From: PL436000@brownvm.brown.edu (Jamie)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.logic
Subject: Re: No Reification Here
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 10:41:09 EST
Organization: Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island  USA
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>From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)

>J:
>>>>Even if you hate Blackburn, there are more respectable examples.
>>>>De Finetti was an expressivist about probability predicates, for
>>>>example. Allan Gibbard has a pretty good expressivist theory of
>>>>normative judgments.

>MZ:
>>>It remains to be shown that expressivism, as exemplified above, is
>>>bereft of an ontology of properties.

>J:
>>I didn't say, of course, that expressivism is bereft of an ontology
>>of properties. Expressivists may be quite happy with some properties,
>>but wish to rid their ontology of others.

MZ:
>Unless they avoid referring, explicitly or implicitly, to other
>objective properties, while so ridding their ontology, my point still
>stands.

Just a moment.
Here is the issue that I thought we were discussing.

Is it true that a given predicate is meaningful iff it expresses
a property?

I am uncertain about this issue. It is not clear to me that a
predicate with an expressivist analysis expresses a property.
But it does seem to me that a predicate with an expressivist
analysis is meaningful.

There is a separate question: do expressivists allow for ANY
properties in their ontologies? I believe virtually all of them
do. But, they still think that there are some meaningful
predicates which express no property.

>How is an attitude not a property?

Well, an attitude might be thought of as a property. But here is
what I thought the issue was.

In regular old realist semantics, the semantic value of a predicate
is a property. The predicate contributes that property to propositions
expressed by sentences in which the predicate occurs.

In expressivist, anti-realist (or "irrealist" as it's fashionably
called nowadays) semantics, a predicate may have no descriptive
semantic value at all. It contributes nothing to any proposition
because sentences in which it occurs express no proposition.

Here is a sample from Allan Gibbard's expressivist theory of
normative predicates.

  "To call something rational is to express one's acceptance of norms
  that permit it." .... Normative talk is part of nature, but it does
  not describe nature. In particular, a person who calls something
  rational or irrational is not describing his state of mind; he is
  expressing it. To call something rational is not to attribute
  some particular property to that thing--not even the property of
  being permitted by accepted norms. The analysis is not directly
  of what it is for something to *be* rational, but of what it is
  for someone to *judge* that something is rational. We explain
  the term by saying what state of mind it expresses. In this sense
  the analysis is *expressivistic*, and in too big a mouthful, I shall
  call it the *norm-expressivistic analysis*.
                              [Wise Choices, Apt Feelings pp.7-8]
     [The quotation marks appear in the original.]

I hope this is clear enough for present purposes. According to
Gibbard, there is no property of being rational. But "is rational"
is meaningful in that it expresses a special kind of endorsement.

Similar ideas can be found in de Finetti.

>J:
>>De Finetti believed that the predicate "Has probability .5"
>>expressed no property, but that it was nevertheless meaningful
>>in that it expressed the speaker's degree of belief. (Again,
>>"expressed" in the second sense. Perhaps I will try to avoid
>>this locution, but it's not easy since the name of the view
>>is "expressivism.")
>
>The speaker's degree of belief surely is a property of the speaker.

It is. But, according to de Finetti, someone who says "The eternal
damnation of the heretics has probability .5" does not express
a proposition about his state of mind, about his degree of belief.
He rather expresses his degree of belief.

If I utter "Ow! you son of a bitch" when Tom Nagel steps on my
gouty toe, I have not expressed the proposition that I am in pain,
but I have expressed my pain.

Jamie
Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.tech:4629 sci.logic:2485