Platitudes and Attitudes: A Minimalist Conception of Belief
1. Minimalism about truth-aptitude appears to undercut the central claim of expressivism about moral value (Wright [6]). The central claim of expressivism is that declarative sentences of moral discourse are not apt to be evaluated as true or false. Minimalism about truth-aptitude appears to undercut this claim by insisting that the sentences in question are apt to be evaluated as true or false according to the standards of truth-aptitude imposed by disciplined syntacticism - i.e. the sentences in question have appropriate syntactic features and their use is constrained by appropriate standards of discipline. The claim that minimalism about truth-aptitude succeeds in undercutting the central claim of expressivism about value has met with considerable resistance (Jackson [2], Smith [4]). In a previous article we