6132009- universityof pittsburgh（- - - - - 6132009 universityof pittsburgh）.doc

6/26/2009 Global Anti-Representationalism? I Huw Price is one of the boldest and most original voices of pragmatism in the generation after Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Two particularly interesting ideas he has been developing recently are subject naturalism and global expressivism. The term by contrast to which “subject naturalism” is defined is “object naturalism,” which is the kind usually associated with the term ‘naturalism.’ It aspires to a particular kind of semantic account of some vocabulary or discursive practice. More particularly, it offers a representational account. That is, it says what objects and properties that vocabulary talks about, what range of facts it states or expresses. That representational semantic strategy accounts for the object side of object naturalism. The naturalism side is a matter of the semantic metavocabulary that is employed, in part to specify the ontology: what kinds of things the vocabulary in question represents. It is to be a naturalistic vocabulary. That is a genus that comprises a variety of species, including at least the vocabulary of fundamental physics, vocabularies of the special natural sciences, or, least demandingly, ground-level empirical descriptive vocabulary, including both observational and theoretical vocabulary. By contrast, subject naturalism is the project of using a vocabulary that is naturalistic in one of these senses, not as a semantic metavocabulary, but as what in Between Saying and Doing I call a “pragmatic metavocabulary.” That is, it is to be used to describe what the discursive practitioners who deploy the vocabulary in question do, the practices they engage in, or the abilities they exercise, in virtue of which they count as using that vocabulary. The idea is to formulate in the favored vocabulary necessary and sufficient conditions for doing what one needs to be doing in order thereby to be saying what can be said using the vocabulary, rather than (as with a semantic metavoc