Abstract

Wittgenstein has often invited expressivist readings especially in his treatment of avowals. In this paper I consider Wittgenstein’s discussion of the avowal “I am afraid” in Part II ix of Philosophical Investigations in order to show that Wittgenstein recognizes more variety in the uses of language than the traditional expressivist does. Indeed Wittgenstein provides grounds for thinking of the expressivist as still being in the grip of central assumptions of his descriptivist opponent e.g. that there is such a thing as ‘expressive language’ that functions in just one way. I also consider two further areas of discourse which have traditionally come in for expressivist treatment, the ethical and the aesthetic. About the ethical I aim to cast doubt on Simon Blackburn’s claim that Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” (1929) is an endorsement of an expressivist or proto-expressivist view. With regard to the aesthetic there are strong grounds for thinking that Wittgenstein’s view is strongly opposed to expressivism. In the last part of the paper I want to draw some wider implications of the discussion for the relation between Wittgenstein and Blackburn’s sophisticated quasi-realist expressivism.