Expressivism and Noncognitivism

Core Idea

Expressivism holds that moral statements express attitudes, emotions, commitments, or imperatives rather than propositions about facts. 'Stealing is wrong' expresses disapproval of stealing, not a factual claim. This noncognitive view avoids the metaphysical burden of moral realism while explaining why moral language functions differently from descriptive language. It must account for how moral statements can be rationally debated, inferred from, and compositionally combined.

Explainer

From your study of metaethics and moral realism vs. antirealism, you know that one of the central questions is whether moral statements are the kind of thing that can be true or false. Moral realists say yes — "Torture is wrong" is a factual claim, and it's true (or false) in some robust sense. Antirealists deny this in various ways. Expressivism and noncognitivism are the antirealist positions that focus specifically on the *nature of moral language*: they claim that when you say "Torture is wrong," you are not stating a fact at all. You are expressing a psychological state — an attitude, an emotion, a commitment.

The earliest and simplest noncognitivist view was emotivism, articulated by A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson. On this view, "Torture is wrong" means something like "Torture — boo!" It expresses disapproval, the way a grimace or a cry of disgust would. The word "wrong" is not a predicate describing a property of torture; it is an expressive noise in grammatical clothing. This view has obvious appeal: it explains why moral disagreement is so persistent (we are expressing different attitudes, not discovering competing facts), and it avoids the metaphysical problem of explaining what moral facts would even be. But emotivism faces an immediate objection: moral statements don't just express emotions. They appear in arguments, they can be inferred from, they combine with factual premises. If "Murder is wrong" is just an expression of disgust, it can't serve as a premise in "Murder is wrong; this is murder; therefore this is wrong." Logical inference requires truth-apt premises.

This is the Frege-Geach problem, and it forced expressivists to develop more sophisticated theories. R.M. Hare's prescriptivism held that moral statements are universal imperatives — "Stealing is wrong" means "Do not steal, anyone!" — which has more logical structure than a mere exclamation. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism tried to show that expressivism can earn the right to talk as if moral claims are true or false, even if in some deflationary sense. Allan Gibbard's norm expressivism held that moral statements express acceptance of norms for guiding action and emotion — a more complex mental state than a simple feeling, one that can participate in logical relationships.

The central tension in all expressivist views is that moral discourse behaves as if it is cognitive — we make inferences, argue about evidence, attribute knowledge and ignorance, call claims true — while the expressivist insists the underlying reality is not cognitive. The challenge is to explain this appearance without simply reverting to realism. The most sophisticated contemporary expressivists (like Gibbard and Blackburn) argue that the realist-seeming features of moral language are "earned" by the expressive function — we can legitimately call moral statements true, inferentially valid, and knowledge-apt within the practice of moral discourse, without needing moral facts in the metaphysically heavy sense. This is a subtle and contested position, but it represents the mature form of the expressivist tradition rather than Ayer's blunt "boo/hurrah."