Abstract
This chapter is a critical discussion global expressivism (GE), the version of ARTL that Price defends. It revolves around two main issues. The first is Price’s idea that by rejecting Representationalism we can, without abjuring naturalism, sidestep metaphysical questions concerning how entities and phenomena of the common sense world fit into the natural world, in the way many naturalists and physicalists take it they must to be real. I defend this argument of Price’s against various recent critiques. The second concerns the issue of whether GE is the best or only way of defending and/or substantiating ARTL. I argue, pace Price, that GE is not the only coherent way of defending ARTL, and that even if one adopts his subject naturalistic approach, there are other ways of substantiating ARTL than GE.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Others might call it ‘metaphysical naturalism’ or ‘physicalism’. The former label is perhaps unfortunate to the extent it suggests the view is necessarily a form of metaphysical realism, which as we shall see I don’t think is the case.
- 2.
The kind of project in question can be seen as invidious in operating with a distinction between, on the one hand, categories that are seen as fundamental, and, on the other, those that are not and hence have to placed within the world view constituted by the former. Exactly what kind of such a metaphysics object naturalism involves – that is, where exactly it draws its invidious distinction – will not be directly relevant to our discussion here; the most prominent version is probably a form of physicalism, but a broader, non-exclusively physics-based conception of what is fundamental in the natural world is of course also possible.
- 3.
Whether there is on this view an asymmetry in explanatory direction in a biconditional like ‘p’ is true iff p is a further matter that I will not broach here.
- 4.
A Ramseyfied theory (after Frank Ramsey) is one in which the theoretical terms in a suitably axiomatized empirical theory are replaced by quantified-over variables. Jackson (op. cit.) links such theories to the products of conceptual analysis, and hence the starting for doing metaphysics ‘Canberra-style’.
Note that Price allows that Ramseyfication can play a role in a theoretical reduction or identification without any assumption of representationalism, along the lines of Lewis (1972) (cf. Price 2004, 196), though it is unclear why one would hold the assumption such reductions presuppose – that all causal roles are filled by physical realisers – without being an object naturalist about causation in the first place, which then itself requires justification, as Price himself clearly sees and we shall discuss more fully in Sect. 2.4 below. (Perhaps there are still good empirical reasons for a version of this view within science, see e.g. Papineau 2000, but even here the issues are dialectically delicate.)
- 5.
The expression is due to Robert Kraut (1990).
- 6.
Given this distinction, label global expressivism might be somewhat misleading, as this tends to imply an approach to a vocabulary that does not make use of its (putatively) referring terms to explain its existence and function. Price acknowledges this non-standard usage, gesturing further at how GE’s deflationary understanding of truth provides a further, non-standard way of exemplifying an ‘expressivist’ approach (2013, pp. 177–8). He avers that global pragmatism might thus be more appropriate as a label. On the other hand, he also thinks expressivist explanations in a more traditional sense can be extended at least a lot further and deeper than is often assumed (for example, to categories like causation; see Price & Menzies 1993, Price 2005). His main point in any case is that the explanations in question are (uniformly) not Representationalist and (hence) not metaphysical, but rather based on use and function. I will recur to some of these points in Sects. 2.3 and 2.4 below.
- 7.
For those acquainted with Sellars’ work, i-represenaton corresponds to to Sellar’s idea of ‘S-assertibility’, cf. Sellars 1968).
- 8.
I should stress that though Horwich rejects Price’s argument against object naturalism, he himself also rejects the position for other reasons (related to his Wittgenstein-inspired scepticism towards substantive philosophy; cf. Horwich 2012). For further discussion and critique of this line, cf. Knowles (2018b).
- 9.
Personal communication.
- 10.
- 11.
I think this kind of assumption – of it being unproblematic to invoke the idea of ‘reality’ – probably underlies quite a lot work that sees no tension between deflationism and metaphysics. For example, an assumption of the availability of a ‘reality discourse’ seems to inform Dorit Bar-on and Keith Simmons’ (2018) distinction between semantics and metaphysics, which allows them to argue that though (e.g.) ethical claims are truth apt, realism (or non-anti-realism) about ethics does not follow. We will also return to it in relation to the broader theme of realism versus anti-realism in Chap. 6.
- 12.
Thus Carnap’s idea of explication, taken over by Quine (see e.g. his 1960, 258 ff), might be used as a way of understanding one vocabulary in terms of another (Knowles 2017, 4790).
- 13.
It is worth adding at this point that Sellars’ overall view, his large differences from Quine notwithstanding, might also be seen as fitting this bill in view of his commitment what he called ‘scientific realism’ (i.e. a kind of metaphysical or object naturalism) coupled with what looks like a rejection of Representationalism. Though I lot of what I, along with Price and Rorty, have to say is deeply influenced by or at least reminiscent of Sellars (as will also be evident in later chapters) I have decided to refrain from explicit commentary (to any great extent at least) on Sellars in view of the shere complexity of his oeuvre and its susceptibility to diverging interpretations. Obviously, a more detailed comparison would be the occasion for interesting further work (as no dobut would a more detailed comparison with Quine or other philosophers I see as cleaving closely to ARTL, such as Davidson).
- 14.
Though acknowledging e-representation is thus not meant to be any kind of backpedalling with respect to the rejection of Representationalism, it is nevertheless a central and important component of Price’s overall picture, as we shall see in Sect. 2.4.
- 15.
This means, as Price puts it in another paper, that we can give ‘One cheer for representationalism’, as opposed to the ‘no cheers’ that Rorty and Wittgenstein, under some interpretations at least, might seem to give it (Price 2010a). Insofar as I interpret Rorty as an ARTList, I would probably beg to differ here but the details of this disagreement need not concern us here.
- 16.
Price refers in support of his line to Michael Ridge who in his (2019) provides a similar but paper length critique of William Scanlon’s form of relaxed realism (‘reasons fundamentalism’). As far as I can see, the dialectical line I offer here would also apply to Ridge’s arguments (at least insofar as they are meant to be support for something like GE).
- 17.
- 18.
This is the title of Price (1992), a discussion of what this concept involves that argues for what is essentically a deflationary, non-metaphysical form of the idea.
- 19.
These issues, already touched on in chapter 1, are complex and deserve further discussion than I can provide here. Chap. 6 takes up the question of the relationship between ARTL and realism at a more general level.
- 20.
One might also question whether relaxed realism really is quietist. Thus, McDowell, who I have been using a representative of relaxed realism, also grounds our rational thinking in what he calls our ‘first’ nature (i.e. our nature as biological beings) in a more substantive sense insofar as he sees our capacity for sensory perception, which we share with non-language using animals, as integral to understanding this. One might therefore think that he is in fact a kind of subject naturalist after all (if not a supporter of GE). I will not try to resolve that issue here, though Chaps. 3 and 4 offers some further discussion of McDowell relevant to these and other more general issues of the book. The main point for now is that I at least have seen no argument from Price for thinking the Wittgensteinean ideas he uses lead one inevitably in the direction of GE or HEX.
- 21.
The strategy seems reminiscent of Hume’s response to scepticism: although reason might tell us that our beliefs are unfounded, scepticism does not follow because we cannot desist from forming the beliefs that we do; in a word, scepticism is motivationally and thereby rationally impotent.
- 22.
- 23.
A somewhat similar idea can seem to underlie Bernard Williams’ idea that we can be said to have knowledge of ethical features of the world even though they are not part of the physical or the world in itself in virtue of the fact that the relevant beliefs track the relevant truths (Williams 1985).
References
Bar-On, D., and K. Simmons. 2018. Truth: one or many or both? In Pluralisms in Truth and Logic, ed. J. Wyatt, N. Pedersen, and N. Kellen. Routledge.
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word. OUP.
Blackburn, S. 1991. Essays in Quasi-realism. OUP.
Blackburn, S. 1998. Ruling Passions. OUP.
Blackburn, S. 2012. Some remarks about minimalism. In Mind, Meaning, and Knowledge: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright, ed. C. Wright and A. Coliva, 195–210. OUP.
Blackburn, S. 2013. ‘Pragmatism: all or some?’ in Price (2013), 67–84.
Brandom, R. 1994. Making It Explicit. HUP.
Brandom, R. 1998. Articulating Reasons. HUP.
Chang, H. 2012. Is Water H2O?: Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 293). Springer.
Cozzo, C. 2012. Gulliver, truth and virtue. Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy 31 (1): 59–66.
Fodor, J. 1975. The Language of Thought. HUP.
Horwich, P. 2008. Being and truth. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33: 258–273.
Horwich, P. 2012. Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy. OUP.
Horwich, P. 2013 Naturalism, deflationism and the relative priority of language and metaphysics, in Price (2013), 112–127.
Jackson, F. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics. OUP.
Johnston, M. n.d. ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ unpublished ms. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/johnston/aintso.html. Accessed on 11 Jan 2022
Joyce, R. 2006. The Evolution of Morality. MIT Press.
Knowles, J. 2011. Naturalism, pragmatism and the retreat from metaphysics: scientific versus subject naturalism. In Pragmatism, Science and Naturalism, ed. J. Knowles and H. Rydenfelt, 63–85. Peter Lang GmbH.
Knowles, J. 2017. Global expressivism and the flight from metaphysics. Synthese 194 (12): 4781–4797.
Knowles, J. 2018b. Representationalism, metaphysics, and naturalism: Price, Horwich, and beyond. In Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Mind, and Naturalism, ed. K. Cahill and T. Raleigh. Routledge.
Kraut, R. 1990. Varieties of pragmatism. Mind 99 (394): 157–183.
Lewis, D. 1972. Psychophysical and theoretical identifications. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50 (3): 249–258.
Macarthur, D. 2014. What’s the use? Price and Wittgenstein on naturalistic explanations of language. AL-MUKHATABAT: Special Issue on Wittgenstein 9: 77–95.
Mackie, J. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin.
Menzies, P., and H. Price. 1993. Causation as a secondary quality. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44: 187–203.
Menzies, P., and H. Price. 2009. Is semantics in the plan? In Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, ed. D. Braddon-Mitchell and R. Nola, 183–200. MIT Press.
Papineau, D. 2000. The rise of physicalism. In Physicalism and Its Discontents, ed. C. Gillett and B. Loewer, 3–36. Cambridge University Press.
Price, H. 1992. ‘Metaphysical pluralism’ reprinted in Price (2011), 34–53.
Price, H. 1996. Two paths to pragmatism. In European Review of Philosophy, ed. R. Casati and C. Tappolet, vol. 3, 109–147.
Price, H. 1997b. Naturalism and the fate of the M-worlds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LXXI: 247–267.
Price, H. 2004. ‘Naturalism without representationalism’ reprinted in Price (2011), 184–199.
Price, H. 2005. Causal perspectivalism. In Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited, ed. H. Price and R. Corry, 250–292. OUP.
Price, H. 2009c. ‘The semantic foundations of metaphysics’ reprinted in Price (2011), 253–279.
Price, H. 2010a. ‘One cheer for representationalism’ reprinted in Price (2011), 304–321.
Price, H. 2011a. Naturalism without Mirrors. OUP.
Price, H. 2011b. Expressivism for two voices. In Pragmatism, Science and Naturalism, ed. J. Knowles and H. Rydenfelt, 87–113. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Price, H. 2015. Idling and sidling towards philosophical peace. In Meaning without Representation: Essays on Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism, ed. S. Gross, N. Tebben, and M. Williams, 307–330. OUP.
Price, H. 2019. Global expressivism by the method of differences. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 86: 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246119000109.
Price, H., S. Blackburn, P. Horwich, M. Williams, and R. Brandom. 2013. Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism. CUP.
———. 1960. Word and Object. MIT Press.
Raleigh, T. 2019. The recent rise of acquaintance. In Acquaintance: New Essays, ed. T. Raleigh and J. Knowles, 1–30. Oxford University Press.
Redding, P. 2010. Two directions for analytic Kantianism: naturalism and idealism. In Naturalism and Normativity, ed. M. De Caro and D. Macarthur, 263–285. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ridge, M. 2019. Relaxing realism or deferring debate? Journal of Philosophy 116 (3): 149–173.
Rorty, R. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. CUP.
Rosenborg, A. 2012. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Sellars, W. 1968. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Routledge.
Showler, P. 2021. Why subject naturalists need pragmatic genealogy. Synthese 199: 4313–4335.
Simpson, M. 2017. Non-Representationalism and Metaphysics. PhD thesis, Cambridge University.
Simpson, M. 2021. Deflationism and truth making. Synthese 198: 3157–3181.
Stoljar, D. 2021. Physicalism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/. Accessed 12 Jan 2022.
Strawson, P.F. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Routledge.
Williams, B. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Routledge.
Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Knowles, J. (2023). Global Expressivism. In: Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics. Synthese Library, vol 473. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-26923-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-26924-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)