THE SEMANTICS OF MORAL LANGUAGE IN META-ETHICAL NON-COGNITIVISM (original) (raw)

2020, BİLTEK ULUSLARARASI BİLİM, TEKNOLOJİ VE SOSYAL BİLİMLERDE GÜNCEL GELİŞMELER SEMPOZYUMU

According to non-cognitivism in meta-ethics, moral terms are merely non-cognitive (expressive/emotive) linguistic items that events, or actions in question. In this sense, moral terms (e.g. right, wrong, permissible and etc.), in their the first-order and non-parenthetical uses, are on par with expressive (non-moral terms have no semantic content-simply, meaning-to contribute into the meaning of sentences in which they occur. Yet, they only function to surface non-cognitive (i.e. emotive) roval of or aversion from the act of killing. Hence, non-cognitivism entails that moral judgments do not express a proposition at all and thereby moral judgments are not truth evaluable. Nevertheless, it is questionable if non-cognitivism provides a coherent semantics for the analysis of moral sentences. In this work, I will discuss the coherency of non-cognitivist semantics by addressing one essential problem for it, namely the Frege-Geach problem. As the problem suggests, moral sentences can be uttered with non-expressive attitudes ter all, the antecedent merely describes/indicates a case in which some act is evaluated as such-and-such while the consequent is laid out by virtue of its truth-conditional relation with the described case in the antecedent. Thus, moral sentences do not necessarily entail to non-cognitive/expressive ascriptions and thereby they appear to have propositional contents. In this respect, I will explicate the Frege-Geach problem and critically discuss whether there is any room for non-cognitivism to explain away the problem.