Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun philosophy, ethics The doctrine that moral statements such as "this is wrong" express a moral evaluation rather than a statement of fact

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

expressive +‎ -ism

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Examples

  • One such view ” which may be called expressivism ” is the analogue of emotivism in ethics.

    The Deflationary Theory of Truth Stoljar, Daniel 2007

  • An alternative approach ” different both from realism and from the kind of expressivism sketched above ” is constructivism (Korsgaard 1997).

    Practical Reason Wallace, R. Jay 2008

  • Romantic "expressivism," the egotistical sublime), either by promising to overcome it in the supposedly autonomous modality of critical knowledge, or by emulating it in the ineffable dramaturgy of critical confession. [

    The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant, 1999

  • Pevsner, apart of his horrible theory, had some good points criticising expressivism in architecture.

    Swedish Inspiration – Chic Apartment With Scandinavian Feel 2009

  • Non-cognitivist theories (Hare's prescriptivism, Ayer's emotivism, more recently Allan Gibbard's expressivism), which variously deny that moral statements can be true or false, render moral judgment so subjective and capricious that, strictly speaking, it might just as well extend to "the wrongness of running round trees right-handed or looking at hedgehogs in the light of the moon".

    Philippa Foot obituary Jane O'Grady 2010

  • ˜Quasi-Realism™ is Simon Blackburn's name for this sort of non-cognitivism, and especially his own version of expressivism.

    Boys in White Suits 2009

  • Take a version of expressivism which says that a moral judgment that such and such an action is wrong predicates a nonmoral property of that action and at the same time expresses disapproval of that property.

    Boys in White Suits 2009

  • Worries of this sort make expressivist theories which are at the same time cognitivist (Copp 2001, Boisvert 2008) more attractive because they can claim many of the attractions of expressivism without the cost of seeming equivocation.

    Boys in White Suits 2009

  • The resulting theory might now be called ˜plan-expressivism™ rather than

    Boys in White Suits 2009

  • But if expressivism is correct, accepting the antecedent just is holding a non-cognitive attitude.

    Boys in White Suits 2009

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