Norm expressivism and punishment in International Relations - Volume 52 Issue 4

Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons presents a philosophical conception of logic—“logical expressivism”—according to which the role of logic is to make explicit reason relations, which are often neit...

Amitpal C. Singh (Harvard University - Harvard Law School) has posted Expressivism, Fittingness, and New Torts (Journal of Tort Law, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: A growing chorus of scholarly and judicial voices anoints expressivism as a rationale for creating new torts, such as a tort of family violence or intimate partner violence. Rather than take issue with expressivism directly, this Article grants expressivism arguendo and shows that no convincing rationale for new torts follows.

Metaethicists have often claimed that expressivism either avoids or elegantly answers explanatory challenges about the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics in ways that “realist” metaethical views cannot. We argue that currently influential “conciliatory” or “quasi-realist” versions of expressivism lack distinctive means of either avoiding or answering two of the most important explanatory challenges in metaethics: the challenge to explain the supervenience of the ethical, and the challenge to explain the reliability of our ethical judgments. We offer a general framework which explains conciliatory expressivism’s inability to address these challenges. First, there are just two fundamental ways of addressing the sorts of explanatory challenges we pose: to undercut them (by showing that the relevant explanatory demand does not arise), or to answer them (by providing explanations of the relevant modal correlations). Second, the hypotheses about language that are necessary to achieve an even modestly conciliatory form of expressivism entail that the conciliatory expressivist cannot undercut these challenges in a straightforward way. Third, however, the conciliatory expressivist’s characteristic hypotheses about language and thought provide them with no distinctive additional resources that could be used to answer the challenges. If we are correct, the upshot is that conciliatory expressivism is at least as poorly off with respect to these challenges as its realist foils.

Reasoning with Attitude: Foundations and Applications of Inferential Expressivism, by IncurvatiLuca and SchlöderJulian J. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xvii + 330.

Kaplan, Abraham Schilpp, Paul Arthur Carnap was one of the first to use the term “non-cognitivism.” His linguistic pluralism and voluntarism, together with his deflationary views of ontolo...