Modal expressivism, defended by Blackburn (1986, 1993) and developed by Brandom (2008) and Thomasson (2020), denies that modal sentences express propositions about modal facts. Saying *necessarily, water is H₂O* is, on this view, expressing a stance (a commitment to a certain inferential pattern, a certain way of treating the claim) rather than describing a feature of reality. Modal vocabulary is a tool for organizing thought, not a window onto modal reality. The position parallels expressivism in ethics (Gibbard 1990, 2003) and in mathematics, and it aims to deflate modal ontology without giving up modal practice. We can keep saying *necessarily, P* while denying that there are modal facts for *necessarily, P* to be true of.

The argument's reply turns on what expressing a stance requires. Stances are states. They have content. They are distinguishable from other stances. They are sustained by a thinker who persists from the formation of the stance to its expression. The expressivist's framework operates on the structural conditions the argument identifies, and the operation is not a marginal feature of expressivism: it is the mechanism by which expressivism replaces descriptive ontology.

The Frege-Geach problem (Geach's 1965 sharpening of a worry traceable to Frege: how can sentences that merely express stances figure as components in logically valid inferences when embedded in conditionals and other complex contexts?) deserves full engagement. Modal claims figure in valid inferences (*modus ponens*, from *if P then Q* and *P*, conclude *Q*, and conditional reasoning more broadly) that look like inferences over propositions, not over stances. Schroeder (2008) gives the most sophisticated expressivist response, building stances out of “being for” attitudes (mental commitments toward propositional contents, treated as a basic stance-type with logical structure) whose logical relations are engineered to mirror propositional logic. Gibbard's quasi-realism (1990, 2003) takes a parallel line: the expressivist earns the right to talk as if modal sentences had truth-conditions by showing that stance-talk supports the same inferential structure realist talk supports.

Both responses are sophisticated. Their actual deployment requires structured agents and inferential practices, but this act-side requirement does not by itself establish that modal vocabulary describes mind-independent modal structure. Stance-composition requires that one stance be distinguishable from another, that combinations of stances yield further stances with determinate inferential properties, that the network of stance-relations is something a thinker can navigate over time. Schroeder's “being for” attitudes are themselves states with content, sustained by a subject, distinguishable from other states. The structural conditions are required by the resources expressivism uses to do without them.

Two variants of the family require engagement on their own terms, since neither rests its case on the stance-bearing the reply above targets. Brandom (2008) constitutes modal content not by a speaker's stance but by inferential role: the material inferences a claim licenses within a discursive practice, which modal vocabulary makes explicit. The Brandomian can grant everything said above about stances and still hold that content is fixed by inference, not by any condition on stance-formation. Actual inferring and deontic scorekeeping involve ordered acts, differentiated commitments, and continuing practitioners. That establishes the structural conditions of the discursive practice at act-side resolution. Inferential relations considered abstractly need not themselves be temporal processes or physical bearers, and the expressivist can still deny that modal sentences represent independent modal facts.

Thomasson, in *Norms and Necessity* (2020), locates modal claims differently again: neither stances nor descriptions but object-language expressions of the semantic rules constitutive of our concepts. Her normativism needs a distinct reply only in its bearer, not in its form. A rule meets the same three conditions even more plainly than a stance does: it is instituted and followed across cases, it discriminates correct from incorrect application and one rule from another, and it requires competent users who persist as the same rule-followers across applications. A rule just is a standing pattern applied over time by a community that endures to apply it, so the bearer changes but the structural demand does not. Whatever bears the modal (stance, inference, or rule) is sustained by the conditions the argument identifies.

A second front opens at the level of scope. Expressivism is most plausible as a localized thesis about a particular fragment of vocabulary: *this* part of language is expressive, *that* part is descriptive. The local form requires a fact about which sentences fall on which side, and the local expressivist is content to admit such facts at the metalinguistic level while denying them at the object level. Globalizing expressivism (the thesis that all assertion is stance-expression) generates a different problem. The claim *modal sentences express stances rather than facts* is itself either a fact about modal sentences (in which case expressivism has been falsified by the position's own articulation) or a stance about modal sentences (in which case the position lacks the descriptive force its proponents take it to have). Dreier (2004) names the “creeping minimalism” worry from the realist side: as expressivism succeeds in recovering the surface features of realist talk, it becomes harder to tell what the disagreement was about.

The present argument's intervention is orthogonal to that debate. It does not press the realist demand that modal sentences correspond to modal facts. It presses the prior point that any assertion (descriptive, expressive, or quasi-real) operates on T, S, and Φ. Local expressivism faces this point at its metalinguistic level, where the demarcation between expressive and descriptive vocabulary is drawn. Global expressivism faces it at every level, since the structural conditions are exhibited by stance-formation as decisively as by description.

*What is established.* Any stance (whether descriptive or expressive, whether about modality or anything else) operates on the structural conditions. T, S, and Φ are not what modal vocabulary describes; they are what any vocabulary requires.


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← [4.4.4 Modal Fictionalism](<4.4.4 Modal Fictionalism.md>) | [4.4.6 Necessitism](<4.4.6 Necessitism.md>) →
