4.1. Three lessons

The first point is that we should recast the problem of creeping minimalism. We should aim to distinguish expressivism not from realism, but from representationalism. Representationalism says that ethical thought and language is best explained in terms of representation, that ethical thoughts are best explained as beliefs, and so on. Representationalism is not sufficient for realism. While realists typically accept representationalism, so do many non-realists. For example, error theorists are not realists, in the sense that they think there are no ethical truths or facts.Footnote ⁶ But they typically are representationalists: they think ethical thoughts are best explained as representational beliefs. Therefore, distinguishing expressivism from realism is not the right route: error theory differs from expressivism in exactly the same relevant respect as realism does, over whether ethical thought is belief-like and representational.Footnote ⁷

This leads neatly on to the second point. We should not focus too much on the ontology invoked by representational accounts. Error theory gives us a nice route in to this point. Consider again Chrisman's first objection to Dreier: the belief that p cannot be constituted by a relation to the fact that p where it's false that p. A very natural reply to this is to point out that the realist will of course not think it is so constituted, but will instead say that Suzy's belief that T is permissible is composed of concepts, including the concept of permissibility. This concept represents things as permissible, and does so in virtue of a relation to the property of permissibility. This route saves Dreier from Chrisman's objection: it retains the explanatory role of ethical properties rather than ethical facts.

However, it is at the very least controversial whether all accounts of representation will take this form, of appealing to a relation with properties. Start with error theory. The property view I just outlined would commit error theorists to relations between thinkers and uninstantiated properties, perhaps necessarily uninstantiated properties. If representation means a relation with a property, since error theorists think such properties are not instantiated, they can at best say we bear relations to properties which exist but are uninstantiated. Not all error theorists would want to accept this.Footnote ⁸ So this is a drawback for Dreier's view, though it is not necessarily decisive.

However, error theory is just one tricky case: there is a much more general point here, namely that not all accounts of representation take the property or fact view Dreier discusses. There are plenty of representationalist views that do not. Consider a propositionalist view, which takes a belief that p to be explained in terms of the believer bearing the belief relation to the proposition 〈p〉. Some take propositions to be composed of senses or concepts, which don’t require corresponding properties or entities. Such a view could treat my belief that something is F as explained by my bearing the belief relation to a particular proposition, yet it would not require my representing something as F to involve a relation between me and F-ness. Contrast this view with the expressivist, who doesn’t think we have to appeal to a belief relation between me and the proposition 〈stealing is bad〉 in order to explain my belief.

Consider also views which say that we can believe things about non-existent objects. Le Verrier's beliefs about Vulcan are still representational in a way which expressivists think his beliefs about right and wrong are not. But it would be a stretch to think that we should account for his beliefs in terms of a relation with an existing object, since Vulcan doesn’t exist. The same idea goes for uninstantiated properties. We all want to account for systematically false beliefs, for instance about magic or witches. Not everyone will want to accept uninstantiated properties being magical and being a witch to help us explain such beliefs. Finally, consider adverbialism about perception (Ducasse Reference Ducasse and Schilpp1942; Chisholm Reference Chisholm1957). Such a view says that to see something red is to see red-ly, not to bear a relation with redness. Yet this view is still clearly representationalist: this view will accept that seeing red is best explained as representing something as red.

So this is our second point: we should not commit the representationalist to a specific ontological view in order to account for representation. For any proposed ontology, there are plenty of representationalists that will reject it. And we should not rule out any particular representationalist views just to solve the problem of creeping minimalism, a problem, as Dreier says, in ‘metametaethics’ (Dreier Reference Dreier2004, 31)! This point has been obscured because of the focus on distinguishing expressivism from realism specifically, rather than from representationalism.

As such, it might seem that the best route is to say this: expressivists deny that ethical language is best explained in terms of its being representational, while representationalists affirm that it is. We then decline to say anything more specific about what representation is. Before exploring this idea and suggesting an even better alternative, recall Chrisman's second objection: isn’t this proposal hopeless, since expressivists won’t deny that ethical language is representational, and indeed can’t deny it if minimalism is true?

No. The whole point of Dreier's account is that what matters is not what features expressivists think ethical language and thought has, but which of those features explain the fact that ethical language mean what it does.Footnote ⁹ It is not what features words like ‘good’ and ‘permissible’ have, but which of their features explain the fact that they mean good and permissible. Minimalism does not imply that the content of ethical language and thought is to be constitutively explained in terms of representation. It only implies that it is representational, in the sense that ethical language and thought can be said to represent the world. Though minimalism implies that ethical thought and language is representational, it does not imply that this fact helps to explain the protected statements Dreier identifies. Its being representational does not help to explain its meaning. So Chrisman's objection completely misses Dreier's crucial manoeuvre: the shift to explanation.

4.2. A better account

So, we should be distinguishing expressivism from representationalism rather than realism, and we should remember that the key way to do so is to read the two views in explanatory terms. Representationalists think that ethical language and thought needs to be treated as representational to be properly explained; expressivists do not. However, we should also not assume too much about the ontological commitments of a representationalist view. What, then, should we say about creeping minimalism?

The first thing to do is to make a defensive point. By adopting Dreier's explanatory focus, expressivists can defend themselves from the threat of minimalism. Minimalism was a threat because it seemed to undermine the expressivist's negative view: she can no longer say that ethical language is not representational. This threat has disappeared now: even if she has to say ethical language is representational in that it represents the world, she can deny that we should explain it in terms of representation. This shift to explanation neatly resolves the problem of creeping minimalism: minimalism no longer collapses the expressivist's view into representationalism.

However, at this point we might ask more about what representationalism comes to. So far I’ve characterised it as the view that representation is required to properly explain ethical language and thought. But this is only a first step. For starters, how do we classify accounts which don’t use words like ‘representation’ (or ‘belief’ and ‘description’) in their theory? For instance, a reductionist view, perhaps one which reduces an ethical belief to a causal tracking state, would not mention representation in its explanation of ethical thought, yet would still clearly count as representational. More generally, on the above view, expressivism only seems to oppose those accounts which use representation as a primitive – as an unexplained explainer.Footnote ¹⁰

The best response to this objection is that we need simply understand the expressivist's ban on explanatory roles for representation and belief as including anything which might plausibly serve as a reduction base for those things.Footnote ¹¹ So the reductionist view above rests on the idea that causal tracking is representation; her explanatory chain goes:

(where w is just a word.) The expressivist will not accept this. Representation is itself trivially entailed by w's meaning good, which is directly explained in terms of attitudes:

This captures the idea that representationalists are reducing representation, while expressivists are not putting it in any explanatory capacity at all.

So, to conclude: Dreier's account is right in its basic approach, but it faces two issues. It wrongly tries to distinguish expressivism from realism rather than from representationalism, and it attributes too much of an ontological commitment to representationalist views, perhaps because its focus is more on realism.Footnote ¹²

Instead we should step back, and argue that while expressivists must accept that ethical thoughts are beliefs and that they represent the world, as do ethical assertions, they need not say this in their explanation of what gives ethical thought and language its content. Expressivists say that the content of ethical thoughts and beliefs is not to be explained in terms of representation or any plausible reduction base for it. This is completely compatible with minimalism.

5.1. Chrisman's inferentialism

With this in mind let's look at Chrisman's idea. On the basis of his criticism of Dreier, Chrisman rejects representation-based approaches to the problem of creeping minimalism. Instead he thinks we should replace representation with inference as the central tool for understanding expressivism (Chrisman Reference Chrisman2008, 335). On an inferentialist view, the meaning of a sentence is constituted by its inferential role, which Chrisman takes to consist in two things: (1) what circumstances license asserting the sentence and (2) what further assertions and actions are licensed by asserting the sentence (Reference Chrisman2008, 350).

Chrisman argues that realists think ethical terms play a role in theoretical reasoning, whose premises give ‘evidential support’ to the conclusion which if true ‘will usually constitute theoretical knowledge about the world’ (Reference Chrisman2008, 350). Expressivists, on the other hand, will play a role in practical reasoning, whose premises ‘provide practical support for the conclusion’ which if true ‘can constitute practical knowledge about how to interact with the world as we know it to be’ (Reference Chrisman2008, 349–350, original emphasis). As such, realists and expressivists differ in that the former take ethical commitments to be theoretical, while the latter take them to be practical.Footnote ¹³

However, Christine Tiefensee (Reference Tiefensee2016) forcefully criticises Chrisman's account, arguing that it is just as vulnerable to creeping minimalism as other approaches. She focuses her initial objection on the distinction between practical and theoretical commitments. Consider the claim that ethical statements express theoretical commitments. According to Chrisman, this means that they express commitments which if true will constitute theoretical knowledge about the world. But Tiefensee argues that given the right minimalist theories, the expressivist will accept that ethical commitments are theoretical: given minimalism about ‘true’, and ‘world’, she says, there's no reason for expressivism to reject that true ethical commitments can constitute ethical knowledge about the world (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2443).

I think Tiefensee is absolutely right that expressivists can accept a minimalist version of the claim that ethical commitments are theoretical commitments. However, as with Dreier, Chrisman can reply by turning to explanation. He shouldn’t say that for expressivists, ethical commitments are not theoretical. He should say that for expressivists, the fact that they are theoretical has no role in explaining them. A sentence like ‘torture is wrong’ has its meaning because it is practical, not because it is theoretical. It means what it does because it gives practical support for conclusions based on it as a premise. But it is still theoretical: it still gives evidential support to the conclusion, and when true it constitutes knowledge about the world. It's just that this fact plays no explanatory role whatsoever. As with Chrisman's objection to Dreier, Tiefensee's objection can be avoided with more of a focus on explanation. This isn’t to say his solution is correct, just that it can avoid Tiefensee's objection.

5.2. The EMU

Michael Williams (Reference Williams and Price2013) claims that the notion of an EMU – an Explanation of Meaning in terms of Use – is a good way of understanding expressivism about ethical language as well as distinguishing between non-representationalism and representationalism more generally. According to him, an EMU has three components, which I will characterise exactly as Tiefensee does (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2448)

(I–T) is meant to specify the inferential role of a term. For instance, part of the (I–T) clause for a colour-word like ‘red’ will specify inferential connections between that word and other colour terms: from ‘x is red’ you can infer ‘x is coloured’, from ‘x is scarlet’ you can infer ‘x is red’, and so on. (E–T) is meant to specify the circumstances under which a speaker is licensed to make assertions using the term; for instance part of (E–T) for ‘red’ will specify that a speaker can use ‘red’ only to apply to objects which are clearly red. (F–T) is meant to tell us why we have a term of which (I–T) and (E–T) are true (Williams Reference Williams and Price2013, 135). Williams says: ‘The F-clause appeals to use as expressive function: what a word is used to do, what it is useful for’ (Williams Reference Williams and Price2013, 135).

Tiefensee then suggests that we could try to distinguish realism and expressivism by saying that a realist EMU will differ from an expressivist one. She sets out two EMUs which follow the above pattern, and points out where they match and where they differ. For our purposes, the crucial point is that Tiefensee thinks the difference between expressivism and realism will come down to what these views say about tracking. Tiefensee considers the following claim: (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2449, my emphasis):

• (1) In a reporting use, tokens of ‘x is good’ express reliable discriminative reactions to an environmental circumstance. Their role is to keep track of goodness, in this way functioning as language entry transitions.

What this roughly means is that ethical statements express beliefs which track ethical properties, perhaps in the same way that we think our language about our environment tracks the objects in it.

Tiefensee argues that expressivists can accept a suitably minimalist reading of (1). On this reading the idea that ethical statements ‘track the moral truth’ is just the idea that some ethical statements are true, and some people are good enough that they assert more or less only the moral truths, and that their moral statements are counterfactually responsive to the moral truth so that, for example, if x had been good, they would have said that x was good, and if it had not been, they would not have said so. On this minimalist reading of tracking, an ethical truth-tracker is the person who gets the ethical truths right, and who wouldn’t easily have got them wrong. Since we’re assuming that expressivists can make sense of ‘getting the ethical truths right’, and can evaluate counterfactuals involving ethical statements, they will not deny that ethical statements track the truth in this sense.

So, Tiefensee concludes, focusing on the notion of tracking as Williams does will not distinguish expressivism and realism, because expressivists will end up asserting the same things as the realist. And though Tiefensee does not explicitly say so in this passage, this is because of a minimalist reading of ‘truth-tracking’, which Tiefensee calls ‘i-tracking’ due to its link with Price's ‘i-representation’, a concept we’ll discuss shortly.

5.3. E-representation

Tiefensee argues that as a result of this, the only way to get a distinction between expressivism and realism is to understand the notion of tracking in (1) as ‘e-tracking’, which we can make sense of in terms of Huw Price's distinction between what he calls ‘e-representation’ and ‘i-representation’. Roughly, e-representation is a causal relation between terms and their environment, while i-representation is a feature emerging from relations between terms, including inferential and causal relations (see Price Reference Price2013, 36 for a fuller explanation). As such, a term e-represents if it tracks things in world. A term i-represents if it has the inferential role required to give it assertoric content. We can then read the notion of ‘e-tracking’ in terms of e-representation, taking the two to be more or less the same idea.

Crucially, a term can i-represent without e-representing: a term can be used in assertions, without having the job of tracking the world. Expressivists think that ethical terms are i-representational but not e-representational. We might distinguish them on this basis from realists, who think that ethical terms are both i- and e-representational. This is just the same as saying that expressivists deny, but realists accept, that ethical terms e-track the world

Tiefensee argues that we need to explain e-representation in more detail, but that the only substantial way of doing so faces a dilemma: it yields either a characterisation of realism which expressivists can accept (thus failing to yield a distinction) or else one which realists won’t themselves accept.Footnote ¹⁴ Tiefensee argues that on the best way of cashing out the notion of e-representation (and thereby, e-tracking) ethical language is e-representational just in case it has two features: (i) ‘reports of the presence of goodness must be caused by goodness’ and (ii) such reports ‘must be default justified’, i.e. ‘do not require inferential support from other premises’ (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2454). However, many realists will wish to deny (ii). Moreover, there are two readings of (i), one of which realists will reject, the other of which expressivists will accept. Either way, we don’t get a distinction between expressivism and realism.

Nothing in my argument will depend on whether ethical sentences are ‘default justified’ so instead I shall focus on claim (i), that reports of the presence of goodness must be caused by goodness. Tiefensee begins by pointing out that non-naturalist realists, who believe in the causal inefficacy of ethical facts and properties, will reject (i). I think this is sufficient reason to reject this reading, since it fails to account for one of the two major forms of realism. However she goes on to make a further point. She argues that there are two readings of (i), the strong reading and the weak reading. On the strong reading, (i) says that ‘moral properties are themselves causally efficacious and that we perceive them through a special, sensory moral faculty’ (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2454). While expressivists will indeed deny that moral properties are like this, and therefore will deny (i) on its strong reading, Tiefensee points out that many realists will also reject (i) due to scepticism about the notion of a special sensory moral faculty. The strong reading, then, fails to be acceptable to realists, and so cannot be a necessary component of realism.

On the other hand, when read weakly, (i) seems more moderate: it says that goodness can cause reports about goodness by being identical to a natural property or properties which do all the causal work. So ‘whenever we detect a causally efficacious natural property that constitutes a moral property & we also perceive the corresponding moral property’ (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2455). This seems more acceptable to realists. However, Tiefensee argues, it will also be acceptable to expressivists, for the following reason.

The weak reading of (i), says Tiefensee, depends on the idea that moral properties are, ‘in some sense or other, nothing over and above natural properties such as causing pain’ (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, 2455). Expressivists, she says, can make that claim too, though for them it will be understood as the expression of an ethical claim, about what wrongness consists in (e.g. causing pain). But if this is so, she argues, then since wrongness just is some natural property, then if those natural properties cause our ethical utterances, then it follows that ethical properties cause our ethical utterances. And so expressivists will be happy to accept (i) on the weak reading.

Tiefensee concludes that e-representation, as cashed out via (i) and (ii), cannot give us a reasonable distinction between realism and expressivism: either it will not be a distinction at all or else will yield a characterisation of realism which realists themselves will reject. It's worth noting at this point that Tiefensee also thinks of e-representation as being a mark of ontological commitment: those bits of language which are e-representational are the ones which carry some genuine ontological commitment, and as such are the ones for which realism is appropriate. She therefore adopts a pessimistic stance about the notion of ontological commitment here: no such notion has been cashed out which distinguishes expressivism from realism and which realists will accept.

To sum up, Tiefensee argues that neither Williams's EMUs nor Price's distinction between i-representation and e-representation can solve the problem of creeping minimalism. EMUs cannot help by themselves because the best EMU-based strategy uses a notion of tracking that is acceptable to expressivists when understood minimalistically. When cashed out in terms of e-representation, either expressivists will still accept that ethical language is e-representational, or else realists will deny that it is.

5.4. Replying to Tiefensee

As I mentioned earlier, Tiefensee's arguments are important because they target resources – EMUs and e-representation – given a central role in recent work by prominent non-representationalists. These arguments should worry us quite independently of the problem of creeping minimalism for ethics: they threaten some of the core components of contemporary non-representationalism. While I think Tiefensee's argument fails as a whole, discussing it does reveal some important lessons.

First, we must recognise that it's because Williams's EMUs are taken to be explanations, that Tiefensee's criticism of EMU-based strategies fails. Tiefensee claims that expressivists might be able to accept the realist's claim about tracking (1), which is part of the realist's EMU for ‘good’. But if Williams's EMUs really are explanations, then the fact that expressivists can accept that ‘good’ can express reliable discriminative reactions is not enough to undermine this particular EMU strategy. More is required: expressivists need to think that (1) is part of what explains the fact that ‘good’ means good. They might accept (1) as true, but say that it doesn’t belong in the EMU for ‘good’, because it doesn’t have any explanatory role. In other words, even if you are good at tracking the ethical truth, you don’t have the concept good in virtue of this fact.

Tiefensee approaches this point herself in the final footnote in her paper, claiming that ‘a stronger focus on function might do the trick’, though she is sceptical of this (Tiefensee Reference Tiefensee2016, n. 26, 2458). However, if we read ‘function’ just in the same explanatory terms as Dreier introduces and I have endorsed, then the ‘stronger focus on function’ Tiefensee mentions can be understood as putting more emphasis on what explains ethical meaning. And this is precisely the route I want to follow. On this view, the idea Tiefensee discusses becomes the claim that expressivists say that ethical terms ‘establish language entry transitions’ (roughly that they track ethical facts), but that this fact does not explain their meaning. So the EMU-based solution doesn’t collapse given minimalism after all

While Tiefensee's argument against EMUs fails, I think Tiefensee is more or less right about e-representation. Price's notion of e-representation can be used as a mark of neither realism nor representationalism. There are two reasons for this. First, whether or not a given kind of language is e-representational depends on whether it has an appropriate causal connection with the kinds of objects, properties and facts that it is meant to represent. But this cannot be a mark of realism or representationalism in general because there will be views which accept representationalism (and perhaps realism too) yet deny that the relevant facts and properties are causally active, as Tiefensee rightly points out. For instance an ethical non-naturalist might think that ethical language can only be explained in terms of representing the world, but that the properties and facts it represents are not causally linked to it.Footnote ¹⁵

This is one reason we can’t rest the general distinction between expressivism (or nonrepresentational pragmatism more generally) and representationalism on e-representation. The second reason is that e-representation does not have explanation built in. In other words, a piece of language may well be e-representational, but this does not entail that its meaning or use is explained by its being e-representational. (This is why expressivists could accept that ethical language was e-representational in Tiefensee's weaker sense.) Since I have pinned the distinction between representationalism and expressivism on the issue of what explains the content of ethical language, e-representation is not by itself going to play a crucial role – we need to include explanatory considerations too.Footnote ¹⁶ So we shouldn’t think that e-representation is a mark of the difference between representationalism and expressivism in ethics. More generally, therefore, we shouldn’t think that it's a mark of representationalism versus non-representationalism either.

So while Tiefensee's pessimistic argument fails as a whole, it reveals some important general points about the debate about expressivism and representationalism. Moreover, we’ve seen that the main moves in this debate can all be better understood and answered when we appreciate that explanation is the key to distinguishing expressivism. Dreier and Chrisman's points are best understood in these terms, and understanding Williams's EMUs in this way helps us see how we might use them to answer Tiefensee's objections.

6.1. Incompatibility?

The first worry is that minimalism about representation is incompatible with representationalism. This is because minimalism rules out explanations in terms of representation – and such explanations are definitive of representationalism. This is a common point in the literature. In a recent paper Camil Golub rejects some proposed solutions to the problem of creeping minimalism for this reason (Golub Reference Golub2017, 1392f; 1406). Many writers think this point is important for the wider debate about non-representational theories of meaning.Footnote ¹⁸ While a full answer requires more space than I have, I will sketch out what I take to be the best response.

It's not clear why we should care about this supposed incompatibility. We might think that expressivists can live with it: if rival views are incompatible with minimalism, so much the worse for them. However this would make expressivists, who accept minimalism, unable to be representationalists about areas of language outside ethics, for instance about the language of middle-sized dry goods. At least some expressivists want to be representationalists in these cases, so they should try to answer this problem.Footnote ¹⁹

The short answer is this: minimalism about representation rules out some but not all of the kinds of explanation which count as representationalist. Recall that in Section 4 I pointed out that representationalism includes at least two kinds of explanation: (i) those using representation as a primitive, and (ii) those using a plausible reduction base for representation. Minimalism only rules out the first of these, not the second.

While there is not enough space to fully explain why, minimalism about representation blocks the use of representation as an explanatory primitive. In particular minimalism entails that any claim of the form

is false. This is because representation is a trivial unexplanatory consequence of meaning, not the other way round. So minimalism rules out explanations of kind (i). Similarly, minimalism about belief rules out explanations using belief as a primitive.Footnote ²⁰

Minimalism also entails that representation is not reducible. Horwich takes minimalism to involve the view that the property in question is not constituted by any other property. For him this means that there is no property F such that (a) all and only representational terms have F and (b) (a) explains the facts about representation (Horwich Reference Horwich1998b, 104–107). Since reductionism would give us such a property, it is false if minimalism is true. As such, any reductionist view of representation is incompatible with minimalism: minimalism rules out explanations of kind (ii) above.Footnote ²¹

However, this is no threat to the solution I’m defending. Expressivists aren’t primitivists or reductionists about representation. They do not think that we can explain any kinds of term using representation as a primitive – they usually opt for a causal relation like causal tracking to explain middle-sized dry good terms (see Blackburn Reference Blackburn and Price2013; Gibbard Reference Gibbard, Gross, Tebben and Williams2015). Nor do they want to reduce representation: they don’t think representation can be reduced to any one property, partly because they think that ethical terms and middle-sized dry goods terms both represent the world but don’t do so for the same reasons. So they will not care about this incompatibility. Primitivists and reductionists won’t care either: so much the worse for minimalism, they will say.

Moreover, minimalism about representation is compatible with some kinds of representationalist explanations. While minimalists cannot think that representation itself can do explanatory work, they can say that a plausible reduction base for representation can do such work, so long as they do not say that representation reduces to that base. For example, an explanation in terms of a causal tracking relation C which denies that representation reduces to C would be representationalist, since C is a plausible reduction base for representation. Yet since this view does not actually say that representation reduces to C, it is compatible with minimalism.Footnote ²²

More generally, explanations appealing to things which are plausible reduction bases for representation will be unaffected by minimalism about representation so long as they don’t take representation as reducible to such things. So expressivists can accept minimalism about representation, yet argue that some terms, for instance, bear causal relations with the world in virtue of which they mean what they do, so long as they don’t think that representation is or is reducible to those relations. Minimalism rules out some representationalist explanations, but not all of them.

What if minimalism creeps all the way to these reduction bases, for instance causal tracking? I see no reason to think it will. Consider C, the tracking relation. This doesn’t bear the close conceptual relations to truth and meaning that belief, representation, and description do, in virtue of which minimalism crept to them. Nor is it part of ordinary practice to say that ethical terms causally track the world. So there's no pressure on expressivists to accept minimalism here. And so the threat of incompatibility is answered.

6.2. Unintelligibility?

The second point is that if expressivists only have a minimal notion of representation to hand, they will not be able to distinguish their own view from representationalism. This is because they will not be able to characterise representationalism, which requires a non-minimal notion. This concern rests on the idea that minimalism yields a minimal notion of representation; this idea is common in the literature (see e.g. Williams Reference Williams and Price2013, 131; Macarthur and Price Reference Macarthur, Price and Misak2007, 140; Dreier Reference Dreier2004).

We can understand minimalists as defining a minimal notion of representation, by offering definitions like

or perhaps, if we’re willing to quantify over properties

Minimalists think that representation, in its ordinary sense, just is representation_M: ordinary usage of ‘represents’ is best explained in terms of these schemas.

However this doesn’t mean that minimalists cannot understand non-minimal notions of representation which are defined differently, for instance a causal tracking notion defined like so:

Minimalists can understand representation _c. They can understand what causal tracking is. They may even think it's sufficient for representation in general: all terms which represent _c do represent. They just think representation _c isn’t representation in its ordinary sense, and that it doesn’t explain our ordinary use of words like ‘represents’.

Nor do minimalists need to hear their rivals’ theories as using a minimal notion. A minimalist can understand a causal tracking theorist when she says: ‘ethical terms represent _c the world’. She's saying that ethical terms causally track the world. The minimalist doesn’t need to interpret this claim by replacing ‘represent _c’ with ‘represent _m’.Footnote ²³ The minimalist just thinks the tracking claim is false. So there is no threat of unintelligibility, so long as we properly understand what it means for minimalists to ‘only have’ a minimal notion of representation.

So neither incompatibility nor unintelligibility threatens the solution I’m defending. Minimalism about representation neither blocks representationalism tout court, nor makes it unintelligible from the expressivists’ point of view.