Next Meeting: Jack Woods on Expressivism and Moore’s Paradox

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, November 15th. [Edit: note the corrected date!] The speaker will be Jack Woods, a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton. He’ll be talking about some work he’s done on expressivism. Here’s the short abstract:

Expressivism is not a view about how we should think and talk when we engage in moral thought and talk. It is a view about how we do think and talk when we so engage. It’s the view that we do not use moral thought and talk to represent or, at least, not only to represent; we use moral thought and talk to express affective or conative attitudes and that this expression of affective or conative attitudes is, in some sense, a primary function of moral thought and talk. Expressivists are thus committed to the claim that when we make moral assertions, we thereby express affective or conative attitudes and that some sort of recognition of this tight connection between moral assertion and expression of affective or conative attitudes is part of being competent with moral language. In what follows, I give some reason to doubt this claim. Here’s a brief sketch of the argument below: I motivate a distinction between expressing and asserting by considering Moore’s paradox. I then discuss a principle linking expression in the case of non-moral assertion to expression in the case of moral assertion. I use this principle to formulate a prediction about the incoherence of a moral analogue of Moore-paradoxical assertions. I then argue that this prediction is disconfirmed and that this disconfirmation makes it implausible that recognition of the expression of affective or conative attitudes is part of the competence conditions of moral assertion.

You can download a five page summary of Jack’s paper here.

As usual, we’ll meet at 7:30pm at in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We look forward to seeing you there!