CEFISES Seminar: Stephen Barker, « Global Expressivism and 2nd-Order Nihilism »

Livestream  https://youtu.be/nf9f6Dl1PzI

Series: Metametaphysics

Speaker: Stephen Barker (Nottingham University)

Title: « Global Expressivism and 2nd-Order Nihilism »

Abstract

I sketch a metasemantic approach to language that I call global expressivism (GE). GE is a specific kind of generalization to ethical expressivism to all sectors of discourse. I argue that acceptance of GE has metaontological consequences. It implies a view about reality that is fundamentally non-ontological, which is 2nd-order nihilism. This is nihilism about real definition or ultimate nature of things, the very thing that ontological theories seek to uncover. 2nd-order nihilists accept that composite things exist, as do values, numbers, facts, properties, etc, and they affirm that, as it seems, there are non-existent entities that we talk about. It just denies that they have any ultimate nature: we reject all real definitions of such entities, including that they are primitive beings. (long abstract available below).

Long abstract

I sketch a metasemantic approach to language that I call global expressivism (GE). GE is a specific kind of generalization to ethical expressivism to all sectors of discourse. I argue that acceptance of GE has metaontological consequences. It implies a view about reality that is fundamentally non-ontological, which I call 2nd-order nihilism. Ontology is an explanatory enterprise that, to quote Quine, ‘limns the true and ultimate structure of reality’. Ontology is characterised by application of Occam’s razor to questions of existence, anxiety about dualism and part-whole relations, hard problems and explanatory gaps, dubious entities, nomological danglers, the fear of necessary connections between distinct existences, Meinongian slums and desert landscapes, etc. I argue that at the heart of ontological thinking is a principle about reality:

REAL: Everything that is real, indeed, that we quantify over, must have a real-definition, or ultimate nature, viz., a something that makes it what it is.

When we ask: what is it to be x?, what does x reside/consist in?, or what are the identity conditions for x?, what is x ultimately?, when we demand a theory of what x is, and so forth, we are pursuing questions of real definition. Quine again encapsulates it: no entity without identity. I argue that when we ruthlessly survey the logic of REAL we see it must issue in fundamental puzzles: to do with metaphysical primitives and problems of unity, etc. These problems already motivate theorists embrace distinctions of ideology/ontology, ontological deflationism, internal realism, fictionalism, etc. These responses to ontological anxiety merely manage symptoms and don’t get at the root cause of ontological anxiety. I aim to root out the cause. I isolate a metasemantic assumption behind acceptance of REAL. It lies in the idea of language functioning as a mirror:

MIRROR: If a mind refers to X, X is part of the explanatory/causal/grounding base of Mind-refers-to-X. Mind functions like a mirror: if X appears in the mirror, then X itself is part of the explanation of how the mirroring of X arises.

MIRROR, I submit, is to be found in operation behind standard logical semantic (the project of truth-conditional semantics) and its metasemantical preoccupations, principally, theories of reference, as in: casual/counterfactual/descriptive, primitive-intentional theories. I argue that the problems of metaseamntics are themselves sufficient motivation to search for a metasemantics that does not embrace MIRROR. That’s what’s offered with global expressivism (GE). According to GE:

NON-MIRROR: For any talk about xs, xs themselves have no explanatory role in the account of how you get to talk about xs, viz., xs are not part of the explanatory/grounding base for facts of the form: this-mind-refers-to-xs.

For example: in your talk about moral reality, moral reality has no explanatory role in the metasemantic account of how you get to talk successfully about moral reality. Still, you refer to facts of value and moral properties, etc and say true things about them. The same thing applies to all domains of discourse. My main conjecture is this:

If we accept NON-MIRROR, then REAL is false (its contrary holds) for all x we quantify over, there is necessarily no real-definition about what x ultimately is (be it derived or primitive).

This is what I call 2nd-order nihilism. We are not nihilists—based on questions about the nature of reality—about anything, be it numbers, values, material composite things, qualia states, etc. Rather, we embrace a nihilism about what the constitution/ultimate nature, etc of anything is. We must reject all proposed real definitions about entities x, including that they are primitive beings. We invert Quine’s dictum: no entity with identity!