Being for

Expressivism--the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer Stevenson and Hare--is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy -- including logic probability mental and linguistic content knowledge epistemic modals belief the a priori and even quantifiers.Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been very far developed. As argued within expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the negation problem - to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true let alone whether it is.Being For seeks to evaluate the semantic commitments of expressivism by showing how an expressivist semantics would work what it can do and what kind of assumptions would be required in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem - but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful constructive expressivist semantics which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism. But it also argues that no account with these advantages can be generalized to deal with constructions like tense modals or binary quantifiers. Expressivism the book argues is coherent and interesting but false.