Abstract
The notion of expression has been put to many uses in philosophy, yet it has received surprisingly little direct theoretical attention.  Drawing on certain distinctions I employ in earlier work, I try to show how, properly understood, the notion of expression can indeed help address standing puzzles in seemingly disparate areas: a puzzle about so-called first-person authority (in philosophy of mind and epistemology) a puzzle about the motivational character of ethical claims (in metaethics) and a puzzle about the origins of meaning (in the philosophy of language).  In each case, substantive expressivist proposals that could potentially resolve the relevant puzzles have been dismissed — unduly, I maintain, owing to a failure to appreciate the ways in which the expressive and the semantic domains interact .  In the final section, I propose (more tentatively) that the reevaluation I offer – of the notion of expression and of the promise of expressivist proposals – is apt to shed light on the question what (if anything) is distinctive of so-called normative language.