Imperative Clauses and the Frege–Geach Problem

摘要

Mark Schroeder’s Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivismnby isolating a few core assumptions and constraints, and then drawingnout the implications of how they can be developed into a semantic theory forna fragment of English. Its main virtue is that it shows how an expressivist cannhandle the ‘Frege–Geach problem’ by constructing a semantic system innwhich expressive language can embed in complex sentences that have thenright semantic properties. For example, considerable effort is put intonexplaining why the sentence ‘Murder is not wrong’ is inconsistent with thensimpler sentence ‘Murder is wrong’. Additionally, Being For claims tondevelop ‘non-cognitivism’, a family of non-descriptivist theories of normativenlanguage of which expressivism is a popular version, in the best way possible.nBut, ultimately, it concludes pessimistically that expressivism is ‘an extremelynunpromising hypothesis about the workings of natural languages’ (Schroedern2008: 179).