Imperative Clauses and the Frege-Geach Problem
Andrew Alwood · Analysis · 2009
Mark Schroeder's Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivism by isolating a few core assumptions and constraints, and then drawing out the implications of how they can be developed into a semantic theory for a fragment of English. Its main virtue is that it shows how an expressivist can handle the ‘Frege–Geach problem’ by constructing a semantic system in which expressive language can embed in complex sentences that have the right semantic properties. For example, considerable effort is put into explaining why the sentence ‘Murder is not wrong’ is inconsistent with the simpler sentence ‘Murder is wrong’. Additionally, Being For claims to develop ‘non-cognitivism’, a family of non-descriptivist theories of normative language of which expressivism is a popular version, in the best way possible. But, ultimately, it concludes pessimistically that expressivism is ‘an extremely unpromising hypothesis about the workings of natural languages’ (Schroeder 2008: 179). The failure of Schroeder's version of expressivism is instructive in several ways. It shows how currently popular claims in metaethics inevitably lead to radical conclusions about ordinary, non-normative language. It highlights how expressivism is crucially different from its predecessors, and how these differences lead to problems in accounting for natural language. Most importantly, it demonstrates a need for metaethical non-descriptivists to develop a new approach, if they are to have any success in accounting for the normative words of natural languages.