Concept
Non-cognitivism
Overview
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) 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, non-cognitivism 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 acts, 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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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It is needless to insist farther on this head. These objections are but weak. For as, in common life, we reason every moment concerning fact and existence, and cannot possibly subsist, without continually employing this species of argument, any popular objections, derived from thence, must be insufficient to destroy that evidence. The great subverter of _Pyrrhonism_ or the excessive principles of scepticism is…
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
The author is tied to Non-cognitivism in the knowledge graph.
_First_,'tis obvious that, in reasonings of this kind, 'tis not the object presented to us, which, considered in itself, affords us any reason to draw a conclusion concerning any other object or event. For as this latter object is supposed uncertain, and as the uncertainty is derived from a concealed contrariety of causes in the former, were any of the causes placed in the known qualities of that object, they would…
David Hume, Philosophical Works, v. 1
The author is tied to Non-cognitivism in the knowledge graph.
But although there may exist no contradiction in our judgement, it may nevertheless connect conceptions in such a manner that they do not correspond to the object, or without any grounds either à priori or à posteriori for arriving at such a judgement, and thus, without being self-contradictory, a judgement may nevertheless be either false or groundless. Now, the proposition: “No subject can have a predicate that…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Non-cognitivism is.
Philosophers who discussed Non-cognitivism
Related ideas
- Moral nihilism
- Macmillan Publishers
- Truth value
- Logical positivism
- Metaethics
- Imperative mood
- A. J. Ayer
- Categorical imperative
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Vienna Circle
- Grammatical mood
- Knowledge
- R. M. Hare
- Emotivism
- Ten Commandments
- Cognitivism (ethics)
- Quasi-realism
- Attitude (psychology)
- Occam's razor
- Logical consequence
- Mind (journal)
- Simon Blackburn
- Allan Gibbard
- Speech act
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of philosophy.
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