Within Reason - #114 Simon Blackburn - What is Ethical Emotivism?

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Simon Blackburn is well-known both as a writer of popular philosophy introductions (like Think), and also a significant figure in non-cognitivist meta-ethics, having invented the term “quasi-realism” to describe his moral philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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-cognitivism in ethics, which is not the same thing. So could you tell us what cognitiveism and non-cognitivism 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 there are real truths out there. It's also we know which they are. That's cognitiveism. And non-cognitivists 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. Cognitivism then is not readily distinguishable from a generalized anti-realism. Or non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism, I'm sorry, yes. Non-cognitivism is not readily distinguishable from a generalized anti-realism

and cognitiveism not readily distinguished 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 in that if somebody thinks that ethics is cognitive, it means that it's the kind of thing that can be true or false. Yes. And the non-cognitivist thinks 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, um, that subject, that kind of subjectivism is not a very popular option for the reasons we could certainly come to. Um, so it's not, I don't think, I don't think the terminology has been tailored to take account of that. Um, there, there, you are right there, that cognitiveism is always associated with the presence of a truth value. Yeah. Uh, 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 a camouflage, a piece of camouflage, saying, well, 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 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 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-cognitivism 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, a diminishing tribe. There are people who call themselves anti-realists, and they're probably a 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 as 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 permit 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 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, it'd have to be this sort of weird element to our reality, that there is this property 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, like 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 Moore, G. Moore's college in Cambridge. And Moore was still a very important figure to people in Cambridge, including especially my own supervisor. So,

so I do feel very nervous about saying what I'm about to say. But I think the rot started with Moore. Really? In his 1903 book, Prince Hippia Ethica, Moore decided that, um, decided that, um, there was a property, well, he talked about goodness more than rightness, but for our purposes we can take them what was equal to the other. There was such a property. It belonged to some things, and it was a non-natural property. That is, it wasn't like the properties of things which fall within sense experience. So it required a special mode of knowing. And then you're off to the races because where are, well, 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,

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, but most of those people, certainly the ones I've mentioned, didn't trouble 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 Schaftesbury, 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, Human 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 into thinking there was another question, the question of the nature of the moral property. called like moral ontology. Exactly.

It's interesting. You know, 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. So there's this great debate as to whether science really explains anything about the nature of the world or whether it just tells us what stuff does. Yes. So famously Newton describes gravity, discovers all of its laws, but has no idea what gravity he actually is.

And I suppose there's an extent to which I'm thinking now that that could be mirrored in ethics. You know, 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, qualities of mind useful or agreeable to yourself or others. or actually there's an and there

qualities of mind useful and agreeable to yourself and others so that's the properties we're talking about what do they do will 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 saying what the qualities are that excite us That's really interesting because when I've spoken to physicists about this in the scientific context, I sort of am a bit dismayed. I'm like, but you know, you're not telling me what this, what an atom or a subatomic particle actually is. You're just telling me what it does. It's negatively charged, whatever. And they sort of look at me and say, but that's it. That's it. That's what explanation is in science. And maybe the same thing's true in ethics. Well, I think it's true, yes. I think he was absolutely right to stop where he did. That is, 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. 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 of it. As you're finding talking to your physicists, they're not ready to give an answer. Yeah.

Of course, there have been people, I think Emmanuel Kant was one, who thought that that's shows that we're confined to 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 physicists' functionalism are voicing is basically sympathy with Kant, that there is an extra potential object of knowledge, the things in themselves. Yes.

Now, you get exactly the same when Hume talks about causation. That was arguably another 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 irremovable. It's not something we've got control over. And so we express that by saying the second must happen.

We use the modal language. It must happen if the first happened. 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 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, you know, 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 right uh as i say if they go down the the rabbit hole that more opened up they'll just find themselves in darkness um there is no nobody's ever said anything intelligent about it in what how we intuit non-natural properties yeah well i i kind of think that another good word for intuition might be feeling Ah, well, now you're on Hume's side.

Yeah. Because if it's the question of how we feel about things, Hume's your man. Yeah. Or Adam Smith, who's actually a wonderful psychologist. Yeah. 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 go under the title of quasi-realism, which I now regret, but I'm responsible 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 hot. 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, 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 endeavor was. to show that expressiveists 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. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too.

Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. I exams provided by independent optometry. Well, this quasi-realism, which you're famous for, I'm interested in why you regret the term 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 probably doesn't have truth value. It might be something like an emotion or a command or a plan, but that in saying so, they're 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.

Okay. Because it does have a connotation of, as it were, of illusion or something. thing, 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 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... From that. The way I thought of it was that the realists, or people in the realist camp felt that they could say things which the anti-realists couldn't. Right. So they could talk of truth and fact and reality and so. I want to say, well, wait a second,

what does that talk add to just saying that the Nazis were dreadful? And I was abetted in this by a book that came out in 1990 by man called Paul Horwich, a very good philosopher in Cambridge, just on truth. And Paul championed the deflationist view, 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 are bad in one of my works I call that Ramsey's Ladder after Frank Ramsey

and my use of the metaphor was to say that the Ramsey's ladder is lying on the ground. It's horizontal. It doesn't carry you any higher or anywhere different. That's brilliant. Talking about this regression of it's 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 to say something is true? Well, it means that what I'm saying

somehow accords with reality, the so-called correspondence theory of truth, right? 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 as to 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 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 just to express that as a view, to say that the chair is red is. 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 gets held of. Yeah. I think the thing to say about correspondence 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 we invent for a true sentence to correspond to or true proposition. The mistake is to think of the facts as something separate and apart from the beliefs that we hold and the beliefs that we clean. to in 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, they're 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. Yeah. 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 makes sense for the deflationist, but if you really can separate, if you really can separate this idea of the statement of the fact, there are eggs in the, in the, in the,

the fridge to the truth of it, then I should be able to say something like, you know, 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. Which 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 at 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 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 I can say it's true that it's true that the chair is read and that can go on forever 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 they would probably stop me and say, you're not adding anything

every time you say that it's true. That's the idea behind the metaphor, the ladders line horizontal, it's not going any higher. The first philosopher to use that argument you've just used, which is very powerful argument, was Frege. Yes, yeah. And an argument that's good enough for Frager and Ramsey and Wittgenstein and Stawson is, and Quine, 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 omniscient, 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, which almost seems a bit redundant, like most of God's cognition is 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.

And 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 say the chair is red. And one of the reasons this is so popular amongst non-cognitivist 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 expressivist ethics. You've got it exactly. You've got it exactly. That's right. And from about 1990 onwards, I mentioned Paul Horwich wrote then, that's become gradually much more accepted, which is why I think the old labels of cognitiveists, non-cognitivists and so on are less popular today than they used to be. Those battle lines are 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, right? 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, how, 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, it's got 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 a hot under the collar. But I suppose I have the attitude that it was a pity that Cromwell won the Civil War. I regret that. I think it's such a shame. That does 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 a motive to do anything. It would give me a motive to descend from somebody who thought the Promwell 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. And so that's why I don't, entirely recommend the term emotivist. Yeah.

But of course, there's no term attitudinalist, which is a pity. Well, perhaps we can start a trend. If I should love to. Let's get that going. I don't know that because, you know, 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 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 as 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, 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 it up, knowing the text, knowing the episodes, what Jane Austen told us what she didn't tell us and so on. And they'd do it far better than I can do it off the top of my head. But it's not going to be something, I mean, in any profession, as it were, if they're professionally arguing it, they can probably get hot under the collar.

But in itself, it's not being hot under the collar about Emma's behavior. It's been hot under the collar about what's said about Emma's behavior. Yeah. And that's a different object of criticism. I think there are, you know, there are, obviously, history and fiction are 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, then you'd feel the horror. But nevertheless, it's the case where you walk into Auschwitz, which gives you your

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 revulsion or a sense of shame or sense of horror, any of the things which you'd expect. And I think insofar as they're, they're absolutely cold, then they may be mimicking moral disapproval, perhaps to show that they're part of the gang or something. But they're mimicking it.

We said that it's difficult to define what, like, wrongness is. We just talk about, like, what it does. When somebody looks at Auschwitz and they say, that's wrong. And I'm not talking about someone who's steeped in ethical literature here. No, no, no. 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 like there is this thing about something like Auschwitz that, that is wrong and that's, 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. Like, I'm saying something, I'm saying something true about this thing called wrongness. Like, at the very least, if we can't define wrong or bad in terms of what it is, can 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,

or just expressing an attitude, or you're merely expressing an attitude. And I think that has to be resisted. I mean, attitudes are extremely important. It's far more important to me if your attitude towards me is that I ought to be shot than it is if your attitude towards me is the belief that, you know,

I was at university in Oxford, which I wasn't. I was 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, you know, potentially very dangerous attitude. Some people would say that they're different kinds of statements, like that the idea that, you know, you studied at Oxford is not an attitude. No, that's a belief.

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, you know, 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, you know, what will sound to them is like it's just an expression. I think that the contrast between attitude and belief

is not straightforward. Me too. So I think that we're apt 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 is this takes us on to the notorious Fregegech problem yes thank goodness that

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 a favorite example of mine, Cato allegedly said that Carthage was to be destroyed, Carthage de lendomest. And Latin has the Gerundit there. Now, he could just have said let's go and destroy Carthage.

That would have been an experiment 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 Cato 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, or 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, if Carthage is to be destroyed, then is, tar and our tar and sidon to be destroyed with it. Yeah. Or if Carthage is to be destroyed, we'll need a bigger navy than we've got at present.

Interesting. That's a great example, yeah. So the advantage of giving the attitude, or the injunction in this case, the plan, an indicative 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 Boo, hooray. You can't enter into these inferences, or it's on the other side, it's proposition, and then it can. But never the twain shall meet.

And that's emotivism's problem. Yes. And a lot of ink's been spilt about this. this is impressed philosophers and worried them. I tend to run out of nowadays to reverse it, to say no, the exact reason that we have these interchanging forms is that when we use indicative form, we know about making inferences,

and we need to make inferences. The commander of the army needs to say things like if Carthage is to be destroyed, then we're going to need a lot more ships. If Carthage 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. that 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 the inference is important. If you just go around saying boo to Garthage,

you haven't yet, as it were, given the commander-in-chief, is marching orders. Yes, yeah, you've just expressed. You've just expressed a feeling or an avenue. Yes, exactly. so it may be right to say that in ethics or in some of the forms in which ethics takes we go beyond just expressing feeling and attitude you see i use the word just there

just expressing feeling attitude i think we and this was first pointed out by a man called charles stevenson in the 1940s in the book ethics and language we offer um 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 wanted 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've you share it um but having um thought of it as shared we then can also switch to the gerundiv and think of it as something to be done so there's something to be done

carthage is to be destroyed let's build the army if it's build the navy yeah you can't make inferences from expressions of emotion like lot of logically speaking. No. You can't say, if boo Carthage, then open a window. No, that's right. That just isn't, it's like saying if three, then go and open a window. It just doesn't make sense. It's grammatically not sensible. And so, as far as I understand it, the so-called Fregegegege problem, named after Fregea and Geach, also known as the embedding problem. Yes, indeed. Is a problem for, I'll use the term emotivism, because with the caveat that we've said it might describe attitudes, emotivism. 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. No. Like murder is wrong doesn't mean I don't like murder. It's not made true by your like or 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 A.A. famously had it, something like boo murder, right? Or murder and then an angry emoji next to it, right? With a bunch of exclamation marks. Okay. That's what is wrong adds. 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 murder is wrong can't mean I'm expressing boo murder because I'm saying,

well, I wonder if murder is wrong. But I can't say, I wonder if boo murder, if in order to say boo murder, 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, you know, if then statements or, you know, 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 our listeners is an argument that takes, that has two premises and a conclusion. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. For example. Now, here's one syllogism. If murder is wrong,

then murdering Simon is wrong Premise 2 murder is wrong conclusion therefore murdering Simon is wrong that seems valid and everybody would look at that and go that 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 2 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, it helps 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 emotivists, the emotivists says that 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-apt sentences? Well that's a beautiful exposition of exactly Geich'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 to lie for you is wrong. It's exactly the same problem. Yes. Well, it's, it means there's got to be a complication. Now, the complication that I think does the job is the transition to the indicative form. Because that we've already established, I think, as we talked about inflationism, that truth isn't going to be the problem. It's just if you've, if you've, got the indicative form, you've got the possibility of inference. And my counter-geech

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 was if you approve or you approve or you. You're of giving money to the homeless, then you approve of giving money to female homeless. You need to be, as it were, able to be taken to account for your attitudes. If your attitudes are all in pieces, say you think that lying is wrong. If lying is wrong, then letting your little brother, getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong. So, and then you don't say, no, no, but getting your little brother to lie for you isn't wrong.

Well, you may be about to do a modus toe lens saying since not the conclusion, not the premises, not one of the premises. But otherwise, you're a contrary, 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 value? 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. 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 that's just an expression of the same thing, but what is the thing that I'm expressing in a conditional? Because I'm not, 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's wrong, then murdering Simon's wrong, but I think murder's fine. So what am I expressing when I say that the conditional claim is true? Well, there are various ways of putting it. I mean, one thing, this is going to sound more complicated than it is, would be you're expressing disapproval of holding the one attitude without holding the other.

Right. So you're actually amongst your objects of concern is the lattice of implications in your approvals and disapprovals. Because approvals and disapprovals don't stand by themselves. We feel the need to defend them, feel the need to say what they involved. Supposing, you know, if Keos Stama says, I approve of industry or something,

you know, you might say, approve of all industry? If you approve industry, do you approve of unpaid housework, you know, and so on? We want to know what the implications of his approval are. Similarly for ourselves, we may not have realized that our attitudes carry an implication, which we may not be all that happy with. Yeah. And teasing that out is part of the stuff and substance of ethical debate. Yeah. I mean, take, for example, the, you know,

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 that 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 the 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? It would be very nice for people who get richer, but it may be very nasty for everyone else. and the main term become 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, poor just stop oil. Have you any idea about the number of things oil is used in? You know, 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 wear your fleece? Do you any more be able to wear your trainers? The answer to all those questions is no. But seeing that implication is something which I think you've got a duty to do.

Yeah, 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 uh corollaries of ethical expressions but the strategy i really like and and a strategy that i that that sent me down a path of all kinds of thinking when i first read it was was this particular strategy you just referred to in response to the fray gig each problem let's take that conditional statement which i just asked you about if murder is wrong then murdering simon is wrong and we want to say that conditional is true without expressing either of those individual components. 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 sort of language you can construct around there. So if we adopt the boo-ye 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 that's not just like true you don't necessarily hold with those both well suppose i mean it's 10 let's just say for simplicity's sake that the opposite of boo is hooray yeah so hooray would cover just tolerating something doesn't mean you actively approve of it but you don't disapprove okay um well um boo

to boo to boo Simon without boo to boo murder without boo murder Simon you could put that in a in a

parenthesis at a bracket booing murder without booing murdering murdering Simon that seems really weird I can't get on all fours

with somebody who says that it seems as it were illogical, the strictest sense. Okay, so boo to that. Boo to that whole thing. So we end up with something like, boo, yeah, brackets,

yes. 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. And you have to do it in this annoyingly negative way. Yes, and that itself gives us a motive for going o to the form we're all familiar with, the indicative 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 emotivist says something like, premise one, boo towards, brackets. So we're booing, brackets, boo murder and yay murdering Simon.

Premise 2 is, well, boo murder. And because we've previously expressed boo towards boo murdering Simon and... Not. Towards boo murder and hurrah, murdering Simon. If we do express boo murder, then we've kind of committed ourselves to boo murdering Simon. That's right. And that's what the conclusion is. It's like this emotional corollary.

Yes. 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 word. 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 it were, founding things on sand showed that we need our attitudes to have

the kind of structure and the kind of integrity as a whole that we also want from our beliefs and that was I thought an important step in answering

Geach Craiga Geach 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 and

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 in recent years because I think the nerve of my current answer to Geach is that it's precisely because we're want the influential simplicity that we're used to in syllogistic reasoning, that we transfer to the indicative form. Can I ask you then? I know, as you say, this is a language that was concocted a while ago, and it might not best 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 real really interesting way to emotivize if-then statements, right? 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 the conditional. There we go, problem solved. Now I suddenly thought, well, couldn't we also then, in principle, emotivize all conditionals? So outside of just the moral, like boo murder and Yeah, murder. Let's take a non-moral claim. Like, if it's raining outside, then I'll get wet. Could I not also sort of say that what I'm doing there, 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 emotivised non-moral syllogisms as well. Well, I wouldn't use the term emotivized, but the same kind of theory was given for conditionals. In fact, it's implicit in Hume. If we go back to Hume on causation, he's going to give the same sort of story about if the billiard ball A hits billiaball B, bilia ball B must go. He's going to give the same story about the if they're daft if you think that Billy a hits Billie ball B without also expecting Ballya ball B to go.

But Gilbert Ryle wrote a famous paper, if so because, back in about 1950. And he said that by issuing an implication, you're issuing an inference ticket that is your permitting or allowing 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 as it were an injunction that you've got to go from A to B, that you're at 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. Yeah. But it becomes saying something if saying something is the way to issue the license. Yeah. Which was exactly how Raoul thought of it. Interesting. Because for me, I've hinted it.

this a few times and careful listeners 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. I 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.

And 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 could begin to look to find interesting thinking on that. I think you could find it probably at its most richest. I mentioned Ryle. Rial, unfortunately, I think, worked in the 1950s in Oxford, and of course ordinary language was the sort of Beal Nendor under J.L. Austen. But Rial had some roots in the pragmatist tradition, that is the Americans purse and James and perhaps to some extent, Dewey.

And the pragmatists, rather like I mentioned, the Scottish sentimentalists, having told you about the tripartite story, what the properties are in ordinary natural terms, what they do, they excite an admiration in us, what we express, the admiration. Just as they had 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. Perth has a wonderful saying, we must not start with pure ideas. Vagabond thoughts which tramp the public highways with no human. 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 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 deflationists especially, is to say, you tell me what you're interested in. If you're interested in whether this guy's guilty, then the truth consists in him being guilty. If you're interested in showing that, you know, Barabbas is right about everything, then the truth is Barabbas being right about everything. But you can't say in general what truth is, because I don't know. you're interested in yeah um it's like what is well you i guess you could say truth is well no it's not even right to say that truth is affirmation no but it's going to affirm false

at least i i agree that the important thing to do is to look at what people are actually doing right and i'll i'll run this by you just to to round things up here because i 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 train of thought, like let's take the most non-emotive statement we could think of, like, you know, the table exists, right? And then I asked myself, okay, what am I doing when I say, when I affirm, the table exists?

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-hop, right? Okay, why not just do that?

And I have to say something like, I just, I 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 know, sense data accurate. if I say it's false that my sensitor is accurate, and I'm sort of like, no, no, boo. Like I sort of, and when I say that my sensator 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, then when I express that the table exists, if that's what I'm fundamentally expressing, then is it not in some sense, is it not sensible to say? 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, the deliverance 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 were 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 would meet resistance from the table if you put your glass down it'll be held up if if if then and so insofar as conditionals have

an expressive side to them their inference tickets you've handed yourself a great sheaf of inference tickets and just by saying the table exists you're committed

and your expectations spread across you know far more than you might have thought and that I think is fine it reminds us of the to use a 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 lectures on epistemology and then there lectures on metaphysics and then their lectures on ethics and so on. And maybe that's an artifact of the curriculum. Yeah. Nothing to do with the way things come together in our minds. That certainly 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, because I'm expressing an attitude towards my sense data. And it might not be a sense data. It's just wherever it happens to bottom out of you, whatever you're doing. So suppose that 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. It says, okay, well, just consider for a moment that P is true and false at the same time.

What does your brain do? It kind of goes, no, kind of goes, boot. And it doesn't reason it, it's almost pre-rational. It doesn't justify it, it just feels it. Yes, you can't play the game if you can't see the truth and false. But if that foundational thing that you are, 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 to all the dispositions of our minds. Yeah, yeah. I suppose that's what I'm interested in. And the legitimacy, not even so much of doing that, but of conceiving of it in that way, of widening our scope of, of emotive understanding to. Well, I think it's a good line to follow it because it gets us away from what Wilfred Sellers called the myth of the given. I mean, Sellars thought that one of the great mistakes of modern philosophy,

mistake which was basically the split between the analytical movement, Russell and Moore, and the preceding Oxford idealists or Hegel or Kant, was that they thought in atomistic terms, they thought that, you know, the table being there is a datum, 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, you know, less of an indirect realist. And, you know, Sellar's thought and, of course, the idealist thought,

that this was a mistake. A wonderful metaphor, Russell mentions, is that Bradley, and this is the Oxford idealist of the 19th century, thought that the world was a pot of treacle, whereas Maureen he think that it's a heap of shot. A heap of shot has these sort of atomistic individual shot. There's nothing much to relate. them. If you pour them out, they're just a heap.

Whereas 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 it had been exiled by the original analytical philosophers. And with holism comes the, the kind of view that you've been sympathetic to that, um, you know, you can't just have one inference. You're going to, a piece of datum is going to be a cornucopia of many inferences and many 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 emotivize propositions or things which are generally not thought to be emotional, like simple propositions, like the table exists or whatever. Here's 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, a proposition is a declarative statement, you know? It says that something is the case, something like that. 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, 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 it. Can I just interrupt? Please. It seems to me that you're trespassing against purse's dictum, but proposition is an abstraction. Yeah. Asking what it is, is already trespassing against the dictum.

We must not start with pure ideas. Yeah. Vagabond thoughts that trample the public highways with no human habitation, but with men in their conversations. Now, how do we use the idea of a proposition in a 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 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 obviously it's like asking, you know, whether the tree falling alone in the forest, makes a sound, I think of, 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 that if a proposition exists when it's being spoken or when it's being thought, given that speaking and thinking are both things

that people do, their actions, does that mean I could sort of say that a proposition is an action? No, I don't think so. Because it's a thing that's thought or a thing that's spoken? Actions make it salient to talk about them. Hmm. Interesting. You don't want to talk about them if there's no action. Yeah. Because of course the rounding up of that argument might be that, well, if propositions are, in some sense, actions or things that people do, actions or things that people do don't have truth value and therefore propositions wouldn't have truth value. which seemed 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, I feel like that's trespassing somewhere that philosophers dare not tread. Well, I think we've learned the wisdom of not treading there. Ah, right. I see. Yeah, that's an interesting way of thinking about that problem too. Or whatever the case, 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. You say, well, why not? You could ask the same thing for the scientists 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 paring down.

roof, things that there are to trouble ones pretty ahead about. I think that's, that's also true. There's plenty enough to trouble oneself about in the world as we have it, not only in the flights of metaphysics. Yeah, I think it's another great example of why so many people could ridicule philosophy, because you could sit here four hours and discuss what a 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 can... I think philosophers need to shake off that unreal kind of image by not dealing with questions which we don't have to deal with. Yeah. Well, an interesting message and injunction, and I'm genuinely interested to see what people will make. Simon Blackburn, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for giving me the time.