From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.logic
Subject: Re: No Reification Here
Date: 30 Dec 92 07:27:14 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Dec30.022715.18893

In article <1hqjglINN52l@cat.cis.Brown.EDU> 
PL436000@brownvm.brown.edu (Jamie) writes:

>>From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)

MZ:
>>Is anybody still taking emotivism seriously?

J:
>Yes, someone is.

Tant pis pour eux.

J:
>>>As well you know, Simon Blackburn thinks that MANY predicates
>>>should be paraphrased out that way. He thinks these predicates
>>>express NO property, and yet that they are meaningful.

MZ:
>>Is anybody still taking Simon Blackburn seriously?

J:
>Well, now THAT I'm not sure about. I suspect so.

Ditto.

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.

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

J:
>I will fill in a couple of the examples now.
>
>Blackburn claims that "is good" expresses no property, but that
>it is nevertheless meaningful, because it has a function other
>than expressing a property. Its function is to express an
>attitude ("express" in this sentence is meant in a different
>sense from that of "expresses a property").
>(He says roughly the same thing about "causes" and "is necessary.")

How is an attitude not a property?

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.

J:
>>>I suppose what I was thinking was that there is no property of
>>>Yesterday Occurrence. Nevertheless, "Occurred yesterday" does
>>>express a property on each occasion of utterance.

MZ:
>>Does not do anything for your claim then, does it?

J:
>Which claim?

That predicates could be meaningful without expressing any properties.

J:
>>>Why don't you think that's a counterexample? Is it,
>>>(a) because Expressivism is false,
>>>(b) because a predicate with an Expressivist analysis is meaningless,
>>>(c) because a predicate with an Expressivist analysis nonetheless
>>>    expresses a property,
>>>
>>>or something else?

MZ:
>>At the moment, I do not quite know what it is.

J:
>I would now like to add another possibility,
>
>(d) because the things that look like predicates are not,
>according to an Expressivist analysis, really predicates at all.

(c)

>Jamie

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."
Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.tech:4664 sci.logic:2517