Expressivism, Normative Uncertainty, and Arguments for Probabilism

I argue that in order to account for normative uncertainty, an expressivist theory of normative language and thought must accomplish two things: first, it needs to find room in its framework for a gradable conative attitude, degrees of which can be interpreted as representing normative uncertainty. Secondly, it needs to defend appropriate rationality constraints pertaining to those graded attitudes. The first task—finding an appropriate graded attitude that can represent uncertainty—is not particularly problematic. I tackle the second task by exploring whether we can devise expressivist versions of the standard arguments used to support rationality constraints on degrees of uncertainty, Dutch book arguments, and accuracy-dominance arguments. I show that we can do so, but that the resulting arguments don’t support the same rationality constraints as the original versions of the arguments.