Negative avowals and expressing absence

Abstract Avowal expressivism holds that serious and competent utterances of first-person, present-tense ascriptions of mental states – e.g. “I’m in pain,” “I love you,” “I believe that p ” – characteristically function as explicit expressions of the very states they mention. I argue that this stance commits its adherents to a matching treatment of negative avowals (“disavowals”) such as utterances of “I’m not in pain” and “I don’t love you.” Drawing on parity with positive avowals and on the behavior of pure disavowals that resist contrary-state and neg-raising analyses, I defend expressive denegation: disavowals can be expressive of the absence of the named state. The paper diagnoses why standard alternatives (hidden-avowal and purely descriptivist accounts) misclassify these cases, and shows how first-person authority and groundlessness extend to the negative domain. The result is a conditional commitment: endorsing avowal expressivism commits one to expressive denegation for negative avowals.