Mark Schroeder

This chapter introduces the concept of a tempered expressivist theory, and comparatively discusses two forms such a theory may take. One of these two forms, hybrid expressivism, is familiar. But the other, relational expressivism, does not have clear precedents. A version of relational expressivism is developed that solves familiar problems for expressivism by strictly generalizing on hybrid expressivism. Such a view has the prospect to get many of the advantages of hybrid expressivism without incurring some of its distinctive commitments. But relational expressivism also comes with distinctive commitments of its own. One of the key upshots of the chapter is a better understanding of how far one can go in developing an expressivist theory with limited resources in the philosophy of mind.

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties.

Persons are things. We are biological creatures, things of flesh and blood, whose behavior is governed by the same principles that govern the behavior of any other social mammals, plus or minus the complications that come from the recursive possibilities of access to natural language. That much is fact. But to be treated as a thing amounts to a deep insult. To be treated as a thing is to be minimized, rather than engaged with, predicted and controlled rather than reasoned with, written off as the product of our environment rather than appreciated for our unique contributions. Chapter 5 explores what it means to be treated as a thing in a morally problematic way, and argues that the answer must be tempered by the fact that persons are also a kind of thing.

This chapter lays out a case that with the proper perspective on the place of epistemology within normative inquiry more generally, it is possible to appreciate what was on the right track about some of the early approaches to the analysis of knowledge, and to improve on the obvious failures which led them to be rejected. Drawing on more general principles about reasons, their weight, and their relationship to justification, it offers answers to problems about defeat and the conditional fallacy that plagued early defeasibility analyses of knowledge and offers a sketch of a contemporary alternative that is motivated by the idea that knowledge requires the right kind of “match” between objective and subjective factors.

In chapter 6 of _Spreading the Word_, Blackburn spelled out one of the earliest attempts to account for the meanings of logically complex sentences and thoughts in terms amenable to the projectivist—an approach that has since been labeled the Higher-Order Attitude theory. This chapter reviews a problem that has been thought to be fatal for any broadly similar account, and explains why this problem is not as clearly fatal as it might initially seem. The line of defense advocated is broadly Blackburnian in spirit, in that it is intimately linked to a broadly deflationist picture of truth. But it also departs from the letter of much of Blackburn’s work on at least one important matter: its attitude toward propositions.

This chapter is concerned with the question as to whether expressivist theories of meaning can coherently be combined with deflationist theories of truth. After outlining what the text takes expressivism to be and what the text takes deflationism about truth to be, it explains why it doesn't take the general version of this question to be very hard, and why the answer is ‘yes’. Having settled that, the chapter moves on to what the text takes to be a more pressing and interesting version of the question, arising from a _prima facie_ tension between deflationism about truth and the motivations underlying expressivism for what the text takes to be two of its most promising applications: to indicative conditionals and epistemic modals. Here the chapter argues that the challenge is substantive, but that there is no conceptual obstacle to its being met, provided that one’s expressivism takes the right form.

In this article, I introduce and explain an underappreciated but pervasive phenomenon that I call discord. Discord helps to explain the source, dynamics, and resilience of many forms of interpersonal conflict. And it is a kind of misunderstanding into which philosophy offers a particularly privileged form of insight. By better understanding the nature of discord, we can better understand its inevitability, better navigate it, and better appreciate how it can amplify minor conflicts into more significant forms of strife. Discord, I show, is not just a theoretical possibility—it is inevitable. But discord is not just inevitable. It is also impactful. If you and I are in discord, then I do not respond to you in the ways that you think are appropriate. Worse, unrecognized discord has consequences of its own. And sometimes, discord itself persists precisely because it is not recognized. Fortunately, by giving you the concept of discord in this article, I equip you to be able to recognize (sometimes) when you are in discord. So this concept can be therapeutic because it can help you to avoid some of the bad effects of unrecognized discord and to escape discord that persists only because it is unrecognized.

Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by Mark Schroeder, 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.

Perception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder's account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both externalism and internalism, respectively. He answers this motivation by developing a more specific view that he calls the Apparent Factive Attitude view, which pairs an answer to what evidence is provided by a perceptual experience with an answer to why having that perceptual experience provides you with that evidence. In this paper, we advance two interconnected problems for Schroeder's Apparent Factive Attitude view. A traditional intuitive judgment that often motivates internalists is the idea that internal duplicates must necessarily be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. Schroeder's arguments rely on a weaker claim – that people who are both internal and historical external duplicates but differ only in the veridicality of a single perceptual experience must be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. In this way he preserves what he argues to be a more compelling internalist intuition. But our arguments will show that Schroeder's view is committed to denying an even more compelling internalist intuition yet – that internal duplicates must have the same phenomenology.

The last two decades have stood witness to a quiet revolution in epistemology. We used to think of ethics and epistemology as quite distinct areas of inquiry – ethics concerned with action, and epistemology concerned with belief. While ethics is the domain of values, epistemology is the domain of facts – the facts that we must get right, and get right first, in order to know how to pursue our values in ethics. The only competing values in epistemology, we were taught, were those of acquiring truth and avoiding error. But proponents of the revolution have pushed us to find values in the stronghold of truth. They have argued that rationality, justification, and even knowledge can depend on what is practically or even morally at stake, so that we can't do epistemology without thinking about values. And some have gone further, arguing that ethics is not just about action, after all, but also includes distinctively moral, and not just epistemological, questions about what to believe. The revolution in our understanding of the relationship between ethics and epistemology is well underway. Yet as in all revolutionary movements, there comes a moment when the revolutionaries must decide amongst themselves whether what they seek is reform or annihilation of the received world order. The reformists seek calculated interventions in the order of things. But the radicals want to go farther. They believe that more of the old must be thrown out, before the new can be ushered in. This is a chaotic period, when the revolution can yet be lost, if and as the alternative begins to look like total anarchy. And many possible visions of the future remain in play. This paper is a contribution toward working through these issues amongst the revolutionaries in epistemology. Let there be no surprises in this paper: I am of a reformist mindset, and the aim of this paper is to hold the line on cautious, calculated intervention, even in the pursuit of bold results.

This paper explores how philosophical accounts of the nature of persons and attributive responsibility can help us to make sense of the kinds of characteristic errors that people make in interpreting what is attributable to one another. I show how this gives us an important tool for understanding some important kinds of interpersonal conflict, with particular attention to understanding why Maya Angelou's advice that "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time" can seem easier to have followed from the privileged perspective of retrospection than it really was in prospect.

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. Noncognitivism in Ethics is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the 'Frege-Geach' problem. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout. It includes new sections on expressivism as a meta-semantic argument; the rise of relational expressivism; the idea that expressivism leads us to a novel understanding of the nature of propositions; and expressivism and epistemic modals, deontic modals, probability, vagueness and truth. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms, making Noncognitivism in Ethics essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics.

Based on a national social studies survey that included over 10,000 respondents from 44 states, this study examined the emphasis on diversity of religious view (EDRV) in public school P-12 social studies classrooms. This article addresses the following research questions: (1) how do teachers of different subjects (economics, history, and civics) or courses (e.g., U.S. history and world history) compare in their relative EDRV; and (2) what is the association—if any—between the relative importance of cultivating critical thinking/decision-making skills as a primary purpose for teaching social studies and EDRV? Teachers of different social studies subject areas differed ( F [6, 499]=13.83, p<0.001, η2=0.13), on their relative EDRV. There was also a positive relationship ( F [4, 10,072]=115.83, p<0.001) between teachers who believe that the primary purpose for teaching social studies is the cultivation of critical thinking/decision-making skills and the frequency with which they emphasize diversity of religious views (EDRV). The article discusses these findings and their implications on teacher education.

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.

Open peer commentary on the article “Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Upshot: Focusing on the relationship between info-computationalism and constructivism, I point out that there is a need to clarify fundamental concepts such as information, informational structures, and computation that obscure the theses regarding the relationship with constructivist thought. In particular, I wonder how we can reconcile constructivism with the view that all nature is a computational process

Umbhali is writing a serial novel. Her first seven chapters have already gone to press, and have been widely read and generated a lot of interest. But now she must write chapter eight. She has a lot of freedom—authorial freedom—in what she writes in chapter eight. What she writes may conform to a prior plan, but it need not—she could discover a new plan for her novel as she goes along. She doesn’t get to decide which interpretation of her novel is correct, but she does get to write the text that is to be interpreted. She is stuck with the first seven chapters and can’t change their text, but what she writes next can give new meaning to what happened in those pages. Let’s see what we can learn about existentialist freedom by thinking through Umbhali’s case in more detail.

Perceptual evidence about the external world is paradigmatically defeasible. If something looks red to you, it is reasonable to believe that it is red, but if you are wearing rose-tinted glasses, it may not be reasonable at all to believe this, unless you have some independent source of evidence. In this paper, I will compare four models for how to understand this phenomenon. These models differ in their answers to two questions: what evidence we get about the external world through perception, and what our having that evidence consists in. I like one of these models better than the others, but in this paper my primary concern will be to compare their virtues and vices.

In this chapter it is argued that knowledge stands to believing the right thing as acting well stands to doing the right thing. Knowledge is believing well along both objective and subjective dimensions. The argument uses artificial games as a control case in order to argue for a general principle about the relationship between acting well and doing the right thing. And it uses this general principle in order to offer both direct and indirect arguments that knowledge is believing well. It is a consequence of the argument of this chapter that knowledge is essentially normative in nature, and so epistemology is a normative discipline, through and through.

This chapter takes an indirect approach to the question of how people weigh conflicting reasons to determine what they ought to do. It is argued that obligations are a distinct normative concept that also admits of weighing. A natural, simple way due to W. D. Ross—Simple Weighing—of construing the manner in which both reasons and obligations are weighed is introduced. Commitments are introduced as a third normative concept that admits of weighing, and it is argued that Simple Weighing is inadequate for commitments. Commitments, it is argued, are actually a special case of self-imposed obligations; it follows that obligations in general need a more sophisticated weighing process than it first appears. The payoff for our understanding of the weight of reasons is a challenge: if Ross was wrong about how obligations weigh, could Simple Weighing also be wrong about how reasons weigh?

Hybrid metaethical theories come in many forms, but a particularly natural class of such theories takes their inspiration from terms in natural language which seem to have some conventional semantic meaning over and above their truth-conditions. Theories based on this comparison are naturally paired with naturalist metaethical views in order to make sense of how there is more to moral language and thought than naturalistic thought or talk. This chapter takes up the question of how to think about truth in such a hybrid metaethical theory. A simple model is given for how to distinguish between two different ways a word may contribute something extra to a sentence over and above its truth conditions. The consequences of this distinction for hybrid expressivism are explored.