Expression
Expression
This chapter explores how the notion of expression should be understood within an expressivist theory. It is first argued that the key attractions of expressivism can be understood without any understanding of expression, in the process illustrating an argumentative technique important for expressivism: the Basic Expressivist Maneuver. The embedding problem is introduced, and used to show that expressivists need to treat sentential connectives as operating on mental states, rather than on propositions or truth values. This conclusion, along with other problems, is then used to dismiss common accounts of the expression relation in favour of the interpretation of expressivism as a kind of assertability semantics. And this, in turn, is used to draw the conclusion that ordinary descriptive sentences must inherit their truth conditions from the mental states that they express.
Keywords: Basic Expressivist Maneuver, embedding problem, assertability semantics, truth conditions
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