Here is the transcript to facilitate your understanding to the above video re the Frege-Geach Problem:
- This is the Frege-Geach Problem.
One of the most famous and important bits of ethics EVER!
NonCognitivism was pretty much destroyed by this.
Non-Cognitivism
Moral Talk is not about anything.
The sentence grass is green is about grass,
And it having the property of greenness
Grass is Green
Murder is bad
‘Murder is bad’ seems to be similar.
It sound like we’re talking about murder and ascribing
some property of ‘badness’ to it.
And metaEthics wonders what sort of property that “badness” must be.
But the
noncognitivists said that ‘that is not the case’.
Moral language does not try to describe anything, and therefore it has no truth conditions.
There is nothing that can make it true or false.
Murder is bad is neither true nor false.
It looks like its talking about murder, but its actually nott that sort of thing.
To go over some of the views quickly,
Ayer [
a member of the Logical Positivist] thought that “stealing is bad” was like
“Stealing! Boooo”
And Stevenson thought it was “I disapprove of stealing: do likewise.”
And Hare thought it was similar to ‘Don’t Steal’.
Those are oversimplications, and we can go back to those theories another time, but the important thing to take away is that,
the
nonCognitivists thought that the key aspect of moral language wasn’t what it “means,” it is what it “does.”
Why would anybody think that?
Thinking about moral language in terms of what does make it true or false raises issues.
For instance, what ‘does’ make it true or false??
How do we get to know about that?
What kind of property is ‘wrongness’ or ‘goodness’ exactly?
NonCognitivitism cuts straight past all of that and says:
If you want to know what is going on when someone uses moral language, forget about what it means.
Focus on what act the speaker is performing, hence it is also called Performativism.
Now we have a handle on what
noncognitivism is, we can look at its infamous Flaw:
The
Frege-Geach Problem. Also sometimes called the “embedding Problem.”
The first thing you need to notice is that moral language has logical properties.
For instance, “Stealing is bad” is inconsistent with “Stealing is not bad”
“Stealing is bad”
“Stealing is not bad”
“Murder is bad” is entailed by “Stealing is bad and murder is bad”
“Stealing is bad” & Murder is bad
If stealing is bad, then Murder is bad
Stealing is bad
Therefore murder is bad
If you analyze moral language in terms of what makes it true or false, then you can explain this.
Take “Stealing is bad”
If that is true, then, ‘stealing is not bad”
Cannot also be true.
If stealing is bad and murder is bad, is true, then ‘murder is bad “must” be true.
Truth conditional semantics can explain the logical properties of moral language.
But the
noncognitivists rejected truth conditional meaning.
They thought that moral language “should not” be explained in terms of what it true.
So they cannot explain this;
Take Ayer as an example;
He thought that moral language expressed emotions.
So “stealing is bad” is like “stealing!? Booo!”
What happen if we put that into a conditional?
If stealing is bad, then, murder is bad,
Stealing?! Boo!
What the heck does that mean according to Ayer??
This is a problem because any theory of language needs to explain the compositionality constraint.
We can think of infinite different sentences – some of which have never been said before –
But we can always try and figure out what they mean, because the meaning of a big sentence follows from the meaning of its smaller parts.
If I know what cat, sat, on, and mat mean, I know that ‘the cat sat on the mat’ means.
But Ayer cannot do that.
Because the meaning of this – whatever it is according to him cannot follow from the meaning of this.
If stealing is bad, then, murder is bad,
Stealing?! Boo!
And I’m just using Ayer as an example here, “none” of the
noncognitivists manage to do this.
And this is just the beginning, Watch this:
If stealing is bad, then, murder is bad,
Stealing is bad
Therefore murder is bad
This argument is valid, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true.
But watch what happens when we translate premise 2 to a noncognitivist paraphrase.
If stealing is bad, then, murder is bad,
Stealing?! Boo!
Therefore murder is bad
The argument doesn’t look valid anymore
Because when we say ‘stealing is bad’ as premise 2,
We are saying something different from that we say ‘stealing is bad’ as “part of” premise 1.
We equivocated on the meaning of one of our key terms!
So the conclusion doesn’t follow.
And “
this”
is the Central Problem with noncognitivism
It cannot take a simple moral sentence, embed it in a complex sentence and explain how the meaning of the complex follows from the meaning of the simple.
And all the while, the truth-conditional semanticist is grinning like a Cheshire cat.
Because that is the one thing they can do “very well.”
And that is the Frege-Geach Problem.
One of the most famous and important bits of ethics EVER!
NonCognitivism was pretty much destroyed by this.
It did come back later in another form called Expressivism, but that is another story for another time.
