Quasirealism as semantic dispensability
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Quasirealism as semantic dispensability Derek Baker1
Accepted: 16 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract I argue that standard explanationist solutions to the problem of creeping minimalism are largely on the right track, but they fail to correctly specify the kind of explanation that is relevant to distinguishing realism from quasirealism. Quasirealism should not be distinguished from realism in terms of the explanations it gives of why a normative judgment—a normative sentence or attitude—has the semantic content that it has. Rather, it should be distinguished in terms of the explanations it offers of what the semantic content of a normative judgment is. Keywords Expressivism Quasirealism Creeping Minimalism Deflationism
1 Introduction The predicate ‘true’ is the source of the problem, that and the verb ‘believe’. Initially, expressivism seemed like an irrealist doctrine. Despite having the surface grammar of an ordinary descriptive sentence, ‘murder is wrong’ did not describe. It expressed a noncognitive attitude of, say, disapproval towards murder. Neither normative claims nor attitudes were supposed to be truth-apt (e.g., Ayer 1936/1952). Unfortunately, expressivism is a claim about our normative language, the one we grow up speaking. But it is perfectly good English to say, ‘It’s true that murder is wrong’. Similarly, we talk about people’s moral beliefs. As a theory of our normative language, irrealist expressivism makes poor predictions. So expressivists add sophistication to their story. There is a minimalist theory of truth, and by helping themselves to it, they can better accommodate the linguistic & Derek Baker [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, NT, Hong Kong SAR
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data. We can extend this minimalism to beliefs, as well. But as expressivism becomes more sophisticated, it risks losing its distinctiveness. This same minimalism looks like it can be extended to every component of the characteristically realist ideology. But then expressivism seems to collapse into realism. Dreier has named this the problem of creeping minimalism (2004). Dreier also offers a solution: the explanation explanation (ibid). The expressivist may agree that there are normative properties, in an appropriately minimal sense of property. But, ‘to explain what it is to make a moral judgment, we need not mention any normative properties’ (39). The realist’s explanation, on the other hand, must invoke such properties. I will argue that Dreier’s explanation explanation gets something right. Normative properties are different for the quasirealist in that they are in an important sense dispensable. But Dreier assumes the relevant kind of dispensability is metasemantic—that normative properties are dispensable to explanations of ‘‘what it is to make a … judgment’’ with a certain semantic content (or at least the explanation has been understood in the subsequent literature as a metasemantic one). This general strategy of carving out the diff
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