Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language Reprint Edition

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of language; it's also one of the most important books in contemporary meta-ethics. Chapters 5-7, I think, constitute the best introduction to Blackburn's quasi-realism. As a matter of fact, these chapters may constitute the best expression of the nature of, and motivations for, the quasi-realist project that Blackburn has published. (Ruling Passions is more detailed and expansive, but it's also evasive and frustratingly unclear in parts; this book is much clearer and more direct. The papers in Essays in Quasi-Realism are good, but they're aimed at those already working on these subjects; this book, while not an easy read, doesn't assume the reader is coming to it with this sort of background.)
Chapter 5 is Blackburn's introduction to issues concerning language and realism, and Blackburn uses debates about moral realism as his example of an area where linguistic issues are appealed to as providing evidence for an against certain forms of realism and anti-realism. The chapter involves a brief introduction to the sort of noncognitivist expressivism he favors. According to Blackburn, we can best understand moral judgments as expressions of our attitudes. This sort of noncognitivism, he argues, provides us with the best account of the nature, which is not best understood as language used to respond to some moral aspect of reality (as language about ordinary physical objects is best understood as responding to things outside our minds and the properties they possess). To the extent that we can legitimately speak of a moral aspect of reality, of the moral properties of things, they are projections of our attitudes; they're "out there" in virtue of our spreading our attitudes onto the world.
Chapter 6 begins with a discussions of some benefits of a projective theory of moral judgments. Blackburn claims there are three such benefits his theory provides: (i) metaphysical and epistemological simplicity, in that projectivism allows us to understand moral discourse without appealing to special moral properties and a special faculty for knowing them, things which, it seems, wouldn't have a place in a respectable naturalistic account of the world and of human psychology; (ii) a explanation of the supervenience of the moral properties of things on their natural properties better than any explanation a realist can offer; and (iii) an explanation of the intimate connection between a person's moral judgments and her motivations to behave in accord with those judgments.
Having sketched the outlines of his projectivist theory of moral discourse and some reasons to prefer it to its rivals, Blackburn turns to an apparent dilemma facing the projectivist (and noncognitivists more generally). The dilemma is that the projectivist seems to be committed to either declaring that moral discourse is subject to a pervasive error or abandoning projectivism and accepting a form of realism. Why? In short, the reason is that the structure of moral discourse is realist in nature. When we say that something is morally right or wrong, it appears that we are talking about properties of things that are out there, irrespective of human attitudes. We speak of moral claims being true and false, and we claim that people's moral views are occasionally wrong. We talk about what the moral facts are. All of this makes it seem that we're talking about moral facts that exist independently of us. If you go simply by the way we talk about morality, we don't see any difference between such language and how we talk about everyday physical objects.
But the expressivist tells us that there is a major difference here: talk about morality, unlike talk about everyday physical objects, is a means of expressing attitudes and doesn't even purport to describe mind-independent facts. So it looks like the projectivist is stuck. If she defends moral discourse against accusations that it is predicated upon an error, she seems to be committed to realism (i.e. to the view that there are moral facts, and that our moral discourse describes them) and to its, perhaps implausible, metaphysical and epistemological commitments. If she repudiates the appearance of moral discourse, then it appears the projectivist is telling us that people are mistakenly committed to realism though their use of ordinary moral language. Through the things they normally say using moral language, it appears that people erroneously think that there's something out there for moral language to describe, that moral claims can be literally true and false, and that the truth and falsity of moral claims is independent of facts about their attitudes.
Blackburn wants to avoid both both realism and an error-theoretic account of morality, and his quasi-realist project is the project of attempting to show that a projectivist can do so. That is, quasi-realism is the project of explaining and justifying the realist-seeming structure of moral thought and discourse on projectivist grounds
Why, if projectivism is true, do we use language that is realist? And why should we do so? In the rest of chapter 6 and in chapter 7, Blackburn deals with these questions. He presents certain elements of moral thought and language that seem to conflict with his projective theory of moral thought and language, and he tries to account for them on projective grounds. He's especially concerned with three thing: (i) The Frege-Geach problem: that is, the problem of accounting for the appearance of moral sentences in unasserted contexts; (ii) the application of truth and falsity to moral sentences; and (iii) the mind-independence of moral truth and falsity.
By accounting for these aspects of moral thought and language with projectivist resources, he hopes to provide some evidence that the quasi-realist project will be wholly successful.

The title of this book has a double meaning. On the one hand, Blackburn intends to "spread the word" about the philosophy of language; for, among other things, "Spreading the Word" is a comprehensive introduction to, and survey of, the subject. On the other hand, a central part of this book is a sympathetic presentation of "projectivist" accounts of various things -- e.g., values and causation -- and he follows Hume in representing certain of our "sayings" as the mind's "spreading itself" on the world.

"Spreading the Word" is organized in two parts. Part 1, titled "Our Language and Ourselves", discusses issues relating to the compositionality of language and linguistic competence (what Blackburn calls the "elasticity of our understanding"), and in this connection Blackburn discusses the views of Frege, Chomsky, and Quine, and others. The next two chapters are about meaning. In the first, "How Is Meaning Possible? (1)," Blackburn attacks "dog-legged" accounts of meaning -- i.e., theories that explain the meaningfulness of words in terms of their relation to something else (e.g., Locke's "ideas") which is already assumed to have unexplained, representational content. Here we get the Berkeley-Wittgenstein criticism of "imagist" theories, along with criticisms of Fodor's "innate representational medium" and Quine and Davidson on "radical interpretation." In the second chapter, "How Is Meaning Possible? (2)," Blackburn employs the notion of a "bent predicate" (e.g., "grue") and a "bent rule" (e.g., Wittgenstein's idiosyncratic reading of the "plus two" rule in the Investigations), and discusses the issue of what constitutes a person's meaning one thing rather than another, and something rather than nothing. Blackburn takes Wittgenstein to have shown that there is no "display to the mind" which determines whether a person is using a word in a certain sense, but he rejects the idea that an individual's meaning something necessarily involves the existence of a social "practice." Instead, Blackburn defends the possibility of solitary meaning. This I found one of the most interesting chapters of the book. The final chapter of Part 1, "Conventions, Intentions, Thoughts," is primarily a defense of a "convention-belief" account of meaning. Here, Blackburn draws on the work of David Lewis, Jonathan Bennett, and Hilary Putnam. He also discusses the connection between thought and language. Blackburn's view seems to be that thought requires something like language, "a structure map, telling us where we are," but not necessarily a public language consisting of elements with conventionally determined meanings. On these points I found Blackburn somewhat elusive.

Part 2 is titled "Language and the World." Its first two chapters deal with issues relating to realism. "Realism and Variations" lays out the alternative approaches to situations in which our "sayings" seem to invoke entities that seem problematic -- such as values, causality, the theoretical entities of physics, etc. Other than the extremes of rejection, on the one hand, and full realism on the other, the chief alternatives Blackburn discusses are reductionism and "expressive" theories. The latter he calls "projectivist" theories. Roughly speaking, where the problematic sayings are A-statements, and B-statements are the statements about the world to which a reductionist would try to reduce the A-statements, the projectivist enterprise is to explain, relying only on "our exposure to the B-describable world," how it comes about that we have the A-concepts, "with their horizontal connections, loosely fitting the B-descriptions." Blackburn champions the projectivist enterprise -- at least in its application to values, causality, counterfactuals, and modality. Blackburn opposes J.L. Mackie: he doesn't think that projectivism must involve an "error theory." The enterprise of showing that "even on anti-realist grounds there is nothing 'diseased' in projected predicates," is what Blackburn calls "quasi-realism." The following chapter, "Evaluations, Projections, and Quasi-Realism," is devoted to developing and defending the quasi-realist view, primarily as applied to evaluative judgments. In this chapter Blackburn exhibits considerable ingenuity in arguing that the projectivist can account for the embedding in conditionals of sentences containing moral terms (e.g., "If it is wrong to tell lies, it is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies"), and that he can even allow the notions of truth and falsity to apply to moral "sayings".

The next two chapters deal with truth. "Correspondence, Coherence, and Pragmatism" says little about pragmatism, but it's a very useful discussion of the merits and demerits of correspondence and coherence theories of truth, and of related epistemological issues such as scepticism, holism, and the rejection of the given. Blackburn recommends avoiding "direct analysis" of truth in either correspondence or coherence terms but he finds virtues in both approaches. The next chapter, "Truth and Semantics," gives a good elementary presentation of Tarski's ideas on truth, criticizes them along lines similar to Hartry Field's, and then discusses Davidson's use of Tarski's ideas and related issues about radical interpretations. The final chapter is on reference; this chapter discusses Russell's theory of descriptions, Putnam's Twin Earth example, methodological solipsism, Fregean senses, perspectival thought (à la Perry and Lewis), and much else.

Blackburn's mastery of the issues and the literature is most impressive. Throughout he shows good philosophical judgment, and his treatment of the issues is consistently intelligent, sensitive, fair-minded, and insightful. But don't be mistaken: this book is far too ambitious to be called an introductory textbook in the philosophy of language. It's too advanced to recommend or assign to an undergraduate. Blackburn's writing is generally admirable. He has a fluent style, a deft touch with words, and a knack for hitting on the phrase (often a metaphor) that gets across a difficult idea. Sometimes Blackburn's central points become swamped by digressions, elaborations, and subsidiary points, making it easy for one to lose one's way. But in general the writing is pleasing, and often witty. "Spreading the Word" may be recommended to readers with better-than-working background in philosophy who find phil.-language daunting, as well as those who already feel at home with the subject.

man this book is really nice. sure you will disagree with a lot of the stuff but will be a good challenger! i liked...