-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
_______________________________________
This paper develops a solution to the grammatological problem, explaining why moral, ordinary descriptive, and taste judgments share so many grammatical and logical properties. I defend a form of belief expressivism: the view that these properties inhere in the fact that to assert a judgment is to present oneself as having a particular mental state — a belief — with the same propositional, truth-evaluable content. Belief expressivism is compatible with both taste nondescriptivism and ordinary descriptivism, provided that the contents of taste beliefs are truth-evaluable but non-objective. It thus allows for belief in a proposition’s truth without commitment to its objective truth. The account is grounded in five theoretical constraints that jointly explain how beliefs, whether descriptive or nondescriptive, give rise to the shared grammatological properties of judgments. I show how belief expressivism accommodates historically challenging phenomena in nondescriptive moral discourse, including predicate negation and deductive validity. I conclude by proposing a pluralistic framework for assertoric discourse, in which judgments express diverse kinds of beliefs without requiring rigid boundaries between judgment types.
_______________________________________
Genuine Relativism & Expressivism (2025)
This paper challenges the widely held assumption that genuine relativism and expressivism are distinct alternatives to contextualism about taste judgments. I argue that this distinction is largely illusory: genuine relativism is best understood as a form of contemporary minimalist expressivism. Misrepresentations of expressivism — often conflating it with outdated emotivist or prescriptivist views — have reinforced the perception of antagonism, leading the taste literature to overlook decades of work in metaethics. I show that the formal semantic programs developed by early genuine relativists closely parallel those of minimalist expressivists, and that remaining differences reflect complementary shortcomings in both frameworks. Resolving these issues reveals that expressivism and genuine relativism converge on the same position: evaluative nondescriptivism. I conclude by highlighting the interdisciplinary benefits of recognizing this convergence and by offering a framework for integrating insights from both traditions.
_______________________________________
Why not Taste Contextualism? (2024)
Are taste assertions descriptions of contextually salient preferences? In this paper, I critically examine contextualism about taste judgments, the view that the context in which a taste judgment is used determines a person or group whose tastes are supposedly described. Contextualism aims to preserve a conventional truth-conditional semantics and avoid the unconventional frameworks of expressivism and genuine relativism. I argue, however, that contextualism is unlikely to be true. I develop a series of objections showing that taste judgments are not typically used to describe people’s tastes: contextualism cannot accommodate the felicity of deflationary replies, fails to respect speakers’ ability to distinguish taste judgments from judgments about people’s tastes, predicts incorrect patterns of objection in underspecified contexts, and cannot satisfactorily respond to faultless disagreement arguments. I show that expressivism and genuine relativism do not face analogous problems. Finally, I consider an alternative version of contextualism in which taste predicates describe abstract standards rather than individual preferences, and I show that it faces similar difficulties along with additional challenges.
_______________________________________
This paper examines the striking absence of taste realism in the contemporary literature on the semantics of taste judgments. I argue that this absence is not accidental: the view that taste judgments describe mind-independent taste facts faces serious and systematic difficulties. In particular, I identify four features of taste experience and discourse — the quasi-infallibility of taste experience, the absence of natural corrective repercussions for “false” beliefs, the apparent faultlessness of disagreements, and the rational dependence of taste beliefs on subjective features — that undermine a realist treatment. I then argue that the three dominant approaches to taste semantics — contextualism, genuine relativism, and expressivism — are best understood as competing attempts to accommodate these features.
_______________________________________
The Grammatological Problem (2022)
I differentiate between two long-standing problems for metaethical nondescriptivism: the compositional problem and the grammatological problem. The grammatological problem challenges nondescriptivists to say what moral judgments and ordinary descriptive judgments have in common, in virtue of which they share so many grammatical and logical properties. I argue that an expanded version of this problem confronts descriptivists as well as nondescriptivists. In particular, I show that taste judgments exhibit each of the grammatical and logical properties shared by moral and ordinary descriptive judgments, and I challenge both camps to explain what all three types of judgment have in common, in virtue of which they display these properties. Finally, I offer some initial support for the claim that any adequate solution to this more demanding grammatological problem must offer an account of judgment (and belief) that is neutral with respect to the dispute between descriptivism and nondescriptivism.
_______________________________________
Alexander Ioakimidis 