Abstract

Metaethical expressivists have been forced to adopt, at least in part, a semantic theory that explains the meanings of sentences by appealing to something other than their truth conditions. The resulting theories have faced some big and by now familiar difficulties. This chapter probes the extent to which expressivists can adopt a new semantic strategy, here called “success-conditional semantics” (SCS), a promising semantic account of nondeclarative sentences. The chapter argues that hybrid expressivists can adopt SCS without difficulty, that pure expressivism can do so only by accepting an objectionable relativism and increasing an already hefty explanatory burden, and therefore that pure expressivists likely would not want to adopt SCS. The result is a (defeasible) argument that if one is going to be an expressivist at all, one should be an hybrid rather than a pure expressivist.