NON-DESCRIPTIVE NEGATION FOR NORMATIVE SENTENCES

Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotivism, prescriptivism, and expressivism. The sharpened point of such criticism has come to focus on whether negation and inconsistency have to be understood in descriptivist terms. Because they reject descriptivist semantics, these theories must offer a non-standard account of the meanings of ethical and normative sentences and their semantic relations. This paper fills out such a solution to the negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative language like deontic 'must' and 'may' to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in this interplay can help explain negation and inconsistency, in a dynamic semantic system that develops the scorekeeping model of conversation. This clarifies the significance of Frege-Geach worries for nondescriptive semantics.