#114 Simon Blackburn - What is Ethical Emotivism?

The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from, "I know the way, to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Game skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from, "Make it happen, to MADE it happen," and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu/JackWelchMBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shevon as many campuses, including at 21/21/15th Street North in Arlington, Virginia. Simon Blackburn, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Most people who think about ethics know that there are kind of two ways of thinking about it. You've got realism on the one side. Ethics is a real thing. There are real truths to know about facts like murder is wrong. And anti-realism on the other side that ethics is not real, that it's made up a matter of opinion, that kind of thing. Most people are familiar with that distinction, and maybe we can dig into it, but there's this other distinction, which sometimes crops up between cognitiveism and non-cognitiveism in ethics, which is not the same thing. So could you tell us what cognitiveism and non-cognitiveism in ethics is? Well, of course, the root for cognitiveism is knowledge, cognition. And the battleground is or used to be between the realists who say we have knowledge. It's not only that they're real truths out there, but also we know which they are. That's cognitiveism. And non-cognitiveists who said, no, it is made up. It's not a question of knowing anything. It's a question of liking things or proving of things or choosing things. And it's a matter of foisting our sentiments onto other people. So that is, as you rightly say, the battleground. Cognitiveism then is not readily distinguishable from a generalized anti-realism. Non-cognitiveism. Non-cognitiveism is not readily distinguishable from a generalized anti-realism. Non-cognitiveism not readily distinguish from realism. In fact, I think the terms have been used quite interchangeably in the literature. Interesting. I was under the impression that, in at least to at least some degree, cognitiveism was about truth value. If somebody thinks that ethics is cognitive, it means that it's the kind of thing that can be true or false. Not. So when I think of, say, an ethical subjectivist or a moral relativist who says, well, murder is wrong, is true for me, but false for you, it's cognitive and that it's got truth value, but it's not realist. Well, that subject, that kind of subjectivism is not a very popular option for reasons we could certainly come to. So I don't think the terminology has been tailored to take account of that. You are right there that cognitiveism is always associated with the presence of a truth value. That's why it's associated with realism. It doesn't really have to be because if you think of knowledge, then there's knowledge of things that are true, certainly. But there's also knowing how, knowing how to do things. And so people who are called non-cognitivists might allow themselves camouflage, a piece of camouflage, saying, actually, I'm quite cool about cognition. It's just the cognitions I allow and pieces of knowing how to do something. After all, socrates, starting of the ethical debate, all those years ago, tended to think that it's a question of knowing how to live. And that's why it was so important. So he didn't deny that there was knowledge in the area. It's a just a question of knowing how, rather than knowing that. Sure. How much of our moral terminology do you think is useful and accurate? Like we talk about realism, anti-realism, and cognitiveism, and non-cognitiveism, and knowledge and stuff. Is that sort of the state of the language? Is it suitable for you? No, I mean, I've spent an awful lot of my career trying to dismantle the way those oppositions are framed and the arguments that are used against one side or another. And I think by now they've become very stale. There are still people who call themselves realists, but they're, as it were, diminishing tribe. And they're people who call themselves anti-realists, and they're probably diminishing tribe as well. So curiously, the battleground has started to occupy fewer philosophers than it did say 50 years ago when I started writing about it. So what are people using now, if they're not tending to call themselves realists and anti-realists? There are still people who believe there is truth in ethics and not truth in ethics. What kind of language is being used? The language of truth, partly. But that too has its failures. For reasons we might come to, one of the most popular contemporary theories of truth is called deflationary, deflationary theories of truth. And those per minute talk about truth almost everywhere that you've got an indicative sentence like there are cameras in this room or that's red or you're wearing a jacket and so on. So if you say those things, you can say that they're true. Or of course false, as you. Yes, find them. Okay, so let's dig into this then. So there is this idea that a lot of people want truth in ethics when you say that murder is wrong. You want to be able to say that that's true in the sense that it's true that the earth orbits the sun. And the great trouble with this is a lot of people say, well in order for that to be true, there'd have to be this sort of weird element to our reality that there is this property of of wrongness which Mackey famously describes as queer as like totally unlike anything else. And if it does exist, it seems impossible to know how we'd even apprehend it. And yet we have this burning desire to say that there is real truth in ethics. I think you could probably call this the realist appearance, the appearance of realism intuitively for people. Yes, I think you could. And I think it's seduced a lot of people. I think the rot started. This is very treacherous of me to say this because I was brought up in a college which was more G-Maw's college in Cambridge. And more was still a very important figure to people in Cambridge, including especially my own supervisor. So I do feel very nervous about saying what I'm about to say. But I think the rot started with more. Really? In his 1903 book, "Principioethica," more decided that there was a property of, well he talked about goodness more than rightness. For our purposes we can take them as equal to the other. There was such a property, it belonged to some things. And it was a non-non-natural property. That is, it wasn't like the properties of things which are full within sense experience. So it required a special mode of knowing. And then you're off to the races because where are you? Because you've got a supernatural or non-natural property. And you've got a non-natural way of knowing about it. And that known as intuitionism, it was christened intuition. Yes. Sort of set the scene for 20th century discussion of these things. I think it led people up a garden path. If you look at great classics of ethics, for example, the Scottish sentimental tradition, Hume, Adam Smith, but even as late as John Stuart Mill, Bradley's doubtful. Most of those people, certainly the ones I mentioned, didn't travel their pretty heads about non-natural properties and the fugitive nature of ethical knowledge. They either were unabashed sentimentalists like the Scotsman, like Hume, or Shaftesbury, English, but then Hume, Robertson, Hume. And no, not Robertson, I shouldn't have mentioned him, but Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith, Adam Smith. And you can read, say, Hume and Smith, without ever finding worries about subjectivism, worries about naturalism, worried about non-naturalism. They just go ahead and tell you how ethics works. And this I admire them for, and I think they were on the right track. I think we were deluded by more and thinking there was another question, the question of the nature of the moral property. Might be called like moral ontology. Exactly. Exactly. I've spoken to a few physicists on the show recently, and we've been talking about functionalism as a view of what science does. This is great debate as to whether science really explains anything about the nature of the world, or whether it just tells us what stuff does. So famously Newton describes gravity, discovers all of its laws, but has no idea what gravity actually is. And I suppose there's an extent to which I'm thinking now that could be mirrored in ethics. Are we, when we do ethics, just talking about what ethics does and what people do when they make moral claims? Or are we talking about what the good is? And it sounds like you're more in line with the former idea. Oh, I'm very much on board with the former idea. If we look back in history, let's go, let's look at David Hume, writing in the middle roughly of the 18th century. He says an awful lot about what counts as a virtue. He's a virtue theorist. He puts virtue front and center of his discussion of ethics. He tells you about the properties that are involved. Collities of mind use full or agreeable to yourself or others. Or actually there's an end there. Collities mind use will and agreeable to yourself and others. So that's the properties we're talking about. What do they do? Well, they excite admiration in us. What do we then do? We express that admiration. And that's it. But there's no question of what is a virtue not beyond the qualities of the exist. That's really interesting because when I've spoken to physicists about this in the scientific context, I'm a bit dismayed. But you're not telling me what an atom or subatomic particle actually is. You're just telling me what it does. It's negatively charged. And they look at me and say, "But that's it." That's what explanation is in science. And maybe the same thing is true in ethics. Well, I think it's true. I think Hume was absolutely right to stop where he did. There should be no final question about the nature of the ethical property, the property of rightness, the property of goodness. That's a metaphysical question. We don't have to go there. What all we have to do is to say what excites us, how we react to it, and the way we express that reaction. Does this approach rule out the idea that there is this property called goodness that has a nature? Or does it just remain agnostic on that question? That's a very good question. I think it invites you not to ask it, and not to expect an answer for it. As you're finding to your physicists, they're not ready to give an answer. Of course, there have been people I think Emmanuel Kant was one who thought that that shows that we can find the world of phenomena. That is, we've got the phenomena of physics. But we can't really find out what are the properties of things in themselves. And that's. So what you're voicing or what people who dislike the physicist's functionalism, voicing is basically sympathy with Kant, that there is an extra potential object of knowledge, the things in themselves. Now you get exactly the same when Hume talks about causation. That was arguably a rather great contribution to metaphysics. There's the properties that set us off, and these are just regular successions in nature. We find that when one thing happens and another happens, when we've got a regularity like that, and we're confident of it, that makes us expect the second on the occurrence of the first. That expectation is very. it's removable. It's something we've got control over. And so we express that by saying the second must happen. Yeah. That means we use the modal language, it must happen if the first happens. If you ask, where's the must, do we see the must? Yeah, where is this causal connection? No, we don't. And Hume wonderfully sort of looks. He takes the magnifying glass to. you knock one billiard ball into the other billiard ball, and one causes the other to roll, and he's like, well, I can't see this causal connection. I can't see it in the first ball anywhere. I can't see it in the second ball. It's not floating around in the air somewhere. So where is it? And he sort of says, well, I don't really know. And so it restricts our ability to meaningfully talk to what's happening. And the reason I think that's so exciting is because in the scientific context, people are quite willing, I find, in talking to them to sort of say, yeah, okay, fair enough, we can't really get at what stuff like fundamentally is, but that's enough. Like, science is a good enough enterprise just telling us what things do. But when it comes to ethics, they demand something more. Well, I'm sorry for them because I think they won't find anything more. As I say, if they go down the rabbit hole that's more opened up, they'll just find themselves in darkness. There is nobody's ever said anything intelligent about it in how we intuit non-natural properties. Yeah. Well, I kind of think that another good word for intuition might be feeling. Ah, well, now you're on human sight because if it's a question of how we feel about things, humes your man, or Adam Smith, who's actually a wonderful psychologist. So, you know, this is you coming down on the side of what we're traditionally known as anti-realists. A lot of my own works, which goes under the title of "Quees I Realism", which I now regret, but irresponsible for it. That was endeavouring to show that the feeling side, the sentimental view, the Scottish sentimentalism, wasn't as bad as people thought. I think there was a reaction against it, partly probably due to the Second World War. After people discovered the full horror, the Nazi atrocities, they weren't content with existentialism, with the view that you sort of make it up for yourself, or you mold yourself as you choose. They wanted constraints, they wanted to be able to thump the table and say the Nazis were really bad. And if you don't believe that, you're wrong. And my endeavour was to show that expressivists or people on the sentiment side could say that, that is, these certainties, as it were, shouldn't be the private property of realists. In fact, if anything, I think the boots on the other foot, it's easier to explain the certainties in an expressivist or sentimental tradition than it is if you're a realist. After all, if you're more, how do you know you're entitled to thump the table about how bad the Nazis are? By intuiting something, it didn't take intuition for the people who went into Belsen and Auschwitz to understand that something terrible had happened there. They didn't need to intuit that there was badness in the air. They just needed to feel revulsion and feel ashamed almost to belong to the same species as the people who did this. And it was that kind of revulsion, indignation, shame, which got voiced in all the table thumping. And good for them. I'm on their side. I think those were the appropriate sentiments to have in the light of those horrors. Summers here and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dress season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways in your everyday wardrobe, discover stylish options under $100 from tons of your favorite brands like Mango, Skims, Princess Polly and Madewell. It's easy to with free shipping and free returns, in store order pickup and more. Shop today in stores online at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Well, this, this quasi realism, which you're famous for, I'm interested in why you regret the term and and maybe we can talk about that. But my understanding is you're sort of taking this non cognitive understanding of ethics that when people make ethical statements, they're essentially expressing something that that probably doesn't have truth value. It might be something like an emotion or a command or a plan. But that in saying so, there's somehow projecting onto the world a realist language. Yes, well, I used to call myself a projectivist, but the metaphor of projection is very dangerous because it does have a connotation of as a well illusion or something which isn't quite as it appears to be. And I wanted to get rid of that. Well, that's what it will sound like to somebody who for the first time comes across this idea that, oh, yeah, ethics is just an expression of emotion, but I'm not a, I'm not an anti realist. I'm a quasi realist because although I think it's all just expressions of say emotion to take one example. There's something somehow real about the way I'm talking about it. Like, how is that different from? No, I mean, the, the, the, the way I thought of it was that the realists, the people on the real in the realist camp felt that they could say thing which the anti realist couldn't write. So they could talk of truth and fact and reality. I want to say, well, wait a second, what does that talk add to just saying that the Nazis were dreadful. And I was a betted in this by a book that came out in 1990 by Michael Paul Horwich, very good philosopher and Cambridge. And just on truth and Paul championed the deflation, which I meant earlier, as I mentioned earlier. Now, of course, if you've got a deflationary theory of truth, there's no difference between saying the Nazis were bad and it's true that the Nazis were bad. Same thing. It's really true that the Nazis were bad. Same thing. It's really true that it's a fact that the Nazis were bad. It's true that it's true that the Nazis were bad. So I, and one of my works I call that Ramsey's ladder after Frank Ramsey. And my use of the metaphors to say that the Ramsey's ladder is lying on the ground. It's horizontal. It doesn't carry you any higher, any higher or anywhere different. That's brilliant. Talking about this regression of, yes, true that because people, for people listening, it might be helpful to think about this in terms of truth in the popular imagination, at least for a long time. And I think probably amongst most normal people as it were today, what does it mean say something is true? Well, it means that what I'm saying somehow accords with reality, the so-called correspondence theory of truth. When I say the chair is red, there is a fact about reality, there is this chair, and it has this property of redness. And the words that I'm saying correspond to the truth of that real thing in the real world. And so to say that something's true is to say that it corresponds with reality. The deflation, the deflationary theory of truth doesn't so much offer an account of what it means to say something is true. I should just say that it's just adding nothing. Like you just said, the difference between the chair is red and the chair is red is true. It doesn't exist. For the correspondence theory, there is a difference there because to say the chair is red is just to express that as a view, to say that the chair is red is true, is to say that that statement corresponds with reality. But for the deflationist, it's just to sort of express the same thing twice in a row, basically. Yeah, that's right. Now there's a utility to the word true which we can go into. But it's a very different utility than anything that the correspondence theorist here it gets held off. I think the thing to say about correspondences is it's perfectly harmless. Of course it's okay to say that if something's true, it corresponds with facts. That's because facts are made for that role. Fact is something the invent for a true sentence to correspond to or true proposition. The mistake is to think of the fact as something separate in a part from the beliefs that we hold and the beliefs we cling to and the beliefs that have stood the test of time. And which we therefore want to express and want other people to believe, the epistemology is not one of, now I've got a belief, let's say I believe that you're wearing a jacket. Now let me see what the fact is. Oh yes, the fact is that you're wearing a jacket. That second process wasn't different from the first process. All I was doing was reassuring myself perhaps that you're wearing a jacket, which is sometimes a perfectly good thing to do because you do need reassuring. If you think, but you think, not very certain, that there are eggs in the fridge, then of course you reassure yourself by going and looking and going and looking is certainly a process which puts you in a better position to assert that there are eggs in the fridge. And it's helpful to think in terms of these partial beliefs, like you might say, I'm not sure if there are eggs in the fridge and therefore you would say, I'm not sure if it's true that there are eggs in the fridge. That's right. That doesn't make sense. That makes sense for the deflationist. But if you really can separate this idea of the statement of the fact there are eggs in the fridge to the truth of it, then I should be able to say something like. There are eggs in the fridge, but I don't know if it's true that there are eggs in the fridge. Yes, and that's very awkward. It doesn't make very much sense. And this ladder that you were referring to also, if I'm not mistaking you, would refer to the fact that for the correspondence theory of truth, to say something is true means there's a reality it accords with. Okay, so this chair exists. That's the reality. And so I can say it's true that the chair is read because that accords with reality. Well, I've just created a new fact. Yes, that's right. And that new fact is it's true that the chair is read. Allegedly. So I can now say, well, it's true that it's true that the chair is read. And that creates a new fact. Yes. I can say it's true that it's true that it's true that the chair is read. That's right. And that can go on forever. Yeah, and yet there aren't that many facts. Exactly. Exactly. And so when you think of it in those terms, when I start saying to somebody, but that means it's true that it's true that it's true. And that means it's true that it's true that they would probably stop me and say, you're not adding anything. That's right. Every time you say that it's true. That's the idea behind the metaphor that is lying in all of the whole. That's the ladder that goes sideways. And the first philosopher to use that argument, you've just used, which is very powerful argument, was Frager. Yes. And an argument that's good enough for Frager and Ramsey and Fickish Dynastoreson is that Klein is good enough for me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think this might also have some interesting implications for believers in God. Because of God is onnissient, which means he knows all true facts. Yes. And if you have this problem of regress that every time you say something is true, you create a new fact. And that sort of gives you this infinite regress. That would mean that God needs to know and actually infinite number of things. Yes. Which almost seems a bit redundant. Like most of God's cognition has taken up and it's true that it's true that it's true that it's true. Yes. And so maybe this isn't a good way to think about truth. Well, exactly. If it doesn't add anything to say it's true that like for the 15th time, maybe it also doesn't add anything to say it for the first time. Yeah, indeed. And so we have this idea of deflationary theories of truth that to say the chair is read is true, is just to say the chair is read. And one of the reasons this is so popular amongst non-cognitiveists ethicists is because in the moral environment, what the realist says to criticize someone like me, for example, they'll come along and they'll say, well, Alex, I know you think that murder is wrong. But can you say that it's true? I just did. I already did say that it's true. It doesn't add anything to say that it's true. And so it fits in quite nicely with an expressiveness. You've got it exactly. That's right. And from about 1990 onwards, so I mentioned Paul Horitz wrote then, that's become gradually much more accepted, which is why I think the old labels of cognitiveist, non-cognitiveist and so on are less popular today than they used to be. There's battle lines and not quite as solid as people used to think. For a long time now on this show, I've been telling people that, broadly speaking, I'm an ethical emotivist. I never like to commit myself to it just because I'm agnostic about most things as I like to say. But I do try to make sense of what's going on when I see somebody kick a homeless person and I feel something more than just the descriptive fact that a person has been kicked. What's this extra thing that I'm aware of in my mind? It seems like it's a feeling. It's something like stop or don't or boo or something like that. And so I think, okay, it might make sense to say that the ethical component of these statements is an expression of emotion. You yourself are not an emotivist. Well, emotion, you know, if you study emotion, you start to get very tied up with things like anger and fear. Things which have a very pronounced phenomenology, you know, your skin breaks into a sweat and this sort of thing. And that's what people associate with the idea of emotion. I prefer to work with the term attitude. I think it has the same force and it's got the same seat in our sentiments. But an attitude can be, it doesn't necessarily make you hot under the collar. I mean, I've got the attitude that Donald Trump's, no, I won't take that because that does make me hot under the collar. But suppose I have the attitude that it was a pity that Cromwell won the Civil War. Right. I regret that. I think it's such a shame. That doesn't make me hot under the collar. It's perfectly as it were, inert attitude. It doesn't, it doesn't by itself give me much for motive to do anything. It would give me a motive to descend from somebody who thought that Cromwell was a thoroughly good thing. But that's about all because it's not part of my practical life. But emotions, I think, are essentially episodes in your practical life. So that's why I don't entirely recommend the term emotivist. But of course there's no term attitude in the list, which is pity. Well, about so we can start a trend. The guy who's watching Love To. Let's get that going. I don't know that because I think that's interesting what you're saying that you can have attitudes towards something, ethically speaking, without, as you say, getting hot under the collar. But even the way you just said then, you know, because you know, it's such a shame that that didn't happen. I feel like maybe you have to pick something which, in order to find something which isn't that emotionally moving, you also have to pick something which you wouldn't actually find that morally important, like genuinely or something you would express. Yes, I mean, it's unusual. It's not that unusual. I mean, consider people talking about fiction. Yeah. You know, but we talk, you know, was Emma just a silly little girl or was she a heroine? And you can imagine a couple of literary critics getting the pros and cons of that, bringing the top, doing the text, knowing the episodes, what Jane Austen told us, what she didn't tell us and so on. And they do it far better and I can do it. I'm off the top of my head. But it's not going to be something, I mean, in any profession, they're professionally arguing it. They can probably get honda, honda, honda, or color. But in itself, it's not being honda, the color about Emma's behavior. It's been honda, the color about what said about Emma's behavior. Yeah. And that's a different object of criticism. I think there are obviously history and fiction at two cases where you don't have episodes of emotion in the same way that you do if you as it were walked into Auschwitz, you'd feel the horror. But nevertheless, it's the case where you walk into Auschwitz, which gives you your moral basis, your moral bearings. That's where you start, I think. Do you think it would be possible, in principle? This is just a question about motivation and ethics, I suppose. Would it be possible, in principle, for somebody to walk into Auschwitz, feel absolutely nothing. Like nothing about their emotional disposition changes, and yet they truthfully express, this is wrong. I don't think so. No, I think that they might mouth the sentence, it's wrong. But if they feel nothing, I think they're misusing it. I think they're not expressing a feeling that they've got, they're not expressing, expressing revulsion or sense of shame or sense of horror, any of the things that you'd expect. And I think it's a far as they're absolutely cold. Then they may be mimicking moral disapproval, perhaps to show that they're part of the gang of something. But they're mimicking it. We said that. With the Venmo debit card, you can Venmo everything. Your favorite band's merch, you can Venmo this. Or their next show, you can Venmo that. Visit Venmo.me/Devits to learn more. The Venmo master card is issued by the bank for a bank and a pursuant to license my master card international incorporating card. Maybe you used everywhere master card is accepted Venmo purchase restrictions apply. It's difficult to define what like wrongness is, we just talk about what it does. When somebody looks at Auschwitz and they say that's wrong, I'm not talking about someone who's steeped in ethical literature here. Someone you meet on the street. I say, what do you mean by that? And they'd probably say, well, I struggle to define this thing wrongness or badness. But they still mean that there is this thing about something like Auschwitz that is wrong and that's true. And if I try to offer an account of saying, well, I think you're essentially just expressing an attitude there. They would say, no, no, no, it's more than that. I'm saying something. I'm saying something true about this thing called wrongness. At the very least, if we can't define wrong or bad in terms of what it is, we at least get to grips with what people think they mean by those terms. Could I pick you up on something you did this before as well? When you talk about expressing an attitude, you tend to insert the word just. Just expressing an attitude or merely expressing an attitude. And I think that has to be resisted. Attitudes are extremely important. It's far more important to me if your attitude towards me is that I ought to be shot. Then it is that your attitude towards me is the belief that I was at university in Oxford, which I wasn't at university in Cambridge. You've got that wrong, but it's unimportant. Whereas if you think that I ought to be shot, that's not a mere attitude. It's potentially a very dangerous attitude. Some people would say that they're different kinds of statements. The idea that you studied at Oxford is not an attitude. It's a belief. It's a truth claim that's false. And I think that the person I'm embodying here would say that in the same way, when I say that the Nazis were wrong, I'm making a truth claim. I'm stating a belief. This is something that I believe to be true about the world. And yet here we are saying that what will sound to them is just an expression. I think that the contrast between attitude and belief is not straightforward. Me too. So I think that we'll have to go down another rabbit hole there. We've already established that if you use the indicative form, you can use it. It's true that without blushing. I think it's important to put on top of that. And this takes us on to the notorious Frager Geach problem. Yes, thank goodness. The difference between expressing an attitude by means of an indicative sentence and expressing it in some other way is not cast iron. Language is very flexible at this point. So to take over a very, very example of mine, Kato allegedly said that Carthage was to be destroyed. Carthage, they land the mess. And Latin has the Gerundin there. Now he could just have said, let's go and destroy Carthage. That would have been an experiment, that actually an imperative form, but expressing an attitude of, you know, dislike of the existence of Carthage, wishing to do, wishing to abolish it. He could have expressed his wish that way, or he could have said Carthage is to be destroyed. I think the second has a slightly more public face. It makes it plain that Kato doesn't think that he's out of line or idiosyncratic about this. He thinks that, you know, all right thinking people are going to agree with me, oh, I'm going to try and get them to agree with me. Carthage is to be destroyed. But the difference then, I mean, is a difference that Peter Geach did emphasize. If you just say, "Boo to Carthage", or "Boo to the existence of Carthage", let's do away with Carthage. You can't say, "If, let's do away with Carthage", then one thing or another. If you say Carthage is to be destroyed, you can say Carthage is to be destroyed, then he's tired and tired and siden to be destroyed with it. Or if Carthage is to be destroyed, we'll need a big anavie, then we've got a present. Intra. Yes, a great example, yeah. So the advantage of giving the attitude or the injunction in this case, the plan, an addictive form, is that it renders inference and discussion possible. Now Geach famously said, "Ah, this is an abyss that nothing can cross. Either it's on the side of Buhare, you can't enter into these inferences, or it's on the other side, it's proposition, and then it can. But never the twangional meat, and that's a motorism's problem." Yes. And a lot of things been spilled about this, this is an impressed philosopher's and worried them. I tend to remember to reverse it, to say no. The exact reason that we have this in changing forms is that when we use the addictive form, we know about making inferences, and we need to make inferences. The commander of the army needs to say things like, if garbage is to be destroyed, then we're going to need a lot more ships. If garbage is to be destroyed, we can't do it with the army we've got, we're going to have to employ some spaniards and so on. So anybody intent on serious planning is going to have to take the fruition of a plan as something he can make hypotheses about, he can embed into these conditions. But there's a reason for that, and the reason is the one I mentioned, namely that it enables inference, and inference is important. If you just go around saying "booter garbage", you haven't yet, as it were, given the command and chief, is marching orders. Yes. You just expressed. Yes, exactly. So maybe right to say that in ethics or in some of the forms in which ethics takes, we go beyond just expressing feeling an attitude. I use the word "just" there, just expressing feeling an attitude. I think we, and this was first pointed out by Michael Charles Stevenson in the 1940s in the book "Effix and Language". We offer ethical discourse to each other, partly as a matter of persuading people, not just content to say, "This is how it is for me". We're also saying, "This is how I want it to be for you, I want you to share this attitude". So it's a persuasive exercise as much as anything else, or a reassuring exercise if I think you do share it, but I'd like to just hear that you share it. But having thought of it as shared, we then can also switch to the gerundive, and think of it as something to be done. So there's something to be done. Let's build the army if it's a build the navy. You can't make inferences from expressions of emotion, like logically speaking. You can't say, "If, boo, Carthage, then open a window". No, that's right. It's like saying, "If, three, then go and open a window". It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. And so, as far as I understand it, the so-called "frager-geach problem" named after "frager-and-geach". Also known as the embedding problem. Yes, indeed. I'll use the term "emotivism" because with the caveat that we've said it might describe attitudes. "emotivism basically says that when I say murder is wrong, I'm just expressing an emotion about murder". Yeah, that's what I'm doing. And to be clear, one confusion. I'm not reporting what I feel. Like, murder is wrong, doesn't mean that I don't like murder. It's not made true by your dislike. Yeah, because it could be true that I don't like murder. That's not an expression. That's a fact about my brain. Instead, murder is wrong is the expression of that dislike. So, it's as AFAMOUSLY had it something like "boo-merder" or "merder" and then an angry emotion. With a bunch of exclamation marks. Yes. That's what is wrong, ads. Okay, so it's just an expression. The embedding problem is about what happens when we use those phrases embedded in other contexts. So, if I say something like "I wonder if murder is wrong". Those words "merder" is wrong. "Can't mean I'm expressing "boo-merder" because I'm saying, "Well, I wonder if murder is wrong". But I can't say "I wonder if "boo-merder" if in order to say "boo-merder" I have to express something. And so you have this so-called embedding problem that either the emotivist is right, but this is what ethical statements mean. But as soon as they show up in "if then statements" or "I wonder if suddenly it changes", or that's not what was meant all along. And what I want to focus on here, because I want to take this somewhere, is specifically the context of syllogisms. So a syllogism, for eyelistners, is an argument that has two premises and a conclusion. All men are mortal, socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal, for example. Now, here's one syllogism. If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong. Premise two, murder is wrong. Conclusion, therefore, murdering Simon is wrong. That seems valid. And everybody will look at that and go, "The conclusion follows from those premises". The problem is, for an argument to be valid, means that the conclusion can't be false if the premises are true. But if premise two, murder is wrong, it's just an expression of emotion. I'm just going, "Boo, murder". Then it can't be true. It can't be false. It can't be true. Any more than saying, "Stand up", can be true or false. It's an expression of emotion in the indicative form. Yeah, so in this particular context, to help us understand what this means. Most people think of logical validity as requiring true and false statements, with true statements following from true statements. And yet, the emotivist says that premise two there is an expression of emotion, which most people think expressions don't have truth value. So how do you get a logically valid syllogism from non-truth-out sentences? Well, that's a beautiful exposition of exactly "Geacher's Problem". He took the example, "If a lying is wrong, then getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong." "Lying is wrong, so getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong." Yeah. It's exactly the same problem. Yes, well, it means there's got to be a complication. Yes. Now, the complication that I think does the job is the transition to the indicative form. Because that we've already established, I think, because we talked about inflationism, that truth isn't going to be the problem. If you've got the indicative form, you've got the possibility of inference. And my counter-geek is to say, "We've got the indicative form because it gives us the possibility of inference." Now, of course, you can give a functional account of why you want inference when you're expressing your attitude. I mean, one example is, if you approve of giving money to the homeless, then you approve of giving money to female homeless. You need to be able to be taken to account for your attitude. If your attitude is all in pieces, so you think that lying is wrong. If lying is wrong, then getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong. So, and then you then say, "No, no, but getting your little brother to lie for you isn't wrong." Well, you may be about to do a mode of stolen saying, "Since not the conclusion, not the premises, not one of the premises." But otherwise, you're contradicting. If you try and hold everything there, you're going to be in contradiction. But can you have a contradiction if there's no. Do you mean to say that when we put these ethical expressions into their indicative form? They do now have truth-fally. They are now the kind of thing that can be true or false. Yeah, absolutely. And that's because truth and falsity kind of is just an expression. Yeah, because to say it's true is just to express it. In that case, then, when I look at a statement like, "If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong." I might say, "Okay, so maybe when I say that that's a true conditional, that's just an expression of the same thing." But what is the thing that I'm expressing in a conditional? Because when I say, "If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong." If I say that conditional is true, I'm not expressing either of those component parts. I could think murder is fine, but I could say, "If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong." But I think murder is fine. I might say that conditional claim is true. Well, there are various ways of putting it. One thing that sounds more complicated than it is, would be your expressing disapproval of holding the one attitude without holding the other. So you're actually amongst your objects of concern is the lattice of implications. Prime delivery is fast. How fast are you talking? We're talking puzzle toys and look pad delivered so fast you can get this cubby under control. Fast. We're talking shoe toys at your door without really glading fast. Peepads calling Matt and Pegham fast and fast. And there's training TREATES fast and they need to sit fast. And now we can all relax. In order these matching hoodies to get cozy and cute, fast. Fast, free delivery. It's on prime. In your approvals and disprovals. Because approvals and disprovals don't stand by themselves. We feel the need to defend them. Feel the need to say what they involved. Sposing, you know, if Kirstaama says, "I approve of industry or something." You might say, "Do you approve of all industry?" "If you approve industry, do you approve of unpaid housework?" So on. We want to know what the implications of his approval are. Similarly for ourselves, we may not have realised that our attitudes carry an implication which we may not be all that happy with. And teasing that out is part of the stuff and substance of ethical debate. I mean, take for example, what do they call themselves, resolute kind of benevolent people who think you ought to give away all your surplus income above whatever the minimum you settle on is. Have they worked it out? Well, if you do that, if everyone does that, then what will the consequences be for consumption and therefore for production and therefore for wages and economy in general? I mean, if everybody does that, are you sure that the world, as you know, it will go on the same as you always expected it to be very nice for people to get richer, but it may be very nasty for everyone else. And the main term becomes very nasty for the people you thought you were helping. So unless you've sorted all that out, it's not a very sensible policy to go around advocating. Similarly, pause, just stop oil. Have you any idea about the number of things oil is used in? Would you any longer be able to buy your fruit drinks in the cartons that you're used to? Would you any more be able to weigh your fleece? Any more be able to weigh your trainers? The answer to all those questions is no. But seeing that implication is something which I think you've got to do to do. It's really important to be able to talk about the implications of ethical claims. But the problem for the emotivist is that if it's just an expression, it seems tricky to get these logical corollaries of ethical expressions. But the strategy I really like and a strategy that I sent me down a path of all kinds of thinking when I first read it and asked this particular strategy you just referred to in response to the Frage-Igeach problem, let's take that conditional statement, which I just asked you about. And we want to say that conditional is true without expressing either of those individual condos. And you said, well, okay, what you're expressing there is a disapproval of holding one of those beliefs without the other. And there's this wonderful language you can construct around there. So if we adopt the Boo-yee language of Aya, murder is wrong means, Boo-murder. And murdering Simon is wrong means Boo-murdering Simon. So how can we make sense of if Boo-Simon then, if Boo-murder then Boo-murdering Simon? Because that's not just true. You don't necessarily hold of those both. I suppose, let's just say for simplicity's sake that the opposite of Boo is hooray. So hooray would cover just tolerating something, I mean you'll actively approve of it, but you don't disapprove of it. Well, Boo-to-Boo-Simon without Boo-to-Boo-murder without Boo-murder Simon. You could put that in a parenthesis and bracket. Boo-murder without Boo-murdering Simon. That seems really weird. I can't get on all fours with somebody who says that it seems as if we're illogical, the strictest sense. Okay, so Boo-to-that. Boo-to-that whole thing. So we end up with something like Boo-yeah. Brackets. Boo-murder at the same time as Yay-murdering Simon. Yeah, Boo-to-all of that at the same time. And that's what we mean when we say if murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong. Because what we're saying is Boo-to-Boo-murder and yet Yay-murdering Simon. Yes, exactly. So you have to do it in this anorably negative way. Yes, and that itself gives us some motive for going out to the form we're all familiar with in a decadent form. So let's take a look at this syllogism that we've got, which is if murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong. Murdering Simon is wrong. Conclusion, therefore murdering Simon is wrong. So the motorist says something like premise one. Boo-murdering Simon. Boo-to-words. Brackets. So we're booing. Brackets. Boo-murder and Yay-murdering Simon. Premise two is Boo-murder. And because we've previously expressed Boo-to-words, Boo-murdering Simon and. Not Boo-to-words, Boo-murder and Harab, murdering Simon. Yeah. If we do express Boo-murder, then we've kind of committed ourselves to Boo-murdering Simon. That's right. That's what the conclusion is. It's like this emotional corollary of expressing your discontent with these two simultaneous things. And saying one of those things and therefore having to say the second thing. Yeah, I developed a logic like that in a long, long time ago. This was in spreading the words. That's right. Yeah. And it's got its wrinkles. I mean, I still think it was very important to do it. Because it showed that we're not as well founding things on sand. It showed that we need our attitudes to have the kind of structure and the kind of integrity as a whole. That we also want through our beliefs. And that was, I thought, an important step in answering now a geech, very a geech. It attracted a lot of discussion, some of it rather silly, some of it not. The most acute critic was probably a man called Bob Hale, who worked at St Andrews. And he was a logician. And he had some quite interesting things about the recursions involved, about the increases in complexity. I think now I've sort of lost interest in the actual complexities of the 1984, it was 1984 construction. I haven't defended those recent years. Because I think the nerve of my current answer to geech is that it's precisely because we want the inferential simplicity of that we're used to in syllogistic reasoning. And that we transfer to the indicative form. Can I ask you then? And I know as you say, this is a language that was concocted a while ago. And it might not, that's represent how you think about things now. But the thought that this caused to arise in me, let's say, is that I thought, well, this is a really interesting way to emotive eyes, if then statements. Because I've got this problem that I think morals are emotive. But what about if it's a conditional, oh, well, I can just emotive eyes, the conditional, there we go, problem solved. Now I suddenly thought, well, couldn't we also then, in principle, emotive eyes all conditionals? So outside of just the moral, like boomerder and ye murder, let's take a non-moral claim. If it's raining outside, then I'll get wet. Could I not also sort of say that what I'm doing now, if a deflationary theory of truth is correct and by saying something is true, I'm just sort of expressing it, in some sense what I'm saying is 'boo' brackets, 'yay it will rain' at the same time as 'boo' I will get wet. And so I've sort of emotive eyes, non-moral syllogisms as well. Well, I wouldn't use the term emotive eyes at the time. The same kind of theory was given for conditionals. In fact, it's implicit in 'hum' if we go back to 'humour causation'. It's going to give the same sort of story about if the billiable A hits billiable B, billiable B must go. He's going to give the same story about the if they're, if you're daft a few, think that billiable A hits billiable B without also expecting billiable B to go. But Ryle wrote a famous paper if so because back in about 1950 and he said that by issuing an implication, your issuing an inference ticket, that is your permitting or lying or maybe insisting. I mean, somebody who gives you a ticket doesn't usually insist that you go to the concert but it may be that if you issue the inference ticket, you're entitled to go from A to B, if A, then B. It's also an injunction that you've got to go from A to B, or a fault if you don't. So he talked about inference tickets, the licensing of inference tickets. Well, of course licensing something is like expressing an attitude. It's not in itself saying something. But it becomes saying something if saying something is the way to issue the license, which was exactly how Ryle thought of it. It's interesting because for me, I've hinted at this a few times and careful listens to the show might have picked up on it. I'm really interested in the extent to which the way the emotivist looks at ethics and says, I know you think you're being all propositional and truth, claims and correspondence, but actually you're just expressing emotions. So we wonder the extent to which we can apply that same thinking outside of ethics. So we've just done something like that to conditionals. But like the emotivist wants to say that just even the statement murder is wrong is some kind of expression or attitude. And I'm interested to the extent that we might be able to apply that to statements like the table is brown or you are wearing a jacket. I don't know if that's something that I don't know how much that has been explored in this context before and where you know I get to begin to look to find interesting thinking on that. I think you could find it probably it's most richest I mentioned Ryle. Ryle and unfortunately I think worked in the 1950s in Oxford. And of course ordinary language was the sort of bill Nendor under J. L. Austin. But Ryle had some roots in the pragmatist tradition. That is the Americans person. James, perhaps to some extent, Dewey. And the pragmatists rather like I mentioned the Scottish sentimentalists having told you about the the tripartite story what the properties are in ordinary natural terms. What they do the exciter and admiration in us what we express the admiration just as they have that three part story and then stopped. So the pragmatists were very keen that you didn't look at abstractions didn't look at things like truth or logic. Perse has a wonderful saying we must not start with pure ideas. Fagabond thoughts which trump the public highways with no human habitation but with men and their conversation. So what you have to do is look at what people are up to or doing yeah. To that extent this is a link with the ordinary language movement of Oxford. You don't you don't immediately go for the big abstract terms. So as I put it in one of my books when Pontius Pilots says what is truth. The right answer for deflation is especially is to say you tell me what you're interested in. If you're interested in whether this guy is guilty and the truth consists in him being guilty. If you're interested in showing that you know, Brabhas is right about everything then the truth is Brabhas been right about everything. But you can't say general what truth is because I didn't know what you're interested in. Yeah, it's like what is well, I guess you could say truth is well, no, it's not in right to say that truth is affirmation. No, it's going to firm false of his. I agree that the important thing to do is to look at what people are actually doing. And I'll run this by you just to round things up here because I wanted to see what you think of this because it's kind of fun to think about but some people think I'm losing my mind when I start going down this this trade of thought like let's take the most non-imotive statement we could think of like you know the table exists right. And then I ask myself okay what am I doing when I say when I affirm the table exists well well why do I think the table exists because I can see it okay why do I believe that because I can see it it's there well because I believe that my sense data is accurate. Okay, why do I believe that my sense data is accurate because if I didn't I'd be in some kind of you know Cartesian skeptical hell right. Okay, why not just do that and I have to say something like I just. I just just boo you know and so if what I'm kind of expressing at least to some degree by saying the table exists. Is my discontent with the negation of this fundamental premise you sense data accurate if I say it's it's false that my sense data is accurate and I'm sort of like no no boo like I sort of fix and when I say that my sense data is accurate the motivation for saying that what I'm doing is I'm reacting badly to the opposite. If that's like an expression like a boo to that and then when I express that the table exists if that's what I'm fundamentally expressing then is it not in some sense is not sensible to say that when I say the table exists I'm to some degree expressing an emotion. Well, I think you're expressing confidence in your own living of your own senses but of course we're often not aware of the interconnectedness and therefore the complexity of what we're expressing. I mean, I thought you're going to sort of get not so much on to you know a general anti-cartesian view of your own sense experience that can't be just the there's a matrix reality. But to point out that to say that the table exists is to have a huge variety of commitments. Yes. If you try and occupy that space you'll fail. Yeah. If you try to do all sorts of things you'd meet resistance from the table. If you put your glass down it'll be held up. If if if if then. And so you know insofar as conditionals have an expressive side to them. Yeah. The inference tickets you found in yourself a great sheath of inference tickets and just by saying the table exists. You're committed in its ex your expectations spread across you know far more than you might have thought yes. And that I think is fine it remains us of the user word I've used quite often the interconnectedness of things that is that you know philosophy likes to split up into you know there's a picture zone epistemology in the lecture zone physics and then the lectures on a fix and so on. And it may be that's not a fact of the curriculum yeah nothing to do with the way things come together in our minds that certainly seems seems plausible to me. But when I say to people like there is some degree to which I think when I say the table exists what as I say what I'm doing. Is expressing an attitude indirectly so I'm expressing an attitude towards my sense data and it might not be a sense data is just wherever it happens to bottom up you would be able to suppose somehow I broke down my belief that the table existed and I kept breaking it down and why and why and I got down to the laws of logic themselves I said well. Because something can't be true and false at the same time and then you said why not I would then still have to say. It just has to be that way says okay well just consider for a moment that he is true and false at the same time what does your brain do it kind of goes no. Can I go boot I'm not I just and it doesn't reason it is almost pre rational it doesn't justify it just. It feels it yes you can't play the game if you exactly see the truth and fault that if that foundational thing that you are a see what people call it an intuition it's just intuitively or maybe self evidently true. Again as I mentioned before I think another good word for that might just be like really strong feeling. Well it's possible to expand feeling yeah to all the dispositions of our minds I think that yeah yeah I suppose that's what I'm interested in in the legitimacy not even so much of doing that but of conceiving of it in that way of. And why do you need our scope of of of emotive yes understanding to well I think it's I think it's a it's a good line to follow because it gets us away from what will for sellers called the myth of the given. I mean sellers thought that one of the great mistakes of modern philosophy mistake which I'm. Was basically the split between the analytical movement Russell and more. And the preceding Oxford idealist or hegel or can't. And was that they thought in an atomistic terms they thought that you know the table being there is a date on it's an item. Of experience which is given it's a given to you then what was given might only be sense data but it might be the table if you're more. Less or less of an indirect realist and you know sell our thought and and of course the idealist thought that this was a mistake wonderful metaphor Russell mentions is that Bradley and this is the Oxford idealist the 19th century thought that the world was a pot of treacle. Whereas more and he think that it's a heap of shot he put shot has these sort of atomistic individual shot is there's nothing nothing much to relate them. I just they if you pour them out they're just a heap as pot of treacle you can't separate anything out yeah and the idea that. I mean the idea of so called holism came back into philosophy in the middle of the 20th century after to be the exiled by the original analytical philosophers. And with holism comes the kind of view that you've been sympathetic to that you know you can't just have one in front you're going to a piece of data. It's going to be a cornucopia of many in front is a many quite a ripples throughout your whole web of belief. Okay then one more thing then to round out which is just one more strategy a bit of a novel one let's say. To emotivise propositions or things which are generally not thought to be emotional like like simple propositions like the table exists or whatever his one strategy we might say okay. Let's suppose that we're like materialists let's suppose that all that exists is matter there's no God there's no ultimate mind right what is a proposition well proposition is a declarative statement you know it says that something is the case something like that okay. So where and in what way and when do propositions exist well for the materialist propositions only exist when they're being thought or when they're being spoken otherwise. So propositions don't exist the things they refer to like chairs might exist but the proposition the chair is read only exists when someone's thinking it or speaking. Can I just interrupt please it seems to me that your trespassing against purses dictum proposition is an abstraction. Asking what it is is already trespassing against the dictum we must not start with pure ideas yeah bag a modern thoughts that trump the public highways with no human habitation but with men in their conversations now in how do we use the idea of a proposition in the conversation. Well we talk about what you said what you think okay those are propositions okay and they're used to locate items of information or misinformation that we want to tell each other about. That is they they have their home in the conversations of people and I think it's a mistake to ask what they are as it were it's it's it's obviously it's like asking you know whether the tree falling alone in the forest makes a sound. I think they are whether or not anybody's talking they are what they will be saying if they were talking yeah but okay so is it fair to say then. The that if a proposition exists when it's being spoken or when it's being thought given that speaking and thinking of both things people do the actions. I mean I could sort of say that a proposition is an action no I don't think so is that the thought or thing that's spoken. Actions make it salient to talk about them. Interesting you don't want to talk about them if there's no action yeah because of course the. The rounding up of that argument might be that well if propositions are in some sense actions or things people do actions or things that people do don't have truth value and therefore propositions wouldn't have. Truth value which seems a little bit strange so I wanted to I guess probe how you understand what a proposition is but I guess just like with the ethical question from earlier feel like that's. Trust passing somewhere that philosophers do not tread well I think we've learned the wisdom of not treading there. I see that's that's an interesting way of thinking about that problem to whatever the case. It's. It's something that I as I said earlier I think has a surprising connection to what listeners of this show might have heard recently in some of my discussions with physicists about the nature of what science does in other words I think if anybody's a little bit dissatisfied. With the ethicist sort of saying well we just don't do that we just don't talk about that we don't go there. He said well why not we could ask the same thing that the scientist who doesn't go there when it comes to you know the metaphysics of what stuff is actually made of. Yes well there is a wisdom in pairing down the number of things that there are to trouble ones pretty head about I think that that's that's also true. There's trouble ones self about in the world as we have it not not only in the in the flights of metaphysics yeah I think it's another great example of of why so many people could ridicule philosophy because you could sit here for hours and discuss what proposition is and then go out and not change anything about the way that you actually use them in practice. Yes that's right but one proposition that I think I think for us was need to shake off that unreal kind of image yeah by not not dealing with questions which we don't have to deal with. Yeah well an interesting message and and injunction and I'm genuinely interested to see what people will make it's I'm a blackburn thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for giving me the time.