Expressing 2.0

Abstract

William P. Alston argues in “Expressing” (1965) that there is no important difference between expressing a feeling in language and asserting that one has that feeling. My aims in this paper are (1) to show that Alston's arguments ought to have led him to a different conclusion—that “asserting” and “expressing” individuate speech acts at different levels of analysis (the illocutionary and the locutionary, respectively)—and (2) to argue that this conclusion can solve a problem facing contemporary analyses of expressing: the “no show tell” problem, or the problem of accounting for utterances that report feelings truly without expressing them. Alston's paper made an important contribution 50 years ago, and a reimagining of it can make another important contribution today.