Handling rejection

Derek BAKER*, Jack WOODS

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look to Amie Thomasson’s work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)159-190
Number of pages32
JournalPhilosophical Studies
Volume180
Issue number1
Early online date7 Oct 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

We would like to thank the audience at the 2016 Lingnan Expressivism Conference at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, for helpful comments, suggestions, questions and criticism. We would also like to thank the two anonymous referees of this paper for the same.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Keywords

  • Amie Thomasson
  • Deontic modals
  • Disagreement
  • Epistemic modals
  • Expressivism
  • Frege–Geach
  • Inferentialism
  • Negation

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  • Handling Rejection

    BAKER, D. C. & WOODS, J., 7 Jun 2016.

    Research output: Other Conference ContributionsConference Paper (other)Other Conference Paper

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