Pragmatism, Minimalism, Expressivism

Abstract

Although contemporary pragmatists tend to be sympathetic to expressivist accounts of moral, modal and other problematic vocabularies, it is not clear that they have any right to be. The problem arises because contemporary pragmatists tend to favour deflationary accounts of truth and reference, thereby seeming to elide the distinction between expressive and repressentational uses of language. To address this problem, I develop a meta‐theoretical framework for understanding what is involved in explanations of meaning in terms of use, and why some but not all such explanations deflationary. Exploiting this framework, I argue that expressivist explanations of problematic vocabularies are really a particular kind of deflationary explanation. It follows that pragmatists can thus take such explanations on board without committing themselves to the distinction between expressive and robustly representational uses of language that articulations of expressivism typically invoke.

Keywords:

• expressivism
• deflationary truth
• inferentialist semantics
• physical necessity
• pragmatism
• observation terms

Notes

1 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See especially the essays ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’ and ‘Representation, Social Practice and Truth’. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Huw Price, ‘Naturalism without Representationalism’, in Mario Caro and David Macarthur, Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). David Macarthur and Huw Price, ‘Pragmatism and the Global Challenge’, in Cheryl Misak, New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

2 Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge, 1968, re‐issued Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1992), Ch. IV. Also, ‘Truth and Correspondence’, in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963, re‐issued by Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1991); cf. note 8 below.

3 Radical quietists, such as Horwich, agree. Horwich sees no reason to distinguish between metaphysical and philosophical quietism, and thus no reason to reconstruct the distinctions that lie at the centre of standard forms of local expressivism. See Paul Horwich, ‘A World without “Isms”’, in Truth and Realism: New Debates, ed. Patrick Greenhough and Michael Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

4 I think that the tendency on the part of Price and Macarthur to downplay the problem of accommodating expressivist insights reflects their somewhat stripped‐down view of pragmatism. The attractions of expressivism, for pragmatists, reflect pragmatism about norms, the flip side of pragmatic anti‐Platonism. Pragmatism is ‘anti‐metaphysical’ in its hostility to postulating supernatural entities to guide human practices. But if we take Price at his word and take metaphysical quietism to entail having no views about the nature of norms, pragmatists (in pragmatism’s most typical articulations) are not metaphysical quietists. But can they be expressivists? That is the question.

5 Horwich ‘A World without “Isms”’, p. 559.

6 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Counterfactuals, Dispositions and the Causal Modalities’, in H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell (eds) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957). Sellars develops his views in a complex, dialectical way and does not present an explicit meta‐theoretical framework. The compact ‘Sellarsian’ EMU given in the text is my own.

7 This is one of the less discussed aspects of Sellars’s philosophy. This may have something to do with the fact that Sellars never had ‘Counterfactuals …’ reprinted, possibly owing to the essay’s length and complexity. For an important recent discussion of Sellars on modality, see Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 4; and Huw Price, ‘Brandom and Hume on the Genealogy of Modals’, Philosophical Topics (forthcoming).

8 This analysis is drawn from Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963; reissued Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1991). Now also available as Wilfrid Sellars: Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Introduction by Richard Rorty, Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For Sellars’s account of the use and significance of observational vocabulary, see Section VIII. I discuss this account at length in ‘The Tortoise and the Serpent: Sellars on the Structure of Empirical Knowledge’, in Willem De Vries (ed.) Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity and Realism: Essays on the Anniversary of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

9 Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Ch. 2. Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, Ch. VII.