Review of Self-Expression by Mitchell Green.

Q: So what is the book about?

A: Paradigm cases of self-expression include smiling out of joy, or sobbing out of anguish: you are expressing your joy by crying, or expressing your anguish by sobbing. The backbone of this book is a theory of expression. It purports to say when some outward act is an expression of something “inner.” Green uses the theory also to explain modes of expression that are more “conventional” and less “natural” than smiling or crying, and applies the theory to some questions in the philosophy of language and of art.

Q: What’s your headline conclusion about the book?

A: It was fascinating and frustrating. Pieces of “received wisdom” that I have taken for granted since graduate school, Green shows to be houses of cards that fall with the slightest breath. But the book’s main business, the theory of expression, I can’t quite get my head around.

Q: What’s that received wisdom?

A: Well, I sort of absorbed from the zeitgeist that meaning X by what you say requires intending to get people to believe X, plus some other complicated conditions; This is Paul Grice’s theory. And it’s certainly true that if I say “There are muffins on the counter,” and mean that there are muffins on the counter, then in the normal case I do intend to get you to believe this. But, as Green points out, this does not happen in every case. A man who has been framed can say “I am innocent,” and mean that he is innocent, while knowing full well that no one will believe him; he doesn’t intend to get anyone to believe he’s innocent. Or, out for a lonely walk at dusk, you might say “What a beautiful sunset,” and mean that the sunset is beautiful, even though no one is around; you again don’t intend to get anyone to believe anything. It seems that these problem cases have been around for a while, but were regarded as Kuhnian “anomalies,” so they did not stop non-experts like me from assuming that the expert consensus favored something like Grice’s theory.

Q: So what does Green think is required for meaning something?

A: I actually don’t want to get too far into that. But the starting point is the idea that, in basic cases, meaning X assertively by what you say is a matter of making “overt,” or “showing,” your commitment to X’s being true. (It gets complicated to explain how someone can mean X when they don’t believe X.)

Q: Okay then, let’s turn to the book’s heart, its theory of expression. I’ll begin with a skeptical question: is it really that hard to figure out the conditions under which, e.g., a smile expresses someone’s happiness? Here’s my theory: a person is happy; their being happy causes them to smile. That’s all it takes for the smile to be an expression of their happiness. In general: you express some inner state E by doing something X if and only if your being in E causes you to do X.

A: If you blush out of embarrassment, your being embarrassed causes you to blush; but in blushing you do not express your embarrassment. Or, a better example, if you become angry, and that causes you to begin meditating (because you’ve taken a lot of anger management classes), you do not express your anger by meditating. Not all the things you do as a result of feeling an emotion express that emotion; only some do. So, which, and why? That is a hard question.

Q: Fair enough. So what is Green’s answer?