Plan-Based Expressivism and Innocent Mistakes

Over the past hundred years, there has been a series of metaethical views according to which we ought to deepen our understanding of normative terms by inquiring after the states of mind they express. This is the class of views, sometimes identified as forms of noncognitivism, that Allan Gibbard has dubbed "expressivist." It includes the emotivism of A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson as well as, on some readings, the prescriptivism of R. M. Hare. More recently, Simon Blackburn's "quasi_realist" projectivism is a sophisticated form of expressivism, and Gibbard has also developed and defended an expressivist theory of his own.1 What these views share is the thought that normative terms are intimately linked to emotions or actions in a way that cannot be captured in a purely descriptive analysis. They also share a set of common objections. For instance, all expressivists must confront the so_called Frege_Geach problem, according to which an expressivist analysis of normative terms will be unable to account for the many ways in which such terms can be embedded in otherwise descriptive sentences.2 Expressivists also face objections, raised most prominently by Ronald Dworkin, according to which their analyses of normative terms fail to provide an adequate degree of objectivity for normative judgments.3