The Frege–Geach problem is often taken to demonstrate a fundamental incompatibility between expressivist accounts of moral language and logical embedding. According to the standard objection, if moral judgments do not express truth-apt propositions, then they cannot figure coherently in conditionals, negations, or other embedded contexts. Since ordinary moral discourse routinely embeds, expressivism appears unable to account for the inferential roles moral statements play. This paper offers a different diagnosis. Rather than locating the difficulty in moral language, it argues that the persistence of the Frege–Geach problem reflects misplaced expectations about what natural language syntax can support. Formal logic was developed precisely to repair the limitations of ordinary language by enforcing semantic invariance under transformation. Treating this invariance as a universal criterion of semantic adequacy reverses that historical lesson. Drawing on the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, the paper situates moral predicates at the boundary between contestable and fluid expressions—terms whose meaning is distributed across multiple functions, including evaluation, coordination, and norm-signalling. Logical embedding selectively suppresses some of these functions while preserving others, producing predictable semantic fracture without loss of intelligibility. The resulting instability is diagnostic rather than defective. On this view, Frege–Geach does not identify a paradox requiring semantic repair but a category error in how moral language is assessed. Abandoning the demand for universal compositional invariance dissolves the problem and suggests a more modest role for formal logic in evaluating natural language meaning.
Bry Willis (Wed,) studied this question.