivist theory of
>>normative judgments.
>
>It remains to be shown that expressivism, as exemplified above, is
>bereft of an ontology of properties.

I didn't say, of course, that expressivism is bereft of an ontology
of properties. Expressivists may be quite happy with some properties,
but wish to rid their ontology of others.

I will fill in a couple of the examples now.

Blackburn claims that "is good" expresses no property, but that
it is nevertheless meaningful, because it has a function other
than expressing a property. Its function is to express an
attitude ("express" in this sentence is meant in a different
sense from that of "expresses a property").
(He says roughly the same thing about "causes" and "is necessary.")

De Finetti believed that the predicate "Has probability .5"
expressed no property, but that it was nevertheless meaningful
in that it expressed the speaker's degree of belief. (Again,
"expressed" in the second sense. Perhaps I will try to avoid
this locution, but it's not easy since the name of the view
is "expressivism.")

>J:
>>I suppose what I was thinking was that there is no property of
>>Yesterday Occurrence. Nevertheless, "Occurred yesterday" does
>>express a property on each occasion of utterance.
>
>Does not do anything for your claim then, does it?

Which claim?

>J:
>>Why don't you think that's a counterexample? Is it,
>>(a) because Expressivism is false,
>>(b) because a predicate with an Expressivist analysis is meaningless,
>>(c) because a predicate with an Expressivist analysis nonetheless
>>    expresses a property,
>>
>>or something else?
>
>At the moment, I do not quite know what it is.

I would now like to add another possibility,

(d) because the things that look like predicates are not,
according to an Expressivist analysis, really predicates at all.

Jamie