ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, we saw that when Stevenson first introduced his view, he contrasted it explicitly with what he called ‘traditional interest theories’. Traditional interest theories were a kind of predecessor to noncognitivism, and have been advocated by various philosophers for thousands of years. In this section we’re going to encounter the most important kind of traditional interest theory, a view called speaker subjectivism, and see why it attracted philosophers for many of the same reasons that philosophers have been attracted to noncognitivist theories. Then in the remainder of the chapter we’ll see why speaker subjectivism faces very serious problems, and how a certain kind of noncognitivist theory, expressivism, arises directly out of a simple idea about how to solve those problems. There are hints of the main ideas of expressivism in Ayer and Stevenson, but it really came into its own more recently, in the views of Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard. Expressivism is now the dominant version of noncognitivism – so dominant that people often write articles and books in which they define ‘noncognitivism’ to mean ‘expressivism’. Our most important task in this chapter is therefore to find out what this view is, and why it has been thought to amount to such a big improvement on the earlier theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare.
