Normative certitude for expressivists

Abstract

Quasi-realists aspire to accommodate core features of ordinary normative thought and discourse in an expressivist framework. One apparent such feature is that we can be more or less confident in our normative judgments-they vary in credence. Michael Smith has argued that quasi-realists cannot plausibly accommodate these distinctions simply because they understand normative judgments as desires, but desires lack the structure needed to distinguish these three features. Existing attempts to meet Smith's challenge have accepted Smith's presupposition that the way to meet the challenge is to show that normative judgments have more structure than they initially seem to have. I argue that accepting this presupposition is accepting too much. The orthodox view of certitude, insofar as there is one, understands certitude very roughly in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour. Counterfactual betting behaviour, though, is not in any useful sense a structural feature of a given judgment. It is rather a more holistic feature of a given agent's cognitive system. Insofar as it can meet the other challenges it faces, quasi-realism can characterize credences in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour and effectively say exactly what many realists will want to say about credences, thus meeting Smith's challenge much more directly. Keywords Expressivism • Quasi-realism • Decision theory • Credence • Belief • Normativity • Metaethics Quasi-realists aspire to accommodate core features of ordinary normative thought in an expressivist framework. One such feature is that people can be more or less confident in their normative judgments. I am more certain that pain is bad than I am that white lies are permissible. A plausible quasi-realist account of normative credence should follow ordinary practice and distinguish relative degrees of confidence (credences) from how valuable a given judgment takes an object of evaluation to be (importance). It should also distinguish both of these from the stability of the judgment in the face of further information and reflection (robustness). Michael Smith B Michael Ridge

A solution to the many attitudes problem

“…Belief-Desire Reduction: A wide variety of propositional attitudes have a functional 4 For noncognitivist accounts of belief, see Gibbard (1990Gibbard ( , 2003; Köhler (2013); Björnsson and McPherson (2014). For noncognitivist theories of credence, see Sepielli (2012); Eriksson and Olinder (2016); Ridge (2018). For noncognitivist takes on knowledge, see Blackburn (1996); Gibbard (2003: chp.11).…”

Quasi-realism and normative certitude

“…In previous work, two of us have argued that extant non-cognitivist accounts of normative certitude, including ecumenical expressivist accounts, fail (Bykvist and Olson 2009, 2012, 2017. Michael Ridge has recently argued that quasi-realists can do better (Ridge 2018). In Sect.…”