Philosophy Now Forum

Peter Holmes, Sculptor, PantFlasher and others subscribe to Moral NonCognitivism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism

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

NonCognitivism deny the claims of Moral Cognitivism which claims the following features;

• Moral Sentences - Judgments
  1. Are Propositions
  2. Can be True or False – Truth Apt
  3. Are Objective – independent
  4. Represent Moral facts
  5. Reducible to non-moral properties

While non-cognitivists attempt to discredit the cognitivists' claims [which I believe are justifiable with empirical evidence and philosophical reasoning], the non-cognitivists' claims are full of holes.

There are many counters against noncognitivism but the most fatal one is the Frege Geach Problem which had 'killed' noncognitivism.

It is not easy to grasp the Frege Geach Problem that had bombed noncognitivism to pieces and sent noncognitivists scurrying and looking for answers but they have not yet produced any convincing ones to save themselves.

Here is one presentation;

Most Famous Ethical Puzzle: The Frege-Geach Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIzsMHApx8I
One of the most famous and difficult problems in ethics!
The issue that killed moral noncognitivism – The Frege-Geach Problem!

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.

Here is a commentary re the Frege-Geach Problem:

The Frege–Geach problem is an important and well-known obstacle to metaethical theories belonging to the broadly noncognitivist tradition, including emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism.

It is also sometimes called the embedding problem, the Frege–Geach–Searle problem or the problem of unasserted contexts.

Theories in the noncognitivist tradition share the view that the distinctive meaning of moral words does not concern what they are about, and it either does not require or is not exhausted by any answer to what makes moral sentences true.
For example, according to A. J. Ayer, the word ‘wrong’ works more like ‘dammit’ than like ‘common’, so that ‘stealing money is wrong’ means something more like, ‘dammit, stealing money!’ than like ‘stealing money is common’.

But standard ways of understanding the meanings of complex sentences, and of understanding the logical relationships between sentences, depend on an answer to what those sentences are about, or what would make them true.

So noncognitivists need a different, nonstandard, answer to how the meanings of simple sentences give rise to the meanings of complex sentences.

The problem of how to do so, and of whether it can even be done, has come to be known as the Frege–Geach problem.
-Schroeder

A Critique of NonCognitivism re the drowning of noncognitivism:

The noncognitivist rejects realism and claims that moral judgements express not beliefs but rather non-cognitive states.

Part of the attraction of noncognitivism is that it seems to respect the insights of Moore's work without resorting to non-naturalism, which is thought to be ontologically problematic.

However, something was looming on the horizon that would take the wind out of the non-cognitivist's sails and would change the metaethical landscape,
a problem that some philosophers believe has left non-cognitivism dead in the water: the Frege-Geach problem.
-Alan Fisher

https://philosophynow.org/issues/156/The_Cognitive_Gap

This shedding of the metaphysical and epistemological burdens of cognitivism is advantageous for non-cognitivism, but the expressivist view then runs straight into one of the biggest problems in metaethics: the Frege-Geach Problem. This problem was first explained by Peter Geach in 1963. It concerns the semantics of moral sentences when interpreted in the non-cognitivist or expressivist way.

Let’s go back to our example where a non-cognitivist asserts that ‘Killing is wrong’ really means something like ‘Boo to killing!’. This interpretation apparently works for simple moral assertions such as this; but when we start to construct more sophisticated sentences and try to use the same substitution, we run into some serious logical problems.

Let’s look at a simple logical inference first using a cognitivist interpretation:

P1: Killing is wrong.
P2: If killing is wrong, then getting your little brother to kill is wrong.
C: Therefore, getting your little brother to kill is wrong.

This argument gives us a valid inference, meaning that if we accept both P1 and P2, we are justified in drawing the conclusion C. The argument works because the sentence ‘Killing is wrong’ holds the same meaning throughout it. This is just fine for the cognitivists, as they believe that moral language functions in the same way as other language about reality. But let’s look at this from an expressivist perspective. Let us suppose that the non-cognitivist says that the meaning of the assertion ‘Killing is wrong’ is in fact ‘Boo to killing!’. So we can put this phrase as P1, and so on. Doing so, we get:

P1: Boo to killing!
P2: If ‘Boo to killing!’, then getting your little brother to kill is wrong.
C: Therefore, getting your little brother to kill is wrong.

We can see that in P2, in the first case, ‘Killing is wrong’ is part of a conditional “if… then…” phrase, and makes sense there. But in the second argument the original moral judgement ‘killing is wrong’ has been translated as ‘Boo to killing!’ and so P2 of the second argument makes no sense. In fact, the rule turns out to be that non-cognitivist, or expressivist, translations of the meanings of moral claims only work when uttered as assertions, as in P1, and not when unasserted or embedded in larger sentence structures such as conditionals as in P2. And, thus, the validity of the argument on such an interpretation appears suspect, as it commits the fallacy of equivocation.

The Frege-Geach Problem is a formidable issue for the expressivist, and has generated vast amounts of literature since it was first formulated. It is the non-cognitivist’s responsibility to give an account of the semantics of expressivist moral language that would overcome this problem.

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 9:46 am One of the most famous and difficult problems in ethics!
The issue that killed moral noncognitivism – The Frege-Geach Problem!

This is another example of a habit of yours. You choose a philosopher/scientist or position that some people hold and declare the issue decided and finished when it is not. Then from then on you use that philosopher/scientist's opinion/interpretation in appeals to authority. Here it is a position held by those cognitivists and others who think the Frege-Geach Problem is unsolvable and undermines non-cognitivism in some way.

But the actual situation is that theere is disagreement between philosophers about how effective the FG is and whether non-cog responses have undermined it.

For example here.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mora ... onses.html

Someone could do as you do: choose a non-cognitivist who thinks the FG is solved or not effective. And then start celebrating:

The FG has been killed!
Physics is antirealist and realists are primitive barbarians!

And when you meet objections keep linking to your appealed to authority and they theirs both parties whooping and declaring victory.

And then start new threads anytime a new appeal to authority is found. Linking back to earlier presentations and calling them proofs.

This is a Philosophy Forum.
Forum = a meeting or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.

In a forum [as normally understood] is a place to debate, discuss and exchange of ideas and views.
Normally I will end my OP with "views?" and if I don't this is implied by the default of this forum.

As such, it is immature [and very petty] to think some are trying to force their views on others; this is impossible for members has the freedom to ignore what is posted, respond to those posts they are interested in [for whatever the reason], terminate their membership, stop participation altogether.

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 9:46 am Peter Holmes, Sculptor, PantFlasher and others subscribe to Moral NonCognitivism.

I'm not a non cognitivist. I don't think the other two are either.

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:28 am I'm not a non cognitivist. I don't think the other two are either.

Given the social norms of the philosophical tradition you proclaim to subscribe to (in which double negation elimination is a valid inference principle) NOT being a non cognitivist makes you a cognitivist.

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 10:37 am

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:28 am I'm not a non cognitivist. I don't think the other two are either.

Given the social norms of the philosophical tradition you proclaim to subscribe to (in which double negation elimination is a valid inference principle) NOT being a non cognitivist makes you a cognitivist.

And?

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 10:40 am

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 10:37 am

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:28 am I'm not a non cognitivist. I don't think the other two are either.

Given the social norms of the philosophical tradition you proclaim to subscribe to (in which double negation elimination is a valid inference principle) NOT being a non cognitivist makes you a cognitivist.

And?

And you disagree with yourself.

Which is apparently bad and intolerable in your tradition. But I am sure you'll change your mind about that too.

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 9:46 amWhile non-cognitivists attempt to discredit the cognitivists' claims [which I believe are justifiable with empirical evidence and philosophical reasoning], the non-cognitivists' claims are full of holes.

Outside of any model, story, FSK, what about any ethical claim makes it justifiable?

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 12:55 pm Outside of any model, story, FSK, what about any ethical claim makes it justifiable?

Outside of the justification framework you seem to have in mind - what does your question even mean?

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:08 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 12:55 pm Outside of any model, story, FSK, what about any ethical claim makes it justifiable?

Outside of the justification framework you seem to have in mind - what does your question even mean?

Could be anything. My point precisely.

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:53 pm

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:08 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 12:55 pm Outside of any model, story, FSK, what about any ethical claim makes it justifiable?

Outside of the justification framework you seem to have in mind - what does your question even mean?

Could be anything. My point precisely.

Great! So you've answered your own question.

Quite curious to know why you bothered asking it though.

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:55 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:53 pm

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:08 pmOutside of the justification framework you seem to have in mind - what does your question even mean?

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.