ABSTRACT
Expressivists in metaethics hold that there is a philosophically important difference between the kinds of mental states expressed by our use of normative vocabulary and the mental states expressed by our use of other vocabularies paradigmatically caught up in the practice of referring to and describing pieces of reality. Typically expressivists think that someone who does not implicitly track this difference does not completely understand the meaning of the target vocabulary. Hence, expressivism is usually seen as an antidescriptivist theory of the meaning of words like ‘good’, ‘wrong’, or ‘ought’.
