Chapter 4, ‘Introducing Ecumenical Expressivism’, packs in a
lot of stimulating ideas that are central to the broader project of the book,
so I’m afraid this summary will be a bit longer than ideal. Let’s start with a
quick recap: Chapter 2 argued that normative thought is affective,
action-guiding, and acrimonious, and that these features militate against
understanding it as being purely representational. Chapter 3 made the case that
the core features can’t be captured by adding a desire-like element to
representational content. This points us in the direction of expressivism, the
subject matter of the chapter at hand. For expressivists, normative thoughts
are in the first instance constituted by desire-like states, and are as such
inherently practical. This gives it an edge when it comes to accounting for the
affective and action-guiding aspects of normative thought. Insofar as normative
disagreement is best understood as disagreement in attitude, this also favours
expressivism. The distinctive claim of ecumenical
expressivism is that normative judgment is a hybrid state consisting of a
desire-like element and a suitably related representational belief. In this
central chapter, Ridge explains what exactly the hybrid state is, and argues
that the meanings of normative terms are explained in terms of the mental
states they express.
Procedural note: I wrote this critical summary on the basis
of an earlier draft of the book, which was organized differently. Since I don’t
think the order affects the points made below, I’ll leave it as it is.
Normative Thought
Ridge labels the desire-like component of a normative
judgment the agent’s normative
perspective. For Gibbard, it would consist in states of norm-acceptance,
but Ridge prefers a Bratmanian picture, on which a normative perspective is a “set
of relatively stable policies against accepting certain standards of
deliberation” (115), in particular policies the agent is satisfied with (roughly
in the sense of not having conflicting policies). Policies here are kind of
general contingency plans, in particular plans about how to deliberate. (For
Bratman, self-governing policies are plans about which desires to treat as providing
justifying reasons, but Ridge rightly eschews appeal to unanalysed notions
treating something as a reason.) So when you have a normative perspective, you
plan (that is, intend) not to deliberate in certain ways. Perhaps you intend
not to be the kind of person for whom the colour of another’s skin is an
important consideration in deciding whether to pursue friendship. (This is not
how Ridge puts it, but since I worry about the notion of a standard here (see below),
I’m suggesting an alternative gloss in the spirit of the view, as I understand
it.)
But surely there’s more to normative thought than settling
on not deliberating in certain ways! Ridge agrees. Our normative perspectives
are also constituted by plans to act and deliberate in ways that are required
or highly recommended by all the standards we have not ruled out (any acceptable standards). They also involve a
defeasible propensity to encourage others to do likewise. (Think back on
Stevenson: “I approve of this; do so as well”.)
So that, very roughly, is the desire-like aspect of
normative judgment for Ridge. The judgment itself consists of a combination of
normative perspective with a relevant representational belief. What representational
belief? Here we go back to Chapter 1 and the idea that any normative judgment
can be understood in terms of something being highly ranked or required or
recommended by contextually determined standards. Suppose Anne thinks that
pleasure is good as an end. According to Ridge’s analysis, this amounts to her
thinking that pleasure would be highly ranked as an end by any ultimate
acceptable standard of practical reasoning. And this thought, in turn, has the
following two elements (cf. 119):
a)
A normative perspective.
b)
The representational belief that pleasure would
be highly ranked as an end by any admissible ultimate standard of practical
reasoning.
So, roughly, you accept certain standards of practical
reasoning, and believe that those standards rank pleasure highly as an end.
That’s what it is to think that pleasure is good as an end. On this view, a
normative judgment is a relational state in the sense that Mark Schroeder has
popularized, since the content of the belief refers to the content of the
normative perspective (‘admissible’ standards in b are those not ruled out in
a). The core appeal of thinking of normative judgments as this sort of hybrid
states is that they allow for any degree of logical complexity in the content
of the belief element, which helps deal with some key objections to
expressivism (see next chapter).
Okay, so much for a very brief sketch of the view. I have
four questions or worries. First, it’s not clear what the role of the
representational belief is in normative judgment. Return to the case of
thinking that pleasure is good as an end. Evidently, Anne’s normative
perspective consists of policies ruling out standards that rule out pleasure as
an end, and plans to give pleasure positive weight as an end in practical
reasoning. Question: why does that not suffice, for an expressivist in
particular, for her judging that pleasure is good as an end? If all the
standards she endorses rank pleasure highly, why does she also have to believe that admissible standards rank
pleasure highly? After all, the distinctively normative aspect of the thought
is all in the attitudes, for an expressivist. To be sure, the hybrid model makes
sense when it comes to, say, thoughts of good bread. It’s plausible enough that
one way in which the thought that O’Keeffe’s bread is good can be realized is
that I accept only standards for choosing bread that rank crustiness highly,
and believe that O’Keeffe’s bread is crusty. But what about the thoughts that
are not of this type?
Second, since the expressivist project is to explain
normative thought without appeal to normative content (which will be downstream
from normative thought), there’s always the question of whether an expressivist
account is necessary and sufficient for normative judgment. Since Ridge packs a
lot into the notion of a normative perspective, the necessity question is
particularly urgent for his view. Do we really have to manifest such complex
intentions and beliefs in order to think, say, that we have a reason to go
swimming on a hot day? This isn’t just a point about the mind-boggling
psychological complexity of Ridge’s view. It is rather that it seems possible
to make normative judgments that don’t involve stable policies of any sort, not
to mention stable policies regarding standards of practical reasoning. Why
wouldn’t it be possible?
Third, what about sufficiency? Recall that normative
perspectives are essentially sets of complex conditional intentions. The
question is whether combining such planning states with representational
beliefs is enough for a normative judgment. Clearly, we can intend to do
something without judging that we ought to do it, or have reason to do it. So
why can’t we intend to (not to) deliberate in a certain way without thinking
that we ought to do so, or that we ought to act in a certain way? On this
point, the contrast between Gibbard’s and Ridge’s views is instructive. On
Gibbard’s original view, moral judgment consists of accepting norms for guilt
and anger. Although there’s room to question the sufficiency of that, it’s at
least plausible that endorsing reactive attitudes is closely bound up with
moral (and perhaps more broadly normative) judgment. But for Ridge, emotions
are only contingently linked with normative judgment. So all the weight is
borne by policies for deliberating. And on the face of it, it seems I could
have a policy of giving positive weight to X in deliberation (including
rejecting standards for deliberating that don’t give X positive weight) without
thereby thinking that X is good or that I have reason to X (especially if we
understand giving positive weight in naturalistic terms, as something a robot
might do).
My fourth, and possibly related, worry about Ridge’s account
is that I’m not sure if it goes deep enough. Take again Gibbard’s original view
for comparison. Accepting a norm requiring X-ing is, roughly, being motivated
to X and perhaps feeling bad if one doesn’t X, and being disposed to
communicate this state of mind to others when speaking without openly. So all
we have is attitudes and behavioural dispositions whose object is an
unambiguously factual (X-ing, speaking in a certain way). This is a clearly
naturalistic, non-normative account of what it is to think normative thoughts.
Ridge’s view, in what seems to me to be an important contrast, is spelled out
in terms of commitments whose content involves reference to what is required or
recommended by a standard. To my eyes, that’s normative talk, something the
expressivist needs to analyse away in terms of attitudes toward natural facts.
It’s not enough to know that in making a normative judgment, we’re committed to
a standard that requires X-ing. We need to know, in terms that don’t make
reference to “standards” or “requiring”, what attitudes we must have toward
X-ing in order to have such commitment. This is even more urgent when it comes
to beliefs about standards requiring
or recommending or highly ranking something – what is it to believe such a
thing?
Normative Language
So much for a brief characterization of ecumenical
expressivism as a theory of normative thought. But what about normative
language? It’s not clear, Ridge observes, what question expressivism is trying
to answer when it promises to account for the meaning of normative language.
There’s two main options. A semantic
theory for a language consists of two main parts: an assignment of semantic
values to the terms and a syntax that tells us how to derive semantic values of
wholes from the semantic values of parts and the way they’re arranged. A meta-semantic theory, in Ridge’s terms, explains
why terms have the meanings they do.
Mark Schroeder thinks of expressivism as a first-order semantic theory,
according to which the contents (or semantic values) of normative sentences are
mental states. But Ridge argues that expressivism is best understood as a view
in meta-semantics instead.
What does this mean? First, expressivism is compatible with
standard first-order semantics for normative sentences. So the expressivist
will agree that “Abortion is wrong” is true iff abortion is wrong, or if the
referent of “abortion” is in the extension of the predicate “morally wrong”.
Here terms like “truth” and “referent” are used in a deflationary sense that
doesn’t entail that there is, say, the property of wrongness out there. (Making
this contrast is notoriously hard once you go deflationist about everything,
but you get the point.) Second, what is distinctive about expressivism is the
meta-semantic thesis it advances: normative claims have the meanings they do in
virtue of their expressing normative judgments, which are hybrid states
of the sort discussed above.
Ridge labels the broader Lockean/Gricean metasemantic
framework in which meanings of linguistic items are explained by way of the
mental states they express ideationalism.
Words mean what they do, because they are conventionally used to express
certain states of mind. What is it to ‘express’ a state of mind? Ridge sketches
two options. The first, based on Wayne Davis’s work, is that a word expresses
an idea if it conventionally indicates it. (Presumably Davis explains what an
‘idea’ is – on the face of it, this suggestion is highly implausible, as the
basic units of communication are sentences rather than words, and they express
complex, highly unconventional thoughts rather than individual ideas.) The
other is that sentences express those thoughts that people who assert them are
accountable for having. For example, if you assert “There’s cheese on the
moon”, you’re accountable for having the belief that there’s cheese on the
moon, on pain of being charged with insincerity or semantic confusion by other
members of your linguistic community. Like Ridge, I find the latter account of
expression more promising – but it’s not immediately clear how it links up with
the core claim that meanings are explained by the mental states they express.
It’s certainly compatible with non-ideationalist meta-semantic frameworks.
Ridge does, however, provide a story of how the
meta-semantic explanation works – how the mental state that a sentence
expresses explains its propositional content (i.e. the proposition it
expresses, in a different sense of ‘express’). Importantly, propositions here
cannot be understood in standard Fregean or Russellian or Lewisian sense, as
abstract entities or structured entities composed of individuals and properties
or sets of possible worlds. If they were, normative propositions could be the
contents of standard representational beliefs, and the contents of normative
claims could be explained by virtue of what they represent, as cognitivists
maintain. So Ridge has to cast about for an alternative conception of propositions,
and finds one in Scott Soames’s work. Soames argues that propositions are cognitive event types. On this view, a
belief that X is F, say, isn’t a relation to an abstract entity (for example)
with the content that X is F. Instead, it is a cognitive event that consists of
predicating F of X (where predication is a primitive contentful mental act) and
some sort of endorsement of this predication. Propositions are types of basic
cognitive events (such as predications).
Soames’s view is an account of propositions as bearers of
representational content. But Ridge maintains that this approach generalizes
naturally to normative thoughts. They, too, are cognitive events of various
cognitive types. Normative propositions are, then, cognitive types of a particular
kind – types of practical thought. Ridge claims that “we can have normative
propositions in precisely Soames’s sense. For once we allow that thinking that
abortion is morally wrong is a cognitive event, we can plausibly infer that
there is a corresponding cognitive event type, and so on for all such normative
thoughts.” (129)
But is this really sufficient? Sure, hybrid states form
cognitive types. But central to Soames’s case for identifying propositions with
cognitive event types is that cognitive events of predication (in particular)
are primitively representational (and have inherent truth conditions), unlike
abstract objects (Fregean propositions). But hybrid states are not primitively
representational – they’re not representational at all! So I don’t see how
following Soames’s arguments would get us to normative propositions consisting
of essentially non-cognitive event types.
Putting that worry aside, Ridge believes that this
understanding of propositions allows for a distinctively expressivist metasemantics.
On this view, giving the semantic content of a claim consists of “articulating
the proposition it expresses in some privileged language” (130). (Is this
really all that first-order semantics does?) Since normative propositions are
types of hybrid states, “what it is for a proposition p to be expressed by a
claim in a context of utterance is for that claim to express the thought that
p, where the proposition that p just is the cognitive event type of
thinking that p” (130).
There is evidently much more to be said here, but I’ll leave
it for general discussion. Here’s a final thought. It seems that expressivism
faces a kind of dilemma: either it is
committed to non-standard, non-truth conditional semantics, or it is committed to a controversial
meta-semantic framework and a highly controversial account of propositions
(which does not obviously fit with the expressivist strategy). (Officially,
Ridge says that ideationalism is the “most natural home” for expressivism, but
it’s hard to see how the strategy would work in other metasemantic frameworks.)
Either way, it seems that accounting for normative language in terms of
essentially non-representational states is not good for your plausibility
points, unless you belong to the small set of people who are antecedently both
ideationalist and Soamesian.
