I thought I had posted a reply to this... it mustn't have uploaded. Or I may have reneged just before clicking...

Now I believe astrology to have reasons for why it's false, and I think it differs from ethics so this is just to make the case against using arguments as a demonstration of truth. — Moliere

Astrology would be true if the words used were in line with the things in the world. So we would get true statements something like

"you will meet a tall dark stranger" is true IFF Jupiter is in Scorpio

Now it seems to me pretty clear that this is false.
(It might be tempting to think that the astrologer must say something like

"you will meet a tall dark stranger" is true IFF you will meet a tall dark stranger

but this doesn't do anything astrological; it makes no reference to the stars)

Antithetically, ethical truth does not set out how the world is, but how we are to act in the world. It's centrally about volition and action. SO it's not about how the world is, but what we might do in it.

So of course no fact about the world will demonstrate it's truth.

So we get a T-sentence such as

"one ought not kick puppies for fun" is true IFF one ought not kick puppies for fun

Now there are all sorts of ways to unpack this, or extend it...

"one ought not kick puppies for fun" is true IFF Kicking puppies for fun decreases the total happiness of the world

or

"one ought not kick puppies for fun" is true IFF one can will that puppies never get kicked for fun

or even

"one ought kick puppies for fun" is true IFF kicking puppies for fun increases my personal autonomy

And each of these the direction of fit is reversed by the antecedent.

So the astrology analogue doesn't work.

That's a bit of a ramble, but it's after a heavy lunch.

You believe, "One ought not kick puppies for fun." — Leontiskos

I think I agree, but with one caveat. It's not the believing that "one ought not kick puppies for fun" that renders it true.

And I think the Principle of Charity comes in to play here, as you hint, Leon. We agree more than we disagree. But especially in this area, it's the disagreement that gets the attention.

At least if we allow ethical statements to have truth values we can engage in a rational discussion. Reject ethical truth values and all there is, is violence.

I'll wrap up my involvement with that. — Judaka

Fine.While I couldn't see how your ideas could be understood in a coherent fashion, it was fun making up a couple of counterexamples.

the method, has no need for transcendence as much as situatedness. — Moliere

We can write from the point of view of those who see the rabbit, or those who see the duck. That's being "situated" because we are able to contrast the two . But we can also from the view of those who see the duck-rabbit. With what is this to be contrasted?

Or if you prefer, being "situated" is always post-hoc.

Thanks for attempting to clarify. I rather think the argument has left your syllogisms behind. I'm also not that bothered with whether you call it antirealism or not, so much as with showing that ethical statements can have a truth value. Which, despite the objections, I think I have done.

I'm happy for "Everyone likes coffee" to be false. It still has a truth value.

Are you saying that, if absolutely everyone really did agree about this, it would be a fact? — J

Well, yes. If everyone likes coffee, then it is a fact that everyone likes coffee.

Again, we cannot reason about ethics unless we acknowledge that ethical statements have truth values.

We are repeating an argument that occurred after the war in Oxford and Cambridge, notably between Ayer and his intellectual children, and the "four women", Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch. In the wake of the war, many philosophers could not accept the view that morals were no more than expressions of disquiet or preference. There was a renewed insistence on treating ethical themes rationally. This was part of the rejection of Positivism.

It's not so much a matter of faith as of grammar.

My view is that "moral truths" are meaningless and logically indistinguishable from opinion. — Judaka

This seems to me to be the nub of our differences. Opinions are not meaningless. If they are logically indistinguishable from moral truths (they are not...) then moral truths are not meaningless, either.

All I would show in this thread is that there are moral statements that have a truth value. The argument has two parts: there are statements that we think of as true or as false, that say how folk ought behave; and we make use of these statements in deductions.

My thesis here does not involve setting out a method for determining that truth or falsity.

That it is easier to reach agreement in physics than in ethics is not an argument for ethical statements not having a truth value.

By your understanding, valid and mutually exclusive facts co-exist since a statement can be true by one's preferences, interpretations and feelings. — Judaka

Certainly not. I don't think I've made any such claim. Cite me. Nor is that an implication of what has been said - if it is, show your argument.

Did you miss the "if"? — Judaka

No. Did you not see the Ngram?

Take a step back and look again. Your argument is that moral truths are intractable, therefore you will save yourself some trouble by simply asserting that they do not exist.

What I have done is to show that there are true moral statements, however uncomfortable that makes you. What we do after and about that remains open.

It remains that we can and do commonly assign truth values to normative statements. We also use these truth values to perform deductions. The oddity here is the denial of all this because of philosophical ideology.

...eccentric usage... — Judaka

They are all well-formed sentences of English. What's eccentric here, if anything, is the insistence that there can be no moral truths.

Why should the term "moral facts" exist if all moral opinions are moral facts? — Judaka

"Should"? The term exists and has a long standing place in English despite your misgivings.

...my wristband... — Leontiskos

Mine look more like this...

The point at issue is that one cannot simply present a theory as a justification for excluding facts. — Leontiskos

This needs to be said far too frequently, and surprisingly most often to those who advocate some form of empiricism...

defend P2-A*1 — Leontiskos

Yes, we need at least P2-A*1i and P2-A*1ii...

:grimace:

Moral anti-realism is the position that there are no true moral facts. — Bob Ross

So understood, moral anti-realism is the disjunction of three theses:

moral noncognitivism
moral error theory
moral non-objectivism — Stanford

and

Non-objectivism (as it will be called here) allows that moral facts exist but holds that they are non-objective. — loc cit

My bolding.

Again, "true fact" is redundant.

P2-A is derived from P2-A* — Bob Ross

P2-A* (fucksake!) is not an argument, it is an assertion. As has already been explained.

We all agree to the fact that coffee is delicious, and a great way to start the day. Despite the fact that cockroaches are disgusting and terrifying, some folk keep them as pets. While it is a fact that Germany is a wonderful country to visit, I would prefer to visit Turkey. The fact is I tried shopping at a market near me, but everything was overpriced. So now I travel looking for bargains. Thanks, .

Note that I do not accept the idea that 'truth' and 'fact' are exact synonyms. — Leontiskos

Nor do I, and that's not what I have been suggesting. I am pointing out that there is a truth functional equivalence between them. P is true IFF P is a fact.

That's fine, but there can be a big difference between the various ways that such truths are understood. — Michael

I agree. From the concurrent thread on deriving an ought form an is:

I do agree that there is a difference between what is the case and what ought be the case. I think that better captured by Anscombe's shopping list. The difference is that of direction of fit; when we say what is the case, we change our words to fit the way the world is. When we say what ought be the case, we are changing the way things are to match our words. — Banno

Direction of fit does a much better job of differentiating ought from is, than a simplistic, scientistic refusal to acknowledge that ought statements, and moral statements generally, have a truth value. It has the advantage of displaying the difference of intentionality.

Now the logical characteristic of antirealism is that one way or another it rejects divalent logic. That is, it claims that, one way or another, there are other truth values besides true and false. I am not here rejecting that possibility. There may be some benefit in using a non-standard logic in Ethics.

My gripe is with the first sentence of this thread:

I think that Hume’s Guillotine can be deployed to validly extinguish the existence of moral facticity, if ‘moral’ language signifies ‘what one ought to be doing’, since in any event of reasoning about ‘what one ought to do’ it is going to be grounded in non-facts. — Bob Ross

The phrase I have bolded is much stronger than antirealism. It claims that there are no moral facts. My simple argument shows this to be wrong.

That one ought not kick puppies for fun is a moral statement.
It is a true statement that one ought not kick puppies for fun.
Facts are true statements.

Therefore there are moral facts. — Banno

it's a commonplace that an evaluation (a 'normative' statement) must be assumed in any argument with a normative conclusion. A close look at Ross' argument shows that he assumes that normative statements are not factual at P1.

It surprises me that no one else¹ has pointed this out.

He doesn't prove his thesis; he assumes it, then allows it to ride into his conclusion on the back of normative statements.

He does this again, explicitly, in his updated version:

P2-A: All prescriptive statements (P) which dictate ‘what one ought to do’ (D) are non-factual (T). — Bob Ross

I'd say that it's error theory which demonstrates how ethical propositions can be truth-apt, but false. So they can take on logical forms but they cannot form sound inferences. — Moliere

Why pay this any heed, when it is clear that there are moral facts, and that we can and do use them to make inferences? Mackie's argument from queerness just confuses being objective and direction of fit. We all agree that one ought not kick puppies for fun, and so objectivity is irrelevant.

...we're not just asserting our convictions... — Moliere

But isn't "asserting our convictions" what we do in physics as well as morality? We engineer planes from what we believe to be true. Why shouldn't we do the same thing in Ethics?

¹ Appart form @Leontiskos

Ah - I see someone else did comment on the question begging.

Played swapsies. No point in being at the bottom when you can be at the top.

So Austin is not an ordinary language philosopher.

Thank you for that, Russell, since it shows so clearly that you are not paying attention, but making shite up.

:lol:


Can you provide an example of a truth that is not a fact?


Or perhaps a fact that is not true?

I’m no closer to following you.

What is it you are arguing for?


Edit. Or perhaps I might ask if and how you suppose the op argument works? Because it doesn’t seem to do anything. I’m not even sure it is well formed.

So you end up with two commensurate theories yet with incommensurate terms? How?

I've read that twice, and I can hear you thinking from here, but can you tell me were all this went? What have you decided? It seems to be something like that words can be translated between incommensurate paradigms, but that interpretations cannot be...?

Okay, but this would be an implication of the assertion of P2 — Leontiskos

P2 is "P2: T is a normative fact.". That is, "T is true adn T is normative". To be a fact is just to be true. And to be true is just to be a fact.

S1: Walking the dog is a normative fact.
vs.
H1: One ought to walk their dog.

IF S1 were "walking the dog is a normative sentence", then their truth value might differ. S1 would not then be a normative truth. "Walking the dog is a normative sentence" does not imply "One ought to walk their dog"

But saying it is a fact is saying that it is true. Hence "Walking the dog is a normative fact" implies "Walking the dog is a normative truth" and implies "One ought to walk their dog".

I'm repeating myself, but I don't see how what you have set out addresses what I have set out.

...ism, ism, ism.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

But no one listens to Lennon any more.

I don't really care what label folk put on the titular view. My concern is simply that folk accept that there are moral truths. I don't see that the syllogisms in the OP amount to very much of anything, actually.

Sirius is arguing against moral realism as described above, not against moral cognitivism in general. — Michael

I don't think I addressed @Sirius...?

So, is your claim that all true statements are facts? — Judaka

Yep.

If it is a true statement its truth does not share a sense with other uses of "truth". "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is false, in sense of the natural world. It fits the form of a proposition, but it doesn't rely upon any feature of the natural world for its truth. Rather we are using the word "true" in the place of the moral words "good" or "bad", which have no natural instantiations. — Moliere

This is the sort of post that requires either five thousand words or something brusque and undiplomatic. I don't have time for five thousand words.

There are quite substantive problems with this approach.

The most obvious is that there simply is not a common use of "true" that exclusively applies to the natural world, nothing in the OED or Macquarie that comes even close.

And the reason for that is that it's a philosopher's conceit, a herniated remnant of logical positivism.

Nor does the idea have any credibility. "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is true; the remainder of your post shows that you agree that it is true. You sensibly wish ethics to work in a way quite different to science, but throw out the babe.

Indeed, adopting the proposal that ethical statements are not truth-apt is a way not of highlighting ethics but of reducing it so it may be thrown out of consideration. If ethical propositions are not truth apt, they cannot take a place in logic, and hence are outside of rational consideration.

So, please, reconsider.

The absence of explicit Ethics in Austin is regrettable. It created a vacuum which was temporarily filled by Hare, but in a way that was ultimately not substantive. Hare was too quick to follow Kant rather than his own argument.

Candidly, that's all motherhood and apple pie handwaving. Can give us some substantive contribution from Tomasello relevant to this discussion?

Thank you for your substantive and thoughtful contribution. I'm not sure I've followed your case, so I'll make a few more general points, in order to "test the water", and see how far apart we are.

It may be true that "phlogiston" doesn't have the same meaning now that it used to". If so, it is worth drawing attention to our realising that this is the case. We've moved beyond the incommensurability of the duck- people versus the rabbit-people to the "transcendental" realisation of the duck-rabbit.

This capacity for "transcendence" (I don't like that word...) permits one to take on an historicist approach. So either one is parochial in taking on the mantle of one conceptual scheme in order to asses other; or one takes a position outside of the various conceptual schemes in order to assess them - an impossibility; or one agrees with Davidson in rejecting the notion of conceptual schema.

If we adopt the historicist perspective, then we must look at the situation at the time Davidson was writing. Davidson's philosophically pretentious theory of meaning was necessary in order to break through the wall built by Feyerabend and Kuhn by providing a formal backbone to his argument.

Further, if we take an historicist approach we must deal with the differing situations not just of Kuhn and Davidson, but of Davidson and Wang. Wang will not be addressing the same paper that Davidson wrote.

...the reason we can’t link different schemes back to the one ‘same’ world is because schemes introduce new elements into the world. — Joshs

Yes, or rather,

...what is said in one scheme is incommensurable with what is said in some other scheme, since any standard that might be used to relate one scheme to another is itself part of one scheme or another. — Banno

Schema include the standard by which they are to be assessed.

And the argument is that you literally can’t conceptualize “one world,” aka the very same stuff, in this way. — J

Yep.

Why does the translation have to be “IFF”? — J

Mostly because that is what Davidson uses elsewhere, generating a theory of meaning.

A lot of people do seem to overlook or forget that Davidson doesn’t dispute conceptual relativism on the grounds that conceptual schemes can’t be relative, but rather on the grounds that the “very idea” can be shown to be either incoherent or contradictory. — J

Thank you. it's a missed subtly. Well, not all that subtle, since it is explicit in the last few paragraphs. Perhaps folk don't read that far?

It’s not that Ayer is a worthy opponent, but that he explicitly hits every touchstone of errors that manifest from the desire for something incorrigible. — Antony Nickles

I'm confident that Austin thought in such strategic terms. Well spotted.

Aspects of logical positivism seem to have taken root elsewhere, as is apparent in the rise to defend versions of emotivism elsewhere in the fora.

You've made this claim a few times now. What do they have to say about incommensurability? What's the evidence?

Its very clear that Aristotle's world view is totally incompatible with the world views of later physicists. — Apustimelogist

Totally? Do you really want to use that word, particularly after saying "It does seem that [Aristotle] can be reconstructed as a mathematical approximation of Newtonian mechanics for particular domains"?

Kuhn doesn't think that incommensurable paradigms are necessarily not mutually intelligible... — Apustimelogist

The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. — SEP, Thomas Kuhn

Hmm.

Maybe have a read of the section in that article on Incommensurability. It's far from unproblematic. There is something very odd about being forced into saying that we cannot claim Einstein is no better than Aristotle.

but the claim of the OP is not that it is true, but rather that it is a normative fact, — Leontiskos

No ambiguity. If it is a fact, it is true. If it is not true, it is not a fact.

we can speak about normative propositions in a non-normative manner. — Leontiskos

Yes, as in

"One ought not pick one's nose" has six words — Banno

But saying they are facts has implications.

In any case, at the end of the day I think your argument about the truth or falsity of moral statements is sound. — Leontiskos

Cheers. It's pretty straight Ordinary Language stuff.

"T is a normative fact," could be read as, "T is normatively binding," — Leontiskos

"T is a normative fact," could also be read as a description or categorization of a fact at a meta-ethical level, in which case the claim is not itself normative. — Leontiskos

"One ought not pick one's nose" has six words... not morally binding.

"One ought not pick one's nose" is true... then you ought not pick your nose.

I think this is how the OP intended it, — Leontiskos

So do I, but was in error.


Edit: part of that error may be the antirealist thesis that normative statements do not have a truth value. But if that were so then they would have no place in a truth-functional syllogism.

That's one of the problems with supposing that moral statements are not either true nor false - they drop out of rational discussion.

It's an unappetising doctrine.

Can I point to Carlo Rovelli, Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look, which I think @Moliere pointed out to me. It is a quite excellent example of where Kuhn and Feyerabend go somewhat astray.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057.pdf

I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein’s theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good empirically grounded theory. The observation suggests some general considerations on inter-theoretical relations. — Rovelli

Rovelli shows Aristotle is not at all incommensurate with Newtonian physics, by translating him.

Brilliant.

Yet,

P2: T is a normative fact. — Bob Ross

Hence in some way T says "One ought A"
hence
it is true that one ought A
also says "one ought A".

I don't see an escape.

"T" is true IFF T.

"T" is a fact IFF T.

tofu turkey — J

Oh, is that now? Weird rituals.

A moral realist might claim that the statement "one ought not harm another" is made true by the mind-independent fact that one ought not harm another — Michael

Seems too strong to me.

A moral realist need only claim that "one ought not harm another" is either true or false.

A moral antirealist claims that it has no truth value...?

Hmm. I'm dubious.

"One ought not pick one's nose" is normative. Supose it is a fact. Then it is a true.

Then how is "It is true that one ought not pick one's nose" not also normative?

To say of some normative statement, that it is true, is itself to make a normative statement, isn't it?