Expressivism about all mental discourse (Departmental Seminar)

Abstract:

Expressivists about ethical discourse maintain (near enough) that an assertion of ‘x is good’ displays the speaker’s positive evaluation of x, opposing those descriptivists who maintain that the assertion instead describes x as having the evaluative property of ‘being good’. A familiar promise of this expressivism is the dissolution of metaphysical vexation over how evaluative properties fit into the natural order: talk of ‘evaluative properties’ is confused, and the vexatious question along with it. An expressivism about mental discourse (including discourse about ‘consciousness’) would have a comparable promise of dissolving metaphysical vexation over how mental properties fit into the natural order — namely, the mind–body problem: talk of ‘mental properties’ is confused, and the mind–body problem along with it. Unfortunately, ethical-discourse expressivism has a familiar tendency to collapse into a subjectivist descriptivism, on which ‘x is good’ describes the speaker as positively evaluating x: for mental-discourse expressivism, such a collapse would disastrously restore mental properties, while drastically attenuating our ability to speak about them. Fortunately, the collapse can be prevented — albeit by means of an extremely deep adjustment to the foundations of analytic philosophy, by reassigning the fundamental theoretical role in systematic theory of meaning from truth, the actual world, and metaphysically possible worlds to (what I call) ‘endorsement’, ‘my present stance’, and ‘phenomenologically possible stances’: by exchanging ‘logical realism’ for ‘logical mentalism’.

Delivered in English.
All are welcome.