Saving Conceptual Role Expressivism from Defect

Recently, it has been suggested that expressivism’s commitments about normative judgments should be cashed out in terms of conceptual role semantics. However, conceptual role expressivism has a central gap in its theory of content determination: it is unable to explain in virtue of what normative concepts have the kinds of contents that allow them to meaningfully embed in complex thoughts and participate in genuine inference. This paper offers conceptual role expressivists a way to close this gap, by fleshing out the idea that concepts have the relevant sorts of contents just in case and because they could otherwise not play their distinctive function.