9-10 May 2012, Workshop "Expressivism and Epistemic Normativity", Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, 15 rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris

Speakers: Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (University of Copenhagen), Simon Blackburn (Cambridge University), Matthew Chrisman (Edinburgh University), Allan Gibbard (University of Michigan), Hannes Leitgeb (LMU München), Seth Yalcin (UCBerkeley).

Respondents: Jérôme Dokic (EHESS, IJN), Igor Douven (University of Leuven), Paul Egré (CNRS, IJN), Friederike Moltmann (CNRS, IHPST), Joëlle Proust (CNRS, IJN), Isidora Stojanovic (CNRS, IJN).

Description: Expressivism is the view according to which normative utterances and thoughts, whether moral, aesthetic or epistemic, do not describe reality, but are rather the expression of practical attitudes. Such an analysis of normative utterances and thoughts in “non-cognitive” terms, as conative mental dispositions of agents, offers a promising way of naturalizing normative judgments. For philosophers of mind, this approach has the additional merit of emphasizing the difference between metacognitive predictions and metarepresentational judgments: while the latter aim at reporting mental states, the former are the product of evaluative attitudes, aimed at expressing the confidence of an agent/thinker in her cognitive dispositions. As a general theory of normative statements, however, expressivism runs into difficulties, such as the problem of truth-functional composition. The goal of the workshop is to foster interaction between defenders and critics of expressivism, to examine whether this view necessarily leads to a relativist or irrealist conception of norms, and, finally, to analyze the difficulties involved in integrating it into a general theory of epistemic normativity.

Organizers: Joëlle Proust & Anne Coubray (Institut Jean-Nicod)