Abstract

JP argue that expressivists must admit that becoming competent with ethical utterances involves learning to make them only when one believes one has the relevant attitude. For expressivists hold that communicating our attitudes is the function of ethical utterances, in which case sincerity demands that we not utter an ethical sentence unless we believe we have the relevant attitude. So (b) is false, as long as we suppose that this commitment, as reflected in well-entrenched and clear-cut (henceforth, 'robust' abbreviates 'well-entrenched and clear-cut') conventions, means that ethical utterances express one's belief that one has the relevant attitude. This, in turn, means that (a) is false, if we grant that a belief expressed in virtue of such conventions provides the utterance's truth-conditions.