Golub, C orcid.org/0000-0003-3934-5842 (Cover date: 2020) Representation, Deflationism, and the Question of Realism. Ergo, 7. ISSN 2330-4014
Abstract
How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought goes, while expressivists appeal instead to desire-like mental states in their explanations of meaning. However, I argue that, if we adopt a deflationary approach to representation and other related notions, there need be no such explanatory divide between expressivism and anything recognizable as a plausible notion of normative realism. Any alleged explanatory criterion for realism will either be incompatible with deflationism, or it will fail to capture some standard versions of normative realism. I conclude that, in a deflationary framework, expressivism is compatible with genuine realism.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This item is protected by copyright. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). |
Keywords: | expressivism, realism, quasi-realism, deflationism, explanation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 837036 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 29 May 2020 14:03 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:17 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Michigan Publishing |
Identification Number: | 10.3998/ergo.1133 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:161309 |