Some remarks on the Frege-Geach embedding problem

Expressivist theories of moral discourse deny that moral judgments express truth-apt propositions or that they correspond to moral facts. Rather, moral judgments are taken to express non-truth-apt and action-guiding attitudes of approval or disapproval. As a result, the classical accounts of validity, consistency and logical consequence cannot be directly applied to moral discourse. These logical limitations are exploited by the Frege-Geach embedding problem, which challenges expressivism to account for the fact that moral sentences can be embedded into truth-functional contexts, and that they can figure as premises in valid arguments. This thesis examines the embedding problem in detail, and analyzes two prominent expressivist responses to it: Simon Blackburn's logic of attitudes, and Allan Gibbard's normative logic. It will be argued that neither response presents a complete solution to the embedding problem. Then some alternative proposals will be investigated.