Expressivism in meta-ethics is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms–for example, “It is wrong to torture an innocent human being”–are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as “wrong,” “good,” or “just” do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact, but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation.^[1] Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions.^[2] Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.

Expressivism[link]

Expressivism is a form of moral anti-realism or nonfactualism: the view that there are no moral facts that moral sentences describe or represent, and no moral properties or relations to which moral terms refer. Expressivists deny constructivist accounts of moral facts – e.g. Kantianism – as well as realist accounts – e.g. ethical intuitionism.^[3]

Because expressivism claims that the function of moral language is not descriptive, it allows the irrealist to avoid an error theory: the view that ordinary moral thought and discourse is committed to deep and pervasive error, and that all moral statements make false ontological claims.^[4]

Expressivism distinguished from descriptivist subjectivism[link]

Expressivism does not hold that the function of moral sentences as used in ordinary discourse is to describe the speaker’s moral attitudes. Expressivists are united in rejecting ethical subjectivism: the descriptivist view that utterances of the type “X is good/bad” mean “I approve/disapprove of X”. Subjectivism is a descriptivist theory, not an expressivist one, because it maintains that moral sentences are used to represent facts–namely, facts about the subject’s psychological states.^[5]

[edit] Historical development: from noncognitivism/emotivism to cognitivist expressivism

Some early versions of expressivism arose during the early twentieth century in association with logical positivism. These early views are typically called “noncognitivist”. A. J. Ayer’s emotivism is a well-known example.^[6]

According to emotivism, the act of uttering a moral sentence of the type “X is good (bad)” is closely akin to the expression of a positive (or negative) emotional attitude toward X, and such an utterance can be paraphrased by “Hurrah for X!” or “Boo, X!”^[7]

C. L. Stevenson also advanced an important version of emotivism.^[8]

At the beginning of the middle of the twentieth century, R. M. Hare was an important advocate of expressivism / noncognitivism.^[9] Hare’s view is called prescriptivism because he analyzed moral sentences as universal, overriding prescriptions or imperatives. A prescriptivist might paraphrase “X is good” as “Do X!”.^[10]

More recent versions of expressivism, such as Simon Blackburn’s “quasi-realism”,^[11] Allan Gibbard’s “norm-expressivism”,^[12] and Mark Timmons’ and Terence Horgan’s “cognitivist expressivism” tend to distance themselves from the “noncognitivist” label applied to Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare.^[13] What distinguishes these “new wave” expressivists is that they resist reductive analyses of moral sentences or their corresponding psychological states, moral judgments,^[14] and they allow for moral sentences/judgments to have truth value.^[2]

Horgan and Timmons’ label “cognitivist expressivism” in particular captures the philosophical commitment they share with Blackburn and Gibbard to regard moral judgments as cognitive psychological states, i.e. beliefs, and moral sentences as vehicles for genuine assertions or truth-claims. Much of the current expressivist project is occupied with defending a theory of the truth of moral sentences that is consistent with expressivism but can resist the Frege-Geach objection (see below). Expressivists tend to rely on a minimalist or deflationary theory of truth to provide an irrealist account for the truth of moral sentences.

Arguments for expressivism[link]

The Open Question Argument[link]

According to the open question argument (originally articulated by intuitionist and non-naturalist G. E. Moore), for any proposed definition of a moral term, e.g. " 'good' = 'the object of desire' ", a competent speaker of English who understands the meaning of the terms involved in the statement of the definition could still hold that the question, "Is the object of desire good?" remains unanswered.

The upshot of this argument is that normative or moral terms cannot be analytically reduced to "natural" or non-moral terms. Expressivists argue that the best explanation of this irreducibility is that moral terms are not used to describe objects, but rather to evaluate them. Many philosophers regard expressivists or noncognitivists as "the real historical beneficiar[ies] of the [open question argument."^[15]

Some moral realists maintain that a synthetic reduction of moral terms to natural terms is possible.^{[citation needed]} Other realists (including Moore himself) have concluded that moral terms refer to non-natural, sui generis properties or relations;^{[citation needed]} but non-naturalism is vulnerable to the argument from queerness (see below).

The Argument from Moral Disagreement[link]

Persons may disagree in their moral evaluations of the same object, while possessing all the same information about the "natural" or descriptive facts about the object of evaluation. Expressivists argue that such deep moral disagreement is evidence that moral judgment is not a species of descriptive or factual judgment.^{[citation needed]}

The Argument from Queerness[link]

Objections to expressivism[link]

The Embedding Problem (or, the Frege–Geach objection)[link]

The Frege–Geach problem — named for Peter Geach, who developed it from the writings of Gottlob Frege — claims that by subscribing to Expressivism one necessarily accepts that the meaning of "It is wrong to tell lies" is different from the meaning of the "it is wrong to tell lies" part of the conditional "If it is wrong to tell lies, then it is wrong to get your little brother to lie", and that therefore Expressivism is an inadequate explanation for moral language.

Frege–Geach contends that "It is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies" can be deduced from the two premises by modus ponens as follows:

• It is wrong to tell lies.
• If it is wrong to tell lies, then it is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies.
• Therefore, It is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies.

In the second statement the expressivist account appears to fail, in that the speaker asserting the hypothetical premise is expressing no moral position towards lying, condemnatory or otherwise. The expressivist thus cannot account for the meaning of moral language in this kind of unasserted context.

The Relativism Objection and the Argument from Moral Error[link]

The Illocutionary Act-Intention Argument[link]

Terence Cuneo argues against expressivism by means of the following premise:

It is false that, in ordinary optimal conditions, when an agent performs the sentential act of sincerely uttering a moral sentence, that agent does not thereby intend to assert a moral proposition, but intends to express an attitude toward a non-moral state of affairs or object.^[16]

Proponents of expressivism are concerned to preserve the participants in ordinary moral thought and discourse from charges of deep error. But, Cuneo argues, there is evidence that many such participants do intend to represent a factual moral reality when they make moral judgments. Hence, if the expressivists are correct and moral language is not properly used to make factual, descriptive assertions, many participants in ordinary moral discourse are frustrated in their illocutionary act intentions. On these grounds it is argued that we should give up expressivism, unless the expressivists are to give up on their claim that expressivism is not an essentially revisionist view of moral thought and discourse.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth, and Logic. London: Gollancz. 

Blackburn, Simon (1984). Spreading the Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Blackburn, Simon (1993). Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Blackburn, Simon (1998). Ruling Passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Cuneo, Terence (2006). "Saying what we Mean", pp. 35-71 in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan, & Railton, Peter (1997). "Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends", pp. 3-47 in Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, Moral Discourse and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gibbard, Allan (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 

Horgan, Terry & Timmons, Mark (2006a). "Cognitivist Expressivism", pp. 255-298 in Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, eds., Metaethics after Moore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Horgan, Terry & Timmons, Mark (2006b). "Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!", pp. 73-98 in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Horgan, Terry & Timmons, Mark (2006c). "Morality without Moral Facts", pp. 220-238 in James Dreier, ed., Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Joyce, Richard, "Moral Anti-Realism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).[1]

Timmons, Mark (1999). Morality without Foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

van Roojen, Mark, "Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).[2]

Stephen Stich giving the Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy 2010 in Tartu, Estonia.

Stephen Stich (born May 9, 1943) is a professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is also currently an Honorary Professor of the department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and moral psychology. He is arguably best known for his contributions to philosophy of mind. His 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. However, he has since modified his position, especially in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind.

Biography[link]

Stephen Stich attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1960-1964 where he was a member of the Philomathean Society. He received his B.A. in 1964 (Summa Cum Laude with distinction in Philosophy). After attending Princeton University from 1964–1968, he received his Ph.D. in 1968.^[1]

Stich has taught at several universities, including University of Michigan, University of Maryland, College Park, University of California, San Diego, University of Sheffield, and Rutgers University.

Stich joined the department of philosophy at the University of Sheffield in February 2005 as an Honorary Professor. He remains primarily at Rutgers, but will visit Sheffield on a regular basis to teach and work with the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies.^[2]

In 2007 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and gave a series of lectures in Paris titled Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science: How the Cognitive Science Can Transform Traditional Debates.^[3]

Work[link]

This section requires expansion.

Stich is primarily known in philosophy for his work in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and moral psychology. In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Stich (1983) has argued for a form of eliminative materialism—the view that talk of the mental should be replaced with talk of its physical substrate. Since then, however, he has changed some of his views on the mind. See Deconstructing the Mind (1996) for his more recent views. In epistemology, he has explored (with several of his colleagues) the nature of intuitions using the techniques of experimental philosophy, especially epistemic intuitions that vary among cultures—see Stich (1988) and Stich, et al. (2001). This work reflects a general skepticism about conceptual analysis and the traditional methods of analytic philosophy. In The Fragmentation of Reason he briefly sketched a form of epistemic relativism "in the spirit of pragmatism."^[4]

He and Shaun Nichols are responsible for a theory of how humans understand the mental states of ourselves and others, or mindreading, which they present in Nichols and Stich (2003). Their theory is a hybrid, containing elements of both the simulation theory and theory theory, and also aims to explain the mental architecture that enables pretence.

Selected publications[link]

• 1972, "Grammar, Psychology and Indeterminacy", Journal of Philosophy, LXIX, 22, pp. 799–818.
• 1978, "Empiricism, Innateness and Linguistic Universals", Philosophical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 273–286.
• 1978, "Beliefs and Sub-Doxastic States", Philosophy of Science, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 499–518.
• 1979, "Do Animals Have Beliefs?" The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 15–28.
• 1983, From Folk Pschology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, MIT Press.
• 1985, "Could Man Be An Irrational Animal?" Synthese, Vol. 64, No. 1, pp. 115–135.
• 1988, "Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology and the Problem of Cognitive Diversity", Synthese, Vol. 74, No. 3, pp. 391–413.
• 1990, "Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology", Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, pp. 499–533. (with William Ramsey & Joseph Garon)
• 1990, The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation, MIT Press.
• 1992, "What Is a Theory of Mental Representation?" Mind, Vol. 101, No. 402, pp. 243–61.
• 1993, "Naturalizing Epistemology: Quine, Simon and the Prospects for Pragmatism", in C. Hookway & D. Peterson (eds.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Supplement no. 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–17. Online text
• 1996, Deconstructing the Mind, Oxford University Press. Chapter 1 online
• 1998, "The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science", (with Michael Bishop) Philosophy of Science, Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 33–49. Online text
• 1998, "Theory Theory to the Max", (with Shaun Nichols) Mind and Language, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 421–49. Online text
• 2001, "Jackson's Empirical Assumptions", (with Jonathan Weinberg) Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 637–643. Online text
• 2003, Mindreading, (co-authored with Shaun Nichols) Oxford University Press.
• 2006, "Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality", (with Daniel Kelley), Online Philosophy Conference, Online PDF

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates

References[link]

External links[link]

• Stich's profile at Rutgers
• Stich's web site at Rutgers
• Stich's profile at the University of Sheffield

Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.

Kuhn has made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well.

Life[link]

Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively. As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history (and philosophy) of science. He later taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and taped Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death.^[1] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work:^[2] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer, of which he died in 1996.

Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs (with whom he had three children) and later to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane R. Kuhn).

[edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase),^[3] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm."^[4]

During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!",^[5] referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work.

The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn popularized the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.^{[citation needed]}

Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.

A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."^[6] In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice:

1. - Accurate - empirically adequate with experimentation and observation
2. - Consistent - internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories
3. - Broad Scope - a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain
4. - Simple - the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor
5. - Fruitful - a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena

He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."^[6] For this reason, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."^[6] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria," although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science.

Polanyi–Kuhn debate[link]

Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over the epistemology of science before either had achieved fame. In response to these critics, Kuhn cited Polanyi in the second edition of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,"^[7] and the two scientists agreed to set aside their differences in the hopes of enlightening the world to the dynamic nature of science.^{[citation needed]} Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.^[8]

Honors[link]

Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates.

Bibliography[link]

• Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. ISBN 1-902683-10-2
• Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-26894-2
• Sal Restivo, The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution. Sociological Theory, Vol. 1, (1983), 293-305.
• Hoyningen-Huene, Paul (1993): Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Copernican Revolution: planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN 0-674-17100-4
• Kuhn, T.S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52(1961): 161-193.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3
• Kuhn, T.S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". pp. 347–69 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, 9–15 July 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ISBN 0-226-45805-9
• Kuhn, T.S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0-226-45800-8
• Kuhn, T.S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2

References[link]

• Black-body theory and the quantum discontinuity: 1894-1912 (1978)

External links[link]

• Thomas Kuhn entry by Alexander Bird in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
• "Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm" (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996)
• Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996)
• Review in the New York Review of Books
• Color Portrait
• History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science BOOK VI: Kuhn on Revolution and Feyerabend on Anarchy - with free downloads for public use.
• article on his Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays
• Thomas Khun's Theory of incommensurability
• John Horgan's Interview http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/shapers/kuhn/
• Thomas S. Kuhn, post-modernism and materialist dialectics
• Errol Morris, The Ashtray: The Ultimatum (Part 1 [of 5 parts]), a critical view and memoir of Kuhn. [1]