Moral Expressivism and Pragmatist Realism

Henrik Rydenfelt

Seminar with Henrik Rydenfelt, post-doctoral researcher at University of Helsinki.

Expressivists maintain that moral (or more broadly normative) claims are expressions of the speaker’s mental states rather than descriptions of how things are “in the world” (except in a minimal or deflationary sense). Expressivists thus appear avoid some of the puzzling issues concerning the characteristics of moral “facts” and the nature of moral inquiry.

Some contemporary pragmatists, such as Huw Price, maintain that this expressivist approach is to be globalized: there is no interesting, non-deflationary account to be given of central semantic terms.

Instead, Price proposes a globally deflationary approach to the ontological commitments made in any domain of language. Here Price explicitly approaches the non-representationalist view of Richard Rorty, who argued that philosophical debates debate between realists and their opponents require a “representationalist” understanding of language and thought as attempting to “mirror” the world.

While Rorty often attempted to count the pragmatist John Dewey as among his non-representationalist ancestry, many contemporary scholars and proponents of classical pragmatism have famously taken a critical stance towards his adoption of the pragmatist colours. One of the most central reasons for this criticism is the fact that Dewey, William James and (especially) Charles S. Peirce – the three founding fathers of pragmatism – were all proponents of one or another form of realism.

Combined with the received wisdom, apparently shared by all fronts, that realism implies representationalism, the result is that these classics couldn’t welcome to the non-representationalist creed.

Against this received view, I will argue that realism should not be taken to imply representationalism; indeed, I will suggest that the classical pragmatists were precisely realists of a globally expressivist sort.

Firstly, I will point out that the semantic issue of representationalism and non-representationalism – or specifically, moral cognitivism and expressivism – is distinct and independent from the ontological issue of realism as opposed to its alternatives.

Secondly, I will argue that the classical pragmatists, especially Peirce with his semiotical system, already advanced a globally non-representationalist view.

Thirdly, I will show how Peirce’s form of (scientific) realism, or hypothetical realism, is already implied by our everyday assertoric practices, and for that reason of interest to the contemporary non-representationalists.

By way of conclusion, I will propose that contemporary expressivists and pragmatists would still benefit from exploring the views of their pragmatist ancestry; in particular, moral expressivists may still be both able and required to develop substantial accounts of normative inquiry and even forms of (moral) realism.

About

Henrik Rydenfelt is Researcher in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His recent publications are concentrated on a pragmatist approach to normatively, addressing key questions in epistemology, meta-ethics, ethical theory and social philosophy.

Rydenfelt is the coordinator of the Nordic Pragmatism Network, assistant review editor of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, associate editor of Pragmatism Today, editor of Nordic Studies in Pragmatism, and a member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy.

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