I Don’t Know Much about Abstract Expressionism and I
Don’t Know What I like
There are two related terms “Expressionism” and “Expressivism”. The former belongs to Art or Culture; the latter to
philosophy.
Expressivism is a theory of
ethics, or morality, that holds that our value judgments, for example, “lying
is wrong”, do not, as the jargon has it, have “truth value”, in the manner of
an empirical observation or a mathematical proof. There is no objective truth
of the matter – only an expression of feeling. “Lying” bad grunt; “truth
telling” (presumably scientific truth) good grunt. Or “Boo”; “Hooray”.
