Frege-Geach Problem Destroyed NonCognitivism

[Skepdick]

Could be anything. My point precisely.

Great! So you've answered your own question.

That's right. What I want to know is whether Veritas Aequitas knows the answer.

The answer being literally anything who doesn't?

[Will Bouwman]

The answer being literally anything who doesn't?

I'm afraid I am not party to the justification framework according to which that makes sense.

[Skepdick]

The answer being literally anything who doesn't?

I'm afraid I am not party to the justification framework according to which that makes sense.

Then why did you answer your own question with....

Could be anything. My point precisely.

If the answer is satisfactory to you then why doesn't it make sense?

[Will Bouwman]

The answer being literally anything who doesn't?

I'm afraid I am not party to the justification framework according to which that makes sense.

Then why did you answer your own question with....

Could be anything. My point precisely.

If the answer is satisfactory to you then why doesn't it make sense?

I wasn't asking me. I already know what I think. This:

The answer being literally anything who doesn't?

in any language I understand, is gibberish. If it means something to you, can you put it in terms that mean something to both of us that might stimulate further discussion?

[Atla]

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world".[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.

?!

Judging from the above, neither cognitivist nor non-cognitivists were bright enough to realize that "ethical sentences do not express propositions" is not the opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true".

The opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true" is "moral judgments are capable of being subjectively true". As in, they aren't objective truths, but personal, subjective truths. The noncognitivist stance comes in on another level. So, is the above just a word game on the word "true"?

This is why Atla doesn't do ethical discussions. It's blatantly obvious that there should be a subjective cognitivism category but where is it?

[Skepdick]

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world".[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.

?!

Judging from the above, neither cognitivist nor non-cognitivists were bright enough to realize that "ethical sentences do not express propositions" is not the opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true".

The opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true" is "moral judgments are capable of being subjectively true". As in, they aren't objective truths, but personal, subjective truths. The noncognitivist stance comes in on another level.

Distinction without a difference.

Subjective or objective all truth is true.

So, is the above just a word game on the word "true"?

It's just the statet goal of philosophy. Truth.

It doesn't say how you should get there.

[Will Bouwman]

It's just the statet goal of philosophy. Truth.

Where is that stated?

[Skepdick]

It's just the statet goal of philosophy. Truth.

Where is that stated?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsehood. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science.

[FlashDangerpants]

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world".[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.

?!

Judging from the above, neither cognitivist nor non-cognitivists were bright enough to realize that "ethical sentences do not express propositions" is not the opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true".

The opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true" is "moral judgments are capable of being subjectively true". As in, they aren't objective truths, but personal, subjective truths. The noncognitivist stance comes in on another level. So, is the above just a word game on the word "true"?

This is why Atla doesn't do ethical discussions. It's blatantly obvious that there should be a subjective cognitivism category but where is it?

The discsussion of this topic so far has been misleading and bad because the people running the show and making more posts than anyone else can keep up with are overerxtended when they venture into this topic and it shows. You've been led to overinterpret there from a very limited description of non-cognitivism, which is clearly the fashion here at philosophy now.... Perhaps it helps if we look at what non-cognitivism is locally opposed to....

There's more than one way to say that moral judgements cannot be true and non-cognitivism is the other way of doing that. An error theorist such as JL Mackie would say that moral language is perfectly, cognisable and therefore potentially truth apt, and that it is a feature of suych language that we are trying to access that truth, but that there are no natural moral properties to vouchsafe a claim against, and therefore all moral claims are erroneous and that is why moral judgements are not capable of being true.

Mackie's error theory is about 700 times more popular in this field than any non-cognitivist and has been since the 1970s when he wrote the boook. So the heyday of non-cognitivism ended about 50 years ago. But whatever. The non-cogs aren't fucking about when they say that ethical sentences do not express propositions, they mean it completely literally, that when you arrange these words, they don't form a cognisable sentence. They express nothing more than a howl, a mood, or a wiggling of the eyebrows designed to convey general dissaproval.

That's what the cognitivism bit means. Not whether something is justified, nor true, nor anything else. It is about whether an expression counts as cognisable language at all, whether any attempt to justify a moral position of any sort can mean anything or be worth attempting at all.

VA and IC have got it into their dim little heads that all their moral-truth-denying enemies fall under this non-cognitivist umbrella. They don't understand this sort of stuff, even if VA does like to describe his own work as "PhD level", which it most definitely is not.

[Skepdick]

There's more than one way to say that moral judgements cannot be true and non-cognitivism is the other way of doing that. An error theorist such as JL Mackie would say that moral language is perfectly, cognisable and therefore potentially truth apt, and that it is a feature of suych language that we are trying to access that truth, but that there are no natural moral properties to vouchsafe a claim against, and therefore all moral claims are erroneous and that is why moral judgements are not capable of being true.

This shit is boresome. You seem to care about intensionality far more than you care about extensionality. Why?

There are an infinite number of ways to conclude that moral judgments cannot be true.

Obviously an infinite number of unique arguments are all unique in an infinite number of intensional ways, but in terms of extensionality they all arrive at the exact same conclusion. So what's the point of this type of pluralism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensionality

Look at this nonsense...

“Stealing money!!” with the tone of voice indicating that a special feeling of disapproval is being expressed (Ayer [1936] 1971: 110). Note how the predicate “… is wrong” has disappeared in Ayer’s translation schema; thus the issues of whether the property of wrongness exists, and whether that existence is objective, also disappear.

This mode of reasoning is utterly ignorant of how humans encode information in language. The way Ayer has "solved' his problems is to remove the information that causes him trouble from the grammar/translation schema and hide the problematic information from himself in the tone of the language.

How dumb do you gave to be to intentionall fall for your own sleight of hand?

And then there's the idiocy of Mackey's error theory. Just because you are using the word "error" and not the word "wrong" to pass judgment on moral reasoning doesn't change the fact that asseerting erroneousness of moral reasoning is itself a moral position! You can't just evacuate your own values form your value-judgments to exempt them from the exact same sort of attack you are launching against other people's value-judgments!

[Atla]

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world".[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.

?!

Judging from the above, neither cognitivist nor non-cognitivists were bright enough to realize that "ethical sentences do not express propositions" is not the opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true".

The opposite of "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true" is "moral judgments are capable of being subjectively true". As in, they aren't objective truths, but personal, subjective truths. The noncognitivist stance comes in on another level. So, is the above just a word game on the word "true"?

This is why Atla doesn't do ethical discussions. It's blatantly obvious that there should be a subjective cognitivism category but where is it?

The discsussion of this topic so far has been misleading and bad because the people running the show and making more posts than anyone else can keep up with are overerxtended when they venture into this topic and it shows. You've been led to overinterpret there from a very limited description of non-cognitivism, which is clearly the fashion here at philosophy now.... Perhaps it helps if we look at what non-cognitivism is locally opposed to....

There's more than one way to say that moral judgements cannot be true and non-cognitivism is the other way of doing that. An error theorist such as JL Mackie would say that moral language is perfectly, cognisable and therefore potentially truth apt, and that it is a feature of suych language that we are trying to access that truth, but that there are no natural moral properties to vouchsafe a claim against, and therefore all moral claims are erroneous and that is why moral judgements are not capable of being true.

Mackie's error theory is about 700 times more popular in this field than any non-cognitivist and has been since the 1970s when he wrote the boook. So the heyday of non-cognitivism ended about 50 years ago. But whatever. The non-cogs aren't fucking about when they say that ethical sentences do not express propositions, they mean it completely literally, that when you arrange these words, they don't form a cognisable sentence. They express nothing more than a howl, a mood, or a wiggling of the eyebrows designed to convey general dissaproval.

That's what the cognitivism bit means. Not whether something is justified, nor true, nor anything else. It is about whether an expression counts as cognisable language at all, whether any attempt to justify a moral position of any sort can mean anything or be worth attempting at all.

VA and IC have got it into their dim little heads that all their moral-truth-denying enemies fall under this non-cognitivist umbrella. They don't understand this sort of stuff, even if VA does like to describe his own work as "PhD level", which it most definitely is not.

Thanks, and I also saw the picture you posted on another topic where everything from subjectivism to objectivism and error theory is categorized under cognitivism. I never heard of noncognitivism before, what a weird idea.

If non-cognitivist sentences can never be moral sentences, then why is the Frege-Geach even needed? Such sentences don't mean anything and their compositions also don't mean anything. Doesn't that just reaffirm what noncognitivism is about (isn't about)? We can't make logical sense of nothing.

[Veritas Aequitas]

How can PH deny he is not a non-cognitivist, when his claims in relation to Morality conform to the following [if not all, then the main ones];

As gleaned from my research, Moral NonCognitivism has the following features:

• Moral Sentences - moral judgments
  1. Cannot be Propositions
  2. Cannot be True nor False
  3. Not truth apt
  4. Not fact, not state-of-affairs
  4i Are opinions and 'beliefs'
  5. Not objectively true
  6. Prescriptive not descriptive
  7. Non-Declarative Speech Acts
  8. Meaningless
  9. Moral knowledge impossible
  10. Not state of mind of Beliefs
  11. Express desires, emotions, dis/approval
  12. Do not predicate properties of subjects
  13. Are Queer - mythical
  14. Mind Dependent

[FlashDangerpants]

How can PH deny he is not a non-cognitivist, when his claims in relation to Morality conform to the following [if not all, then the main ones];

As gleaned from my research, Moral NonCognitivism has the following features:

• Moral Sentences - moral judgments
  1. Cannot be Propositions
  2. Cannot be True nor False
  3. Not truth apt
  4. Not fact, not state-of-affairs
  4i Are opinions and 'beliefs'
  5. Not objectively true
  6. Prescriptive not descriptive
  7. Non-Declarative Speech Acts
  8. Meaningless
  9. Moral knowledge impossible
  10. Not state of mind of Beliefs
  11. Express desires, emotions, dis/approval
  12. Do not predicate properties of subjects
  13. Are Queer - mythical
  14. Mind Dependent

I've helpfully coloured in the obvious fuck ups you made there. None of the red stuff is applciable to non-cognitivism at all and your research should have just been to read one decent book instead of whatever weird shit you do with 900000 folders full of PDFs you haven't read.

4i.... opinions and beliefs are cognisable, non cognitivists explicitly don't agree that moral claims express beliefs, that's the whole fucking point. You blatantly don't know what you are on about you pointless fraud.

8.... NC is a theory about the meaning of moral claims anbd the point of it is to avoid saying that they are meaningless.

13.... That's not what Queer means, it means highly unusual no mythical. But more importantly you are referencing Mackie's argument from queerness which is about how very unusual moral properties would have to be if they exist at all. MAckie is not a non-cognitvist and nor is his argument. This all boil=s down to the lazy and inept assumption of a handful of morons that all antirealists are non-cognitivists.

14 ... Lol.

[FlashDangerpants]

Thanks, and I also saw the picture you posted on another topic where everything from subjectivism to objectivism and error theory is categorized under cognitivism. I never heard of noncognitivism before, what a weird idea.

I am glad somebody got something out of it, it completelyt went over mister Can's head. Fun fact: it comes from an essay within the book that VA once recommended for us all to read (Essays in Moral Realism). So if VA just followed his own reading recommendation (competently that is) then he wouldn't have posted the confused screed with the misanalysis of non-cognitivism that is at the root of all this current silliness.

If non-cognitivist sentences can never be moral sentences, then why is the Frege-Geach even needed? Such sentences don't mean anything and their compositions also don't mean anything. Doesn't that just reaffirm what noncognitivism is about (isn't about)? We can't make logical sense of nothing.

There was a fashion in the mid 20th C to try and replace all the language of human thought and feeling and communication with more scientific terms that didn't invite some Cartesian ghost int he machine sort of problem. Arguably, that kept non-cognitivism on life support because people were trying to perform natural reduction of all the other contents of folk psychology (folk psychology being a demeaning term for words like thought and idea and belief).

So for a while it was just relatively fashionable and some people assumed it was futuristic, and thus good.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Note I qualified;

How can PH deny he is not a non-cognitivist, when his claims in relation to Morality conform to the following [if not all, then the main ones];