Nadja-Mira Yolcu

We do not only use language to avow our emotions but also to deny having them. Negative avowals – utterances such as “I’m not happy,” “I’m not scared,” or “I’m not angry” – raise an important but neglected question: how can the absence of a mental state be expressed in speech? I argue that negative avowals can, like positive ones, function as explicit expressive acts. This phenomenon, which I call expressive denegation, shows that speakers can make mental state absence itself linguistically manifest. To address the resulting puzzle, I develop propositional expressivism, on which what is expressed is not a mental state but a proposition about the speaker’s mental condition – namely, that she is (not) in the state named. This framework preserves the core insight of avowal expressivism while extending it to negative avowals.

Avowal expressivism holds that serious and competent utterances of first-person, present-tense ascriptions of mental states – e.g. “I’m in pain,” “I love you,” “I believe that p” – characteristically function as explicit expressions of the very states they mention. I argue that this stance commits its adherents to a matching treatment of negative avowals (“disavowals”) such as utterances of “I’m not in pain” and “I don’t love you.” Drawing on parity with positive avowals and on the behavior of pure disavowals that resist contrary-state and neg-raising analyses, I defend expressive denegation: disavowals can be expressive of the absence of the named state. The paper diagnoses why standard alternatives (hidden-avowal and purely descriptivist accounts) misclassify these cases, and shows how first-person authority and groundlessness extend to the negative domain. The result is a conditional commitment: endorsing avowal expressivism commits one to expressive denegation for negative avowals.

The paper comments on David Rosenthal’s claim that saying “p” is performance-conditionally equivalent to saying “I believe that p”. It is argued, by way of counterexamples, that the proposed performance-conditional equivalence does not hold in this generality. The paper further proposes that avowal expressivism gives necessary conditions for the performance-conditional equivalence: it holds only if the speaker’s utterance of “p” is a non-explicit expressive act expressive of the belief that p and the utterance of “I believe that p” is an explicit expressive act expressive of the very same belief. If that is correct, the performance-conditional equivalence thesis provides an argument against Rosenthal’s preferred avowal descriptivism and in favor of avowal expressivism.

The paper analyzes the nature and scope of Moore’s paradox, articulates the desiderata of a successful solution and claims that psychological expressivism best meets these desiderata. After a brief discussion of prominent responses to Moore’s paradox, the paper offers a solution based on a theory of expressive acts: a Moorean utterance is absurd because the speaker expresses mental states with conflicting contents in commissive versions of the paradox and conflicting states of mind in omissive versions. The paper presents a theory of expressivism for self-ascriptions of mental states. In addition, it introduces the idea of expressive denegation—the speaker’s expressing the absence of a mental state—as an analysis of negative self-ascriptions of mental states. Some of the consequences of expressivism for avowals are explored.