The Limits and Costs of Expressivism
The Limits and Costs of Expressivism
This chapter summarizes the basic insights and arguments needed in order to get this far. It is argued, however, that expressivists will have extraordinary difficulties trying to expand the expressive power of their language beyond that of the predicate calculus. It is shown that most obvious treatments of the past tense and of ‘necessarily’ — constructed on exactly the same model as the accounts of negation, conjunction, and the quantifiers — result in tensed and modal sentences expressing incoherent states of mind, and fail to assign them the right truth conditions on either the approach of Chapter 9 or that of Chapter 10. It is argued, further, that binary quantifiers like ‘most’ cannot be incorporated into biforcated attitude semantics at all. The moral is that the prospects for expressivism are dim. An appendix to the chapter makes suggestions for further research.
Keywords: truth conditions, tense, modals, binary quantifiers, biforcated attitudes
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