ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6 we saw what constructive expressivist recipes for the meanings of complex sentence determined from the meanings of their parts might look like, and investigated the Higher-Order Attitude approach. The primary problem with Higher-Order Attitude accounts was that they overgenerated valid arguments, because they failed to be able to distinguish valid arguments from some invalid arguments. And that happened, as van Roojen noted, because they relied on too general a notion of ‘irrational’ in order to explain why it is irrational to both think that P and think that ~P. Consequently, in order to avoid overgenerating, an expressivist explanation of inconsistency needs to establish that [P] and [~P] – that is, the thought that P and the thought that ~P – clash with each other in the very same way as the ordinary descriptive belief that grass is green clashes with the ordinary descriptive belief that grass is not green.
