Non-Cognitivism, Truth and Logic

• Published in: Philosophical studies Vol. 86; no. 1; pp. 73 - 91
• Main Author: Wedgwood, Ralph
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Kluwer Academic Publishers 01.04.1997; Sringer; University of Minnesota Press; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Inference; Language; Logic; Logical operators; Mathematical validity; Moral judgment; Normative ethics; Normative sentences; Normativity; Phenomenological research; Philosophical logics. Philosophy of language; Philosophy; Rationality; Semantics; Truth; Truth condition; New York; Massachusetts; Condition; Operator; Ethics; Cognitivism; Non-cognitivism; Characteristic; Justification; Emotion; Geach (P. T.); Logic of norms; Truth
• ISSN: 0031-8116; 1573-0883
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1017968816286

(1986, 46)Our beliefs aim at truth precisely because the way in which they are formed and maintained is regulated by various standards of warrantedness or rationality; and the ultimate purpose of conforming to all these standards of rationality is to try to ensure that ones beliefs will be true. [...]it is not an accidental feature of our beliefs that their formation and maintenance is regulated by these standards; it is essential to our beliefs that they are subject to these standards. [...]truth is the aim of assertions as well as beliefs: the ultimate purpose of conforming to the standards of warranted assertibility to which a given discourse is essentially subject is to try to ensure that ones assertions will be true.4For the purposes of this discussion, let us ignore all the thorny questions relating to truth value gaps and the Liar Paradox. [...]the semantics of normative statements will commit us to accepting a theorem, for every normative statement, of the following familiar form: Consistency and validity are fundamental standards of warrantedness for the following simple reasons: it is impossible for all members of an inconsistent set of statements to hold at any winning world/norm-system pair; and, in any valid inference, if the premisses hold at a winning world/norm-system pair, then the conclusion will also hold at such a winning world/norm-system pair.So, if it is to be an adequate account of validity and consistency, Gibbards theory must associate each normative statement with a condition viz. the condition under which the statement holds at a winning world/norm-system pair. [...]we may say that normative statements aim at meeting these associated conditions: the basic purpose of conforming to the standards of warrantedness that are essentially connected to normative statements, in virtue of their very meaning, is to lead one to make a given normative statement only if it holds at such a winning world/norm-system pair.Suppose that this semantical theory is stated in a metalanguage which is simply an extension of the object language that is, a metalanguage of the kind which permits homophonic semantic theories; hence the appropriate semantics for the metalanguage will be precisely analogous to the semantics of the object language.