Going Global: Carnap’s Voluntarism and Price’s Expressivism

Huw Price has sketched a program for a globalized expressivism in support of which he has repeatedly invoked Rudolf Carnap (and what he calls “the Carnap thesis”). This paper argues that this is entirely appropriate, as Carnap had something quite similar in mind. However, it also argues that Price’s recent attempts to integrate Robert Brandom’s inferentialism to this program are less successful, and that a more empirically-oriented descriptive pragmatics along Carnapian lines would be a better fit with his original program than Brandom’s explicitly hermeneutical agenda.