Between Thought and Expression

Abstract

Between Thought and Expression develops a unified conception of the rational mind—along with the philosophical method needed to reveal it—through seven self-contained essays on fundamental questions in diverse areas of philosophy. Variants of Moore’s Paradox—conjunctions of independently meaningful statements that somehow fail to make sense—are shown to arise across a striking range of domains: intentional action, desire, moral exhortation, aesthetic judgment, and validity. Tracking these Moore-style phenomena, the book argues that our attitudes in each domain are partly constituted by the thinker’s capacity to avow them—a capacity whose exercises, properly understood, are themselves applications of the standard of appropriateness to which the attitude is answerable. We do not first form a belief, intention, or desire and then find words to report it; the ability to put a thought into words is part of what makes it the thought it is, and a rational creature’s thought is no more determinate than her ability to articulate it. Understanding what someone is saying is therefore not a matter of inferring the speaker’s state of mind from the words she utters, but of grasping the sense she is making with them.