Propositional clothing and belief

Sinclair, Neil (2007) Propositional clothing and belief. The Philosophical Quarterly, 57 (228). pp. 342-362. ISSN 1467-9213

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Moral discourse is propositionally clothed, that is, it exhibits those features – such as the ability of its sentences to intelligibly embed in conditionals and other unasserted contexts – that have been taken by some philosophers to be constitutive of discourses that express propositions. If there is nothing more to a mental state being a belief than it being characteristically expressed by sentences that are propositionally clothed then the version of expressivism which accepts that moral discourse is propositionally clothed (‘quasi-realism’) is self-refuting. Fortunately for quasi-realists, this view of belief, which I label ‘minimalism’, is false. I present three arguments against it and dismiss two possible defences (the first drawn from the work of Wright, the second given by Harcourt). The conclusion is that the issue between expressivists and their opponents cannot be settled by the mere fact that moral discourse wears propositional clothing.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1016771
Additional Information: The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Arts > School of Humanities > Department of Philosophy
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.488.x
Depositing User: Sinclair, Dr Neil
Date Deposited: 22 Feb 2013 23:35
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 20:28
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/1929

Actions (Archive Staff Only)

Edit View Edit View