¹ The current debate on the semantics of personal taste predicables as led by MacFarlane's work (MacFarlane, John, Assessment Sensitivity. Relative Truth and its Application (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar involves normative functions of objects, a debate that falls outside the scope of this paper. As far as FGA is concerned, arguments in which predicables of personal taste occur are more similar to the ‘is-bad’ argument than to the ‘is-true’ argument.

² See, for instance, Chrisman, Matthew, ‘Ethical Expressivism’. In Ed. By Miller, Christian (ed.), Continuum Companion to Ethics. Continuum, Bloomsbury Companions (2011), 29–54Google Scholar, and also Price, Huw, ‘The semantics foundations of metaphysics’, in Ravenscroft, Ian, ed., Minds, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson. Oxford University Press (2009), 111–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ In our paper, ‘Pragmatism. Propositional Priority and the Organic Model of Propositional Individuation’, Disputatio, Vol. VIII, No. 43, November 2016, 203–217, Neftalí Villanueva and I defended the ‘organic model’ of propositional individuation. The organic intuition is a related but more basic claim.

⁴ Geach, Peter, ‘Ascriptivism’, Philosophical Review 69 (2) (1960),  221–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ I use ‘non-descriptivism’ as a general label for those semantic theories that deny that representation is the most basic semantic notion. These theories standardly assume that what speakers do with words when they are concerned with truth reduces to referring and predicating. ´Non-descriptivisḿ is thus intended to cover alternative views to the standard truth-conditional semantics. This characterization is very vague but, as the paper proceeds, the nature of my proposal and the alternative views that I want to keep at a distance will become clearer. Expressivisms of all kinds, non-cognitivism, conceptual-role semantics, and inferentialism, fall under my use of ‘non-descriptivism’. Strictly speaking, ‘describing’ and ‘representing' are not synonymous. The opposition of descriptivism vs. non-descriptivism, a dichotomy with pragmatist tones, concerns what agents do with utterances. Representationalism vs. non-representationalism, in contrast, is more centered in the semantic realm, and is often used to explain why some sentences mean what they do, and in which circumstances they are true or false. Finally, the opposition of cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism concerns the epistemic aspects of the debate, i.e. whether normative sentences express beliefs that can be said to be true or false, and whether knowledge of normative realms is possible. The Frege-Geach Argument, although originally used by Geach against ascriptivism, has since extended its target to the general family of non-representationalist, non-descriptivist views.

⁶ Peter Geach, op. cit. note 4,  222.

⁷ See Bar-On, Dorit and Chrisman, Matthew, ‘Ethical NeoExpressivism’, in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Shafer-Landau, Russ, vol. 4.  Oxford University Press, 2009, 132–65Google Scholar.

⁸ See, e.g. Ridge, Michael ‘Ecumenical Expressivism: The Best of Both Worlds?’, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Shafer-Landau, Rus, Vol. 2., Oxford University Press, 2007, 51–76Google Scholar; Impassioned Belief. Oxford: University Press, 2014, chapter 4.

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¹² Andrew Alwood, op. cit. note 11.

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¹⁴ Huw Price, in Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford University Press, 2011, 9, 12, 18, has used the label ‘global expressivism’, and Robert Brandom, in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, Harvard University Press, 2000, chapter 1, uses ‘inferentialism’ to name the view that propositions are individuated by the inferential network they stand in, in a way similar to the one Frege proposed in Begriffsschrift. Without a special name for his proposal, Arthur Prior, in ‘Is the Concept of Referential Opacity Really Necessary?', Acta Philosphical Fennica, vol. 16, 1963, 189–199, also used an intuition close to inferentialism to individuate propositions. I am sympathetic to Frege's, Prior's, Price's and Brandom's proposals, but I would like to stress the meta-theoretical character of [OI], which is compatible with expressivist/inferentialist implementations as much as it is with representationalist implementations.

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¹⁶ Allan Gibbard, op. cit., note 15, e.g. 7ff., 147 ff.)

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¹⁸ ‘Irremediably’, if logic is restricted to the realm of propositions, as products of assertive acts. But historically there have been other, alternative views of logic. For instance, Richard M. Hare, in ‘Imperative sentences’, Mind, New Series, vol. 58, n°. 229, 1949, 21–39, rejected this standard view of logic and proposed that imperative sentences are as able as declarative sentences to bear contents with logical properties.

¹⁹ That we disagree about and debate normative claims is a raw fact. Disagreement is a basic intuition that is hard to dismiss. Semantic views that do not account for this phenomenon pay a high price that often takes the form of error theories (Mackie, John L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1977Google Scholar; Moberger, Victor, ’Not Just Error: A New Interpretation of Mackiés Error Theory’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, vol. 5, No. 3, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  Classical emotivists acknowledged some kind of disagreement, in normative background (Alfred Ayer, op. cit. note 15, 111) or in attitude (C. L. Stevenson, op. cit. note 15, 18). Ayer rejected while Stevenson accepted the possibility of rational debate about ethical claims; but both, although defending ethical claimś lack of propositional content, felt the need to touch upon the issues of ethical disagreement and ethical debate. MacFarlane (MacFarlane, John, Assessment Sensitivity. Relative Truth and its Applications. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 121, 125, and 130) has refined the notion of disagreement to vindicate its application to normative disputes while allowing an explanation of the intuitions of absolutists and contextualists about values. Adapting his relativism to ethical claims, if A says ‘Cheating on your partner is good’ and B says ’Cheating on your partner is bad’, A and B disagree about content in the sense that their claims are not cotenable (the contents of their claims are incompatible), and the joint accuracy of A's and B's attitudes is precluded (A and B cannot both be right in the same context). Nevertheless, the reflexive accuracy of A's and B's attitudes is not precluded, in the sense that both can maintain their views from their different contexts of assessment. MacFarlane's refinements help deal with different types of disagreement, and make precise relevant aspects of it. But the first step for applying MacFarlane's apparatus is to acknowledge that speakers say something with normative claims, which is what [OI] says.

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³⁹ I will not dispute this point. There might be reasons to believe that ‘bad’ in ‘he is a bad person’ applies to individuals, in the same sense in which some people have argued that ‘true’ has first-level uses as in ‘He is a true friend’. I disagree. I consider that ‘true’ and ‘bad’ to  express normative notions that always involve reference to some standards that have to be represented as conceptual systems. Nevertheless, the alleged existence of first-level instances of them is irrelevant for my point here.

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⁴⁵ The case of predicates of personal taste is similar to the case of ethical terms. A non-descriptivist, expressivist explanation of normative first-order predicables, such as ‘is tasty’, is in no better position than ‘is bad’ on this account. MacFarlane explains the import of ‘is tasty’ as belonging to the context of assessment (John MacFarlane, op. cit. note 1, 149). His relativism is very much in need of explanation once the non-propositional status of its argument is exposed. MacFarlane's view is not my concern here, but it is worth bearing in mind that a correct assessment of the scope of FGA and an appropriate answer to it have effects that exceed the strict limits of meta-ethics.

⁴⁶ Robert Brandom, op. cit., note 22 and Brandom, Robert, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ See Robert Brandom, op. cit., note 22, chapter 2 passim, e.g. 91–92.

⁴⁸ See, e.g., Robert Brandom, op. cit., note 22, 167ff.

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⁵¹ Nevertheless, even Ayer (op. cit, note 17, 107) makes room for a descriptive sense of ‘good’

⁵² Allan Gibbard, op. cit. note 15,  53ff.; Robert Brandom, op. cit., note 20, 614ff.

⁵³ James Dreier, op. cit. note 50; Matthew Chrisman, op. cit., note 2.

⁵⁴ For an illustration of the consequences of creeping descriptivism, see Price's matching game in Price, Huw, Naturalism without Mirrors (Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 3ff.

⁵⁵ María J. Frápolli and Neftalí Villanueva, op. cit., note 49.

⁵⁶ The project of this paper was made possible by funding received from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 653056. It has also received funding from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Proyecto FFI2016-80088-P. I have presented some of the ideas defended here in the Departmental Seminar of the Department of Philosophy at UCL, the TeC Seminar of the Departamento de Filosofía I, Universidad de Granada, and the Workshop Expressivisms, Knowledge and Truth, which is the source of this volume. Several of my colleagues have provided insightful comments on previous drafts, among them Andrés Forero, Manuel de Pinedo, Neftalí Villanueva and Victor Verdejo. To all of these, people and institutions, I am deeply grateful.