right, and we can expand on this to demonstrate those basic tenets of non cognitivism and emotivism mentioned earlier. first, divide ‘truth’ values of statemnets into only two sorts; analytically (deductive and necessary) and synthetically (inductive and contingent) true (you guys probably already know all this). analytical truths are true by virtue of their definitions; you don’t need to ‘get off your couch’ (paraphrasing carnap, i believe) to check and see if they’re true. synthetic statements however need some kind of verification in order to be known as true… and we’ll skip the controversy around what constitutes ‘reasonable justification’ at the moment because this problem is irrelevant to the point being made here.
the verification principle works hand-in-hand with logical empiricism, and these examine the meanings of terms and the logical relations between them. they would never raise or answer questions like ‘what is the meaning of life’ or ‘are men mortal’ because these questions admit no empirically verifiable reply. so most normative assertions, whether moral or religious or aesthetic, are empirically unverifiable and therefore meaningless as expressions of ‘fact’ in an objective sense. these kinds of statements express only personal judgments, values, preferences, opinions. and these of course are relative and non-analytical… but they are also unable to be empirically verified, so they aren’t inductive truths either. non cognitivists claim that such statements are not ‘truth-apt’, meaning that there is no logical content beyond the structure of the grammar used to declare them.
an example: ‘thou shalt not violate ecmandu’s consent’. this statement is not meaningful (as a command) because it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. it expresses a belief or a preference, not a statement of fact. we may believe that it is wrong to violate ecmandu’s consent, but can we verify that it is in fact wrong to do so? certainly, we can discover that people believe it is wrong… but this would only verify the factual statement ‘people believe violating ecmandu’s consent is wrong’, see.
non cognitivists call such statements ‘emotive’, but there can also be emotive statements that impart cognitive content. a non cognitive emotive statement example would be if i said ‘that is the wrong thing to read’ to ecmandu as he reads a playgirl magazine. my statement would be an attempt to direct ecmandu’s future reading, and would not be imparting any cognitive knowledge. on the other hand, if i tell ecmandu to read a playboy magazine that explains some topic ‘very well’, i’d be imparting cognitive content. such a statement can be checked by examining the magazine and verifying the statement directly.
but the latter statement is still emotive. why? because it expresses a value; ‘very well’.
and here is where that tinsy weensy almost imperceptible subtle difference in declarative mood causes so many people to mistake ethical statements as statements of fact. if we were to describe a person’s behavior as corresponding to some moral ‘good’ as an example of ‘very well’ behavior, we can check that by examining how the behavior conforms to what is expected in order to be moral. and presto, it is a ‘fact’ that the person is being moral. but wait. that there is correspondence between the behavior, the expectation, and the concluding factual claim that the person is being moral, does nothing to verify whether or not there is ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ in that correspondence. if we were to say ‘what joe did was good’, this would be equivalent to an emotive exclamation like ‘yay joe!’, and nothing more.
on the other hand, if we say ‘joe did the right thing by leaving early’, we can check the value of this notion of ‘right’ by considering how heavy the traffic is, or how slow his car is. such a statement would impart cognitive content in that it can be verified by examining the circumstances surrounding joe’s travel.
but none of this does away with ethical discourse. it only significantly changes the context of it. you can do normative ethics, but you can’t do it like the doc wants to. the trick with being successful with ethics is to not try to get all epistemological with it, and just try to appeal to people’s sensibilities rather than try to convince them through logical force. fortunately most people don’t know of the secret sauce i’ve just given you, so they’d not offer much protest to a common sense, normative ethics. if we wish to save ethics, we must remove it from philosophy, for here it does not fair well.
