"On Stephen Barker's Expressivist Proposal"

ORLANDO, ELEONORA

Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires

Workshop; Workshop on Truthmakers and Semantic Expressivism; 2006

Grupo de Acción Filosófica (GAF)

  In “Truthmaking, Expressivism and the Incredible Lightness of Being”, Stephen Barker has put forward an expressivist conception of truth, as an alternative to truth-conditional, epistemic and minimalist accounts in their different versions. Right from the beginning, he points out that the kind of expressivism that he is going to argue for is one that allows for the following three well-known platitudes about truth: (i)         Tarski´s truth schema T: <S> is true if and only if S (ii)       The so-called truth-making schema TM: <S> is true because S (iii)     What he calls F: It is a fact that S if and only if S Since Tarski, respect for (i) has been taken to be a condition of adequacy for any theory of truth. So, it is natural to require that any account of truth should be informed by the purpose to respect (i). In contrast, what is rather surprising is Barker’s concern for both (ii) and (iii). Therefore, there is something that he recognizes to have in common with any truth-conditional approach, namely, a concern to make sense of (ii) and (iii). In this article, I intend to point out a number of aspects of the proposal that are not entirely clear to me. As is known, moral expressivism has provided us all with a clear characterization of what expressivism may amount to when applied to evaluative terms. As far as logical terms are concerned, I think that Barker’s proposal is clear enough too: each logical connective is taken to be associated with a certain subjective attitude that gets expressed by means of its use. For instance, a negation is taken to express the attitude of rejecting an attitude associated with the (possible) assertion of what is being negated. However, I am doubtful whether expressivism can be applied to descriptive terms. More specifically, in this regard, I don’t see in what sense the position is taken to constitute an alternative to truth-conditional accounts of meaning. Besides, I have some worries related to Barker’s second main idea, namely, the thesis according to which the asymmetry involved in TM can be accounted for with no appeal to the correspondence relation between language and reality pointed out by truth-conditional theorists.