Non-cognitivism
Encyclopedia
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical
view that ethical sentence
s do not express proposition
s 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." If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know
something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.
Non-cognitivism entails that non-cognitive attitudes
underlie moral discourse and this discourse therefore consists of non-declarative speech act
s, although accepting that its surface features may consistently and efficiently work as if moral discourse were cognitive. The point of interpreting moral claims as non-declarative speech acts is to explain what moral claims mean if they are neither true nor false (as philosophies such as logical positivism
entail). Utterances like "Boo to killing!" and "Don't kill" are not candidates for truth or falsity, but have non-cognitive meaning.
, associated with A. J. Ayer, the Vienna Circle
and C. L. Stevenson, suggests that ethical sentences are primarily emotional expressions of one's own attitudes and are intended to influence the actions of the listener. Under this view, "Killing is wrong" is translated as "Killing, boo!" or "I disapprove of killing; do so as well."
A close cousin of emotivism, developed by R. M. Hare
, is called universal prescriptivism
. Prescriptivists interpret ethical statements as being universal imperatives, prescribing behavior for all to follow. According to prescriptivism,
phrases like "Thou shalt not murder!" or "Do not steal!" are the clearest expressions of morality, while reformulations like "Killing is wrong" tend to obscure the meaning of moral sentences.
Other forms of non-cognitivism include Simon Blackburn
's quasi-realism
and Allan Gibbard
's norm-expressivism.
Prescriptivists argue that factual statements and prescriptions are totally different, because of different expectations of change in cases of a clash between word and world
.
In a descriptive sentence, if one premises, that "red is a number," according to the lexical rules of English grammar, then said statement would be false. Since said premise describes the objects; red and number, anyone with an adequate understanding of English would notice the falseness of such description and the falseness of said statement. However, if the norm "Thou shalt not Kill!" is uttered, and this premise is negated (by the fact of a person being murdered), the speaker is not to change his sentence upon observation of this into: "Kill other people!", but is to reiterate the moral outrage of the act of killing. Adjusting statements based upon objective reality and adjusting reality based upon statements are contrary uses of language, so descriptive statement are a different kind of sentences than norms. If truth is understood according to correspondence theory
, the question of the truth or falsity of sentences not contingent upon external phenomena cannot be tested (see tautologies
).
Some cognitivists argue that some expressions like "courageous" have both a factual as well as a normative component which cannot be distinguished by analysis. Prescriptivists argue, that according to context, either the factual or the normative component of the meaning is dominant. The sentence "Hero A behaved courageously." is wrong, if A ran away in the face of danger. But the sentence "Be brave and fight for the glory of your country!" has no truth value and cannot be falsified by someone who doesn't join the army.
Prescriptivism is also supported by the actual way of speaking. Many moral statements are de facto uttered as recommendations or commands, e.g. when parents or teachers forbid children to do wrong actions. The most famous moral ideas are prescriptions: the Ten Commandments
, the command of charity, the categorical imperative
, and the Golden Rule
command to do or not to do something, they are not statements that something is the case or not.
Prescriptivism can fit the theist idea of morality as obedience towards god. It is however different from the cognitivist supernaturalism which interprets morality as subjective will of god, while prescriptivism claims, that moral rules are universal and can be found by reason alone without reference to a god.
According to Hare, prescriptivists cannot argue that amoralists are logically wrong or contradictive. Everyone can choose to follow moral commands or not. This is the human condition according to the Christian reinterpretation of the Choice of Heracles. According to prescriptivism, morality is not about knowledge (of moral facts), but about character (to choose to do the right thing). Actors cannot externalize their responsibility and freedom of will towards some moral truth in the world, virtuous people don't need to wait for some cognition to choose what's right.
Prescriptivism is also supported by Imperative logic
, in which there are no truth values for imperatives, and by the idea of the Naturalistic fallacy
: even if someone could prove the existence of an ethical property and express it in a factual statement, he could never derive any command from this statement, so the search for ethical properties is pointless.
As with other anti-realist
meta-ethical theories, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the argument from queerness
: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world. People generally have a negative attitude towards murder - calling it a disgust. This sentiment presumably keeps most of us from murdering. But does the actual wrongness of murder play an independent role? Is there any evidence that there is a property of wrongness that some types of acts have? Some people might think that the strong feelings we have when we see or consider a murder provide evidence of murder's wrongness. But it is not difficult to explain these feelings without saying that wrongness was their cause. Thus there is no way of discerning which, if any, ethical properties exist; by Occam's Razor
, the simplest assumption is that none do. The non-cognitivist then asserts that, since a proposition about an ethical property would have no referent, ethical statements must be something else.
Argument
s for emotivism focus on what normative statements express when uttered by a speaker. A person who says that killing is wrong certainly expresses her disapproval of killing. Emotivists claim that this is all she does, that "Killing is wrong" is not a truth-apt declaration, and that the burden of evidence is on the cognitivists
who want to show that in addition to expressing disapproval, the claim "Killing is wrong" is also true. Emotivists ask whether there really is evidence that killing is wrong. We have evidence that Jupiter has a magnetic field
and that birds are oviparous, but as of yet, we do not seem to have found evidence of moral properties, such as "goodness". Emotivists ask why, without such evidence, we should think there is such a property. Ethical intuitionists
think the evidence comes not from science or reason but from our own feelings: good deeds make us feel a certain way and bad deeds make us feel very differently. But is this enough to show that there are genuinely good and bad deeds? Emotivists think not, claiming that we do not need to postulate the existence of moral "badness" or "wrongness" to explain why considering certain deeds makes us feel disapproval; that all we really observe when we introspect are feelings of disapproval. Thus the emotivist asks why not to adopt the simple explanation and say that this is all there is; why insist that a genuine "badness" (of murder, for example) must be causing feelings, when a simpler explanation is available.
Another argument is the "embedding problem." Consider the following sentences:
Attempts to translate these sentences in an emotivist framework seem to fail (e.g. "She does not realize, 'Boo on eating meat!'"). Prescriptivist translations fare only slightly better ("She does not realize that she is not to eat meat"). Even the act of forming such a construction indicates some sort of cognition in the process.
According to some non-cognitivist points of view, these sentences simply assume the false premise
that ethical statements are either true or false. They might be literally translated as:
These translations, however, seem divorced from the way people actually use language. A non-cognitivist would have to disagree with someone saying, "'Eating meat is wrong' is a false statement" (since "Eating meat is wrong" is not truth-apt at all), but may be tempted to agree with a person saying, "Eating meat is not wrong."
One might more constructively interpret these statements to describe the underlying emotional statement that they express, i.e.: I disapprove/do not disapprove of eating meat, I used to, he doesn't, I do and she doesn't, etc.; however, this interpretation is closer to ethical subjectivism
than to non-cognitivism proper.
A similar argument against non-cognitivism is that of ethical argument. A common argument might be, "If killing an innocent human is always wrong, and all fetuses are innocent humans, then killing a fetus is always wrong." Most people would consider such an utterance to represent an analytic proposition which is true a priori. However, if ethical statements do not represent cognitions, it seems odd to use them as premises in an argument, and even odder to assume they follow the same rules of syllogism
as true propositions. However, R.M. Hare, proponent of universal prescriptivism
, has argued that the rules of logic are independent of grammatical mood
, and thus the same logical relations may hold between imperative
s as hold between indicatives.
Many objections to non-cognitivism based on the linguistic characteristics of what purport to be moral judgments were originally raised by Peter Glassen
in "The Cognitivity of Moral Judgments", published in Mind
in January 1959, and in Glassen's follow-up article in the January 1963 issue of the same journal.
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
view that ethical sentence
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
s do not express proposition
Proposition
In logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
s and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist
Cognitivism (ethics)
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world." If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.
Non-cognitivism entails that non-cognitive attitudes
Attitude (psychology)
An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the attitude object...
underlie moral discourse and this discourse therefore consists of non-declarative speech act
Speech act
Speech Act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts...
s, although accepting that its surface features may consistently and efficiently work as if moral discourse were cognitive. The point of interpreting moral claims as non-declarative speech acts is to explain what moral claims mean if they are neither true nor false (as philosophies such as logical positivism
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
entail). Utterances like "Boo to killing!" and "Don't kill" are not candidates for truth or falsity, but have non-cognitive meaning.
Varieties of non-cognitivism
EmotivismEmotivism
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and...
, associated with A. J. Ayer, the Vienna Circle
Vienna Circle
The Vienna Circle was an association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922, chaired by Moritz Schlick, also known as the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach...
and C. L. Stevenson, suggests that ethical sentences are primarily emotional expressions of one's own attitudes and are intended to influence the actions of the listener. Under this view, "Killing is wrong" is translated as "Killing, boo!" or "I disapprove of killing; do so as well."
A close cousin of emotivism, developed by R. M. Hare
R. M. Hare
Richard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
, is called universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
. Prescriptivists interpret ethical statements as being universal imperatives, prescribing behavior for all to follow. According to prescriptivism,
phrases like "Thou shalt not murder!" or "Do not steal!" are the clearest expressions of morality, while reformulations like "Killing is wrong" tend to obscure the meaning of moral sentences.
Other forms of non-cognitivism include Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn is a British academic philosopher known for his work in quasi-realism and his efforts to popularise philosophy. He recently retired as professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North...
's quasi-realism
Quasi-realism
Quasi-realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences do not express propositions.# Instead, ethical sentences project emotional attitudes as though they were real properties....
and Allan Gibbard
Allan Gibbard
Allan Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Allan Gibbard has made several contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics...
's norm-expressivism.
Arguments in favour of non-cognitivism
Arguments for prescriptivism focus on the function of normative statements.Prescriptivists argue that factual statements and prescriptions are totally different, because of different expectations of change in cases of a clash between word and world
Direction of fit
The technical term direction-of-fit is used to describe the distinctions that are offered by two related sets of opposing terms:* The more general set of mind-to-world vs. world-to-mind used by philosophers of mind, and* The narrower, more specific set, word-to-world The technical term...
.
In a descriptive sentence, if one premises, that "red is a number," according to the lexical rules of English grammar, then said statement would be false. Since said premise describes the objects; red and number, anyone with an adequate understanding of English would notice the falseness of such description and the falseness of said statement. However, if the norm "Thou shalt not Kill!" is uttered, and this premise is negated (by the fact of a person being murdered), the speaker is not to change his sentence upon observation of this into: "Kill other people!", but is to reiterate the moral outrage of the act of killing. Adjusting statements based upon objective reality and adjusting reality based upon statements are contrary uses of language, so descriptive statement are a different kind of sentences than norms. If truth is understood according to correspondence theory
Correspondence theory of truth
The correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes that world...
, the question of the truth or falsity of sentences not contingent upon external phenomena cannot be tested (see tautologies
Tautology (logic)
In logic, a tautology is a formula which is true in every possible interpretation. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first applied the term to redundancies of propositional logic in 1921; it had been used earlier to refer to rhetorical tautologies, and continues to be used in that alternate sense...
).
Some cognitivists argue that some expressions like "courageous" have both a factual as well as a normative component which cannot be distinguished by analysis. Prescriptivists argue, that according to context, either the factual or the normative component of the meaning is dominant. The sentence "Hero A behaved courageously." is wrong, if A ran away in the face of danger. But the sentence "Be brave and fight for the glory of your country!" has no truth value and cannot be falsified by someone who doesn't join the army.
Prescriptivism is also supported by the actual way of speaking. Many moral statements are de facto uttered as recommendations or commands, e.g. when parents or teachers forbid children to do wrong actions. The most famous moral ideas are prescriptions: the Ten Commandments
Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue , are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship, which play a fundamental role in Judaism and most forms of Christianity. They include instructions to worship only God and to keep the Sabbath, and prohibitions against idolatry,...
, the command of charity, the categorical imperative
Categorical imperative
The Categorical Imperative is the central philosophical concept in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as modern deontological ethics...
, and the Golden Rule
Golden Rule
Golden Rule may refer to:*The Golden Rule in ethics, morality, history and religion, also known as the ethic of reciprocity*Golden Rule savings rate, in economics, the savings rate which maximizes consumption in the Solow growth model...
command to do or not to do something, they are not statements that something is the case or not.
Prescriptivism can fit the theist idea of morality as obedience towards god. It is however different from the cognitivist supernaturalism which interprets morality as subjective will of god, while prescriptivism claims, that moral rules are universal and can be found by reason alone without reference to a god.
According to Hare, prescriptivists cannot argue that amoralists are logically wrong or contradictive. Everyone can choose to follow moral commands or not. This is the human condition according to the Christian reinterpretation of the Choice of Heracles. According to prescriptivism, morality is not about knowledge (of moral facts), but about character (to choose to do the right thing). Actors cannot externalize their responsibility and freedom of will towards some moral truth in the world, virtuous people don't need to wait for some cognition to choose what's right.
Prescriptivism is also supported by Imperative logic
Imperative logic
Imperative logic is the field of logic concerned with arguments containing sentences in the imperative mood. In contrast to sentences in the declarative mood, imperatives are neither true nor false. This leads to a number of logical dilemmas, puzzles, and paradoxes...
, in which there are no truth values for imperatives, and by the idea of the Naturalistic fallacy
Naturalistic fallacy
The naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica...
: even if someone could prove the existence of an ethical property and express it in a factual statement, he could never derive any command from this statement, so the search for ethical properties is pointless.
As with other anti-realist
Moral realism
Moral realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion....
meta-ethical theories, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the argument from queerness
Argument from queerness
"The Argument from Queerness" is a term used in the philosophical study of ethics first developed by J. L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ISBN 0-14-013558-8...
: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world. People generally have a negative attitude towards murder - calling it a disgust. This sentiment presumably keeps most of us from murdering. But does the actual wrongness of murder play an independent role? Is there any evidence that there is a property of wrongness that some types of acts have? Some people might think that the strong feelings we have when we see or consider a murder provide evidence of murder's wrongness. But it is not difficult to explain these feelings without saying that wrongness was their cause. Thus there is no way of discerning which, if any, ethical properties exist; by Occam's Razor
Occam's razor
Occam's razor, also known as Ockham's razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae , is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.-Overview:The principle is often summarized as "simpler explanations...
, the simplest assumption is that none do. The non-cognitivist then asserts that, since a proposition about an ethical property would have no referent, ethical statements must be something else.
Argument
Argument
In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...
s for emotivism focus on what normative statements express when uttered by a speaker. A person who says that killing is wrong certainly expresses her disapproval of killing. Emotivists claim that this is all she does, that "Killing is wrong" is not a truth-apt declaration, and that the burden of evidence is on the cognitivists
Cognitivism (ethics)
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
who want to show that in addition to expressing disapproval, the claim "Killing is wrong" is also true. Emotivists ask whether there really is evidence that killing is wrong. We have evidence that Jupiter has a magnetic field
Magnetic field
A magnetic field is a mathematical description of the magnetic influence of electric currents and magnetic materials. The magnetic field at any given point is specified by both a direction and a magnitude ; as such it is a vector field.Technically, a magnetic field is a pseudo vector;...
and that birds are oviparous, but as of yet, we do not seem to have found evidence of moral properties, such as "goodness". Emotivists ask why, without such evidence, we should think there is such a property. Ethical intuitionists
Ethical intuitionism
Ethical intuitionism is usually understood as a meta-ethical theory that embraces the following theses:# Moral realism, the view that there are objective facts of morality,...
think the evidence comes not from science or reason but from our own feelings: good deeds make us feel a certain way and bad deeds make us feel very differently. But is this enough to show that there are genuinely good and bad deeds? Emotivists think not, claiming that we do not need to postulate the existence of moral "badness" or "wrongness" to explain why considering certain deeds makes us feel disapproval; that all we really observe when we introspect are feelings of disapproval. Thus the emotivist asks why not to adopt the simple explanation and say that this is all there is; why insist that a genuine "badness" (of murder, for example) must be causing feelings, when a simpler explanation is available.
Arguments against non-cognitivism
One argument against non-cognitivism is that it ignores the external causes of emotional and prescriptive reactions. If someone says, "John is a good person," something about John must have inspired that reaction. If John gives to the poor, takes care of his sick grandmother, and is friendly to others, and these are what inspire the speaker to think well of him, it is plausible to say, "John is a good person because he gives to the poor, takes care of his sick grandmother, and is friendly to others." If, in turn, the speaker responds positively to the idea of giving to the poor, then some aspect of that idea must have inspired a positive response; one could argue that that aspect is also the basis of its goodness.Another argument is the "embedding problem." Consider the following sentences:
- Eating meat is not wrong.
- Is eating meat wrong?
- I think that eating meat is wrong.
- Mike doesn't think that eating meat is wrong.
- I once thought that eating meat was wrong.
- She does not realize that eating meat is wrong.
Attempts to translate these sentences in an emotivist framework seem to fail (e.g. "She does not realize, 'Boo on eating meat!'"). Prescriptivist translations fare only slightly better ("She does not realize that she is not to eat meat"). Even the act of forming such a construction indicates some sort of cognition in the process.
According to some non-cognitivist points of view, these sentences simply assume the false premise
False premise
A false premise is an incorrect proposition that forms the basis of a logical syllogism. Since the premise is not correct, the conclusion drawn may be in error...
that ethical statements are either true or false. They might be literally translated as:
- "Eating meat is wrong" is a false statement.
- Is "eating meat is wrong" a true statement?
- I think that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
- Mike doesn't think that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
- I once thought that "eating meat is wrong" was a true statement.
- She does not realize that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
These translations, however, seem divorced from the way people actually use language. A non-cognitivist would have to disagree with someone saying, "'Eating meat is wrong' is a false statement" (since "Eating meat is wrong" is not truth-apt at all), but may be tempted to agree with a person saying, "Eating meat is not wrong."
One might more constructively interpret these statements to describe the underlying emotional statement that they express, i.e.: I disapprove/do not disapprove of eating meat, I used to, he doesn't, I do and she doesn't, etc.; however, this interpretation is closer to ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are about the attitudes of people.This makes ethical subjectivism a form of cognitivism...
than to non-cognitivism proper.
A similar argument against non-cognitivism is that of ethical argument. A common argument might be, "If killing an innocent human is always wrong, and all fetuses are innocent humans, then killing a fetus is always wrong." Most people would consider such an utterance to represent an analytic proposition which is true a priori. However, if ethical statements do not represent cognitions, it seems odd to use them as premises in an argument, and even odder to assume they follow the same rules of syllogism
Syllogism
A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition is inferred from two or more others of a certain form...
as true propositions. However, R.M. Hare, proponent of universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
, has argued that the rules of logic are independent of grammatical mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
, and thus the same logical relations may hold between imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
s as hold between indicatives.
Many objections to non-cognitivism based on the linguistic characteristics of what purport to be moral judgments were originally raised by Peter Glassen
Peter Glassen
Peter Glassen was a professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1949 until his death in 1986. He was previously a member of the psychology department at the University of Saskatchewan. He developed a considerable reputation as an analytic moral philosopher on the basis of a number...
in "The Cognitivity of Moral Judgments", published in Mind
Mind (journal)
Mind is a British journal, currently published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association, which deals with philosophy in the analytic tradition...
in January 1959, and in Glassen's follow-up article in the January 1963 issue of the same journal.
See also
- Amoralism
- ExpressivismExpressivismExpressivism in meta-ethics is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms–for example, “It is wrong to torture an innocent human being”–are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as “wrong,” “good,” or “just” do not refer...
- Theological noncognitivismTheological noncognitivismTheological noncognitivism is the argument that religious language, and specifically words like "god", are not cognitively meaningful. It is sometimes considered to be synonymous with Ignosticism.-Overview:...
- Moral skepticismMoral skepticism"Moral skepticism" denotes a class of metaethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal, claim that moral knowledge is impossible...
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
- Richard RortyRichard RortyRichard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
External links
- Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism - Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyStanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a freely-accessible online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from over 65 academic institutions worldwide...
entry by Mark van Roojen. - rsrevision.com's pages on Metaethics Emotivism, Intuitionism and Prescriptivism with explanations, criticisms, and links.