La Cuenca del Paleógeno al Mioceno Superior

Familiar problems facing expressivists in other areas will also be faced by expressivists about grounding. Perhaps the best known example is the Frege-Geach problem (Geach, 1965: 463) which raises a

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difficulty for giving an expressivist treatment of sentences when they are embedded in more complex sentences.54 _{Consider the following example of a seemingly valid inference about grounding:}

(1) If singleton sets are grounded in their members, then {Socrates} is grounded in Socrates (2) Singleton sets are grounded in their members

(3) Therefore, {Socrates} is grounded in Socrates

On an expressivist treatment, there is no proposition expressed by the claim ‗singleton sets are grounded in their members‘, only an attitude. An expressivist about grounding will treat (2) as an expression of (for example) lesser willingness to update or revise beliefs about the existence of any given entity than to update or revise beliefs about the existence of the set which has that entity as its sole member. But it looks as though an agent who does not share such an attitude ought nevertheless to be able to assent to (1), and therefore that the embedded grounding clause in the antecedent of the conditional in (1) has a different content to the same clause as it appears unembedded in (2). We don‘t ordinarily expect linguistic expressions to have different contents in embedded and unembedded contexts, and moreover, any difference in the contents of the expressions renders the seemingly valid inference invalid.

In the case of expressivism about moral discourse (where most work on expressivism has been conducted) the most influential responses to the embedding problem are as follows. First, one might adopt a minimalist theory of truth (see e.g. Horwich, 1993; Stoljar, 1993). For example, a minimalist might hold that collected instances of the schema: ―‗S‘ is true iff S‖ together imply everything there is to know about truth (Dreier, 2004: 26). Minimalism about related notions makes more realist-sounding discourse available to the antirealist. For example, for propositions: ‗S‘ expresses the proposition that S. The expression ‗the proposition that‘ is merely a device for forming noun phrases out of sentences so that generalisations are possible (see Dreier, 2004: 26, and section 7.1 below). Since grounding sentences are meaningful and can be embedded into that clauses, there are propositions about grounding.

54 _{A detailed discussion of the embedding problem and responses that have been made to it would take us beyond the scope}

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In order to solve the embedding problem for grounding, it must be appropriate to call sentences about grounding true, for those sentences to embed grammatically in more complex sentences in the usual ways, and for us to have a relatively clear conception of the conditions on the appropriate use of sentences about grounding. The first requirement is secured by minimalism about truth, and the way in which we make grounding claims are evidence of the second. The positive expressivist proposals secure the third. We can explain the truth values of more complicated truth-functional embeddings by showing how their truth values are functions of the truth values of the component sentences. The minimalist expressivist can give minimal truth conditions for the component sentences and can thereby give an account of the meaning of the sentence whether asserted or embedded. (c.f. van Roojen, 2014b.)

The second available response to the embedding problem is to move to a hybrid expressivism that uses the ‗descriptive meaning‘ of the relevant utterances to explain logical relations between sentences in the domain (see e.g. Ridge, 2006). Non-cognitivists are generally happy to grant some kind of secondary descriptive meaning to the sentences about which they are non-cognitivist (van Roojen, 2014b). For example, they might take the sentence ‗murder is wrong‘ to express the speaker‘s disapproval of murder (a non-cognitivist meaning) but also to predicate the property of moral wrongness of the act-type murder (a descriptive meaning). Hybrid expressivists give that descriptive meaning nearly equal status, and claim that (somehow or other – proposals differ, and do not concern us here) the descriptive component of meaning accounts for logical relations between the relevant sentences (see van Roojen, 2014b).

A third response exploits relations not between the contents of sentences, but between the sentences themselves (explaining the validity of inferences such as that introduced above). One influential version of this strategy for responding to the embedding problem was proposed by Blackburn (e.g. 1984) who posits a ‗logic of (higher-order) attitudes‘ towards accepting certain attitudes. Applied to our inference about grounding, we might claim that an utterance of the statement in (1) expresses the agent‘s attitude towards her willingness in the light of new evidence to update or revise beliefs about Socrates‘ singleton over updating or revising beliefs about Socrates – she takes it that that attitude is implied by her willingness in general to, in the light of new evidence, update or revise beliefs about singleton sets over updating or revising beliefs about their sole members. The agent‘s utterance in (2) expresses her greater

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willingness in the light of new evidence to revise or update her beliefs about the existence of singleton sets than to revise or update her beliefs about the existence of their sole members. Given the resilience of her beliefs as expressed in (1) and (2), it would be irrational for the agent not to hold the attitude expressed by (3); greater willingness in the light of new evidence to revise or update her beliefs about the existence of {Socrates} than to revise or update her beliefs about the existence of Socrates.

These responses to the embedding problem work by complicating the semantics of grounding claims so that they can sustain the problematic inferential connections. Minimalism and/or positing a logic of attitudes allows the sorts of inferences that are constitutive of realist discourse to go through. Blackburn‘s quasi-realist program is the general project of securing the ability for the antirealist to legitimately engage in realist-sounding discourse. I will have more to say about quasi-realism and its consequences in section 7.

One final possible solution to the embedding problem I will mention is to distinguish between local expressivism – expressivism about a given area of discourse, and global expressivism – an account not restricted to a particular area of discourse, and to adopt the latter. The recent champion of global expressivism is Huw Price (see also Barker, 2007, and the Sellarsian version of expressivism advocated by Brandom e.g. 2000). Price argues that ‗whatever story the quasi-realist tells about the genealogy and functions of the ―factual‖ character of (say) moral language, the same story is likely to work for other cases, too‘ (Price, 2011: 97). The idea is that there is pressure to give a uniform account of declarative speech acts, and that that entire story can be non-representational. At the local level, there is diversity between vocabularies – Price wants to maintain that (for example) the states projected in association with moral concepts are different from those projected in association with modal concepts and that they play different roles in people‘s lives (2011: 98). There is a distinction between domains of discourse, but the distinction is not between representational and non-representational vocabularies, because all vocabulary is non-representational.

Global expressivism seems to avoid embedding problems because it removes a distinction between parts of language that are to be given a cognitivist treatment (i.e. are to be considered truth-apt) and those that are not. There is of course a worry that global expressivism throws the baby out with the

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bathwater – in attempting to avoid troubling metaphysical commitments in the case of one area of discourse (such as morality or grounding) we are led to adopt an antirealist position with regards to everything. This difficulty is discussed by Price (2011), who argues that global expressivists can accept the idea that some vocabularies are more in the business of ‗tracking the world‘ than others, but that this limited bifurcation is not to be made at the semantic level. Global expressivism is an intriguing but radical position, and since I think there are alternatives to global expressivism open to the expressivist about grounding I will not discuss it further here.