The Error Theory of Metaethics I

The "error" theory is a special case in the old debate between "cognitive" and 'non-cognitive" meta-ethical views.

Cognitivism holds that there are moral properties or moral facts, and that the aim of normative ethical discourse is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them, in something like the same way that there are bodies and events we call "astronomical," (stars, planets, collisions, the collapse of a star into a black hole) and the aim of discussing "astronomy" is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them.

For example, the wrongness of murder may be a fact in the world. If it is then the goal of the sentence "murder is wrong" is to name that fact.

Non-cognitivists claim that there aren't any moral properties or facts, so they can't be described, rightly or wrongly. But it also generally adds that this doesn't mean normative ethical statements are wrong. It just means that such statements are doing something different from what statements in astronomy are doing. What it is that a normative ethical statement is doing, and why -- that varies of course with the particular non-cognitivist one is reading.

Moral cognitivism includes moral realism, but it isn't precisely the same thing. A contemporary philosopher like Russ Shafer-Landau is a cognitivist because he is a realist. One could also believe, though, that moral judgments are entirely subjective and regard THAT statement as an example of something one knows, of cognition. I would view the statement "Murder is bad" as a matter of cognition even if I also believed that it was equivalent to "personally, I see murder as bad" and if I claimed to have learned of THAT fact through introspection. Keith Augustine is a cognitivist despite not being a realist, despite being in fact a subjectivist.

So far so good. Moral non-cognitivism, on the other hand, includes such views as expressionism. According to an expressivist, "murder is bad" means only "Boooo to murderers, boooo." This isn't something I know (even by introspection). It is something I do.

All theories about what moral statements mean seem to fall neatly into one or the other of these camps. They either hold that such statements refer to something knowable or they don't hold that.

Except for the error theory, which seems to avoid making this choice. I'll flesh this out a bit tomorrow.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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