Expressing Our Attitudes ─ Explanation and Expression in Ethics

When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research program of expressivism, emotivism's contemporary heir, has called this assumption into question. In this volume Mark Schroeder argues that the only plausible ways of developing expressivism or similar views require us to re-think what we may have thought that we knew about propositions, truth, and the nature of attitudes like belief and desire. Informed by detailed scrutiny of the structural problems about understanding complex thoughts, he develops a range of alternative expressivist frameworks in detail as illustrations of general lessons, and applies them not just to metaethics, but to epistemic expressions and even to truth itself.
Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. Two new and seven previously published papers weave treatments of propositions, truth, and the attitudes together with detailed development of competing alternative expressivist frameworks and discussion of their relative advantages. A substantial new introduction both offers new arguments of its own, and provides a map to reading these essays as a unified argument.
Along with its sister volume, Explaining the Reasons We Share, this volume advances the theme that metaethical inquiry is continuous with other areas of philosophy.

Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California

Mark Schroeder is the author of Slaves of the Passions (OUP, 2007), Being For: Evaluating the Semantic Program of Expressivism (OUP, 2008), Noncognitivism in Ethics (Routledge, 2010), and Explaining the Reasons We Share (OUP, 2014), as well as over fifty articles in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His work has appeared inEthics, Philosophical Review, Mind, Nous, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophers' Imprint, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Philosophical Studies, and many other places. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.