Cognitivist Expressivism

This chapter challenges the so-called semantic assumption - according to which beliefs are necessarily descriptive in that they purport to represent or describe some state of affairs - by arguing that moral judgments share enough of the phenomenological and functional features that are central to the notion of belief, to count as genuine beliefs; a notion that does not require beliefs to be primarily descriptive. This opens the door to a cognitivist version of expressivism. The chapter sketches a version of cognitivist expressivism, including an account of logical embedding (meant to deal with the Frege- Geach problem), which it argued as prima facie more plausible than non-cognitivist and descriptivist alternatives in metaethics.