Abstract
The threefold purpose of this first chapter is (i) to synthesise an integrated summary account of the Emotive Theory from the separate versions proposed by Ayer and Stevenson; (ii) to distinguish those of its claims which contribute to its semantic thesis from those which contribute to its justificatory thesis; and (iii) to subsume its semantic thesis under its justificatory thesis.
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Positively’ here is intended to convey the sense in which positivists (logical and otherwise) have always tried to limit inquiry and belief to what can be firmly established (after Lacey, 1986)
Ayer not only drew a distinction between the poet who is not concerned with the expression of true propositions but with the creation of art and the eliciting of emotional responses, and the scientist who is concerned with the expression of true propositions; he also drew a distinction between the poet who deliberately writes ‘nonesense’ with a view to eliciting the emotional responses he desires to elicit, and the metaphysician who writes ‘nonesense’ in the mistaken belief that he is giving expression to true propositions (LTL 59–61).
In hindsight, Ayer had second thoughts about this ‘positively’ streamlined conception of ethical philosophy. The very fact that he went on to write and publish a further six papers in the field (three between the years 1946 and 1954), and that only two of these were concerned with the analysis and definition of ethical terms, suggests, in itself, a softening of his earlier views, but this softening eventually became explicit: Looking back on [my attempt to delimit the subject matter of ethical philosophy] I find that it is not so much mistaken as unduly scholastic. The distinctions that I made were valid, but my use of them to lay fetters upon moral philosophy impoverished the subject to an unreasonable extent (FM 17).
I have inserted the qualifier ‘orthodox’ in anticipation of the distinction which Ayer himself would later draw between orthodox subjectivism and what he refers to as his own radical subjectivism.
By conjoining the forward-looking observations of Taylor (1926, p.151), which link Plato’s Euthypro Argument to Cudworth, and the retrospective observations of Prior (1949) linking Moore’s argument to Cudworth, the history of this argument can be traced back to antiquity.
Person A’s approach may well have been more effective if at this point he had asked `What if it were your daughter, your wife or your lover who was abused as a means to someone else’s sexual gratification?’ But, even so, there would still be no necessary connection between Person B’s having imagined this state of affairs and his changing his attitude to pornography. We will return to this matter in the next section and again in Chapters 4 and 5.
It may be objected that accepting the judgement of a guru (in whom one has placed one’s spiritual trust) is a very much more complex matter than simply adopting an attitude. But, as I intend to show in due course, since attitudes are usually adopted or imbibed along with a particular world view, or as part of some larger package-deal commitment (such as one’s commitment to a particular guru), attitude adoption, or attitude formation, as the case may be, is one aspect of this very much more complex matter.
Following on from footnote 36, it might be objected that there are no such things as fundamental attitudes, and that, even if there were, it would be impossible to isolate them from their psycho-dynamic entanglement with people’s world views and religions, but, once again, this is precisely what I intend to show.
Contrary to what Maris suggests, therefore, it simply is not true that by `non-rational methods’ Stevenson `[was only] thinking of rewards and punishments’ (1981, p.172).
As we will see in Chapters 4 and 5, the challenge facing Hare, in his attempts to assign reason a more significant role in moral thinking than that which Ayer and Stevenson assigned it, was that of showing why the `What if you were in the other person’s shoes?’ method of argument should be conceived of as a rational rather than a non-rational psychological method of argument.
Op. cit., p.566. As Wachbroit notes, this is his own distinction, not Maclntyre’s. Maclntyre draws a distinction between emotivism considered as a theory of meaning and emotivism considered as a theory of use, but as Wachbroit, quite correctly, suggests, the distinction is better characterised in terms of meaning and justification. saying `X is good’ he is really saying nothing more, and, thus, means nothing more, than ‘I approve of X. Do so as well.’
Thus, as G. E. Moore put it, while ‘This is good’ does not mean ‘I approve of X’, it may be said to imply it, though not in the sense that the one follows from the other, but rather in the sense that we have all learnt by experience that a man who says that something is good does, in the great majority of cases, approve of it (after Hudson, 1980, pp.116–17).
And since the point of all such second pattern definitions is, as Ayer put it, ‘not that [they] give precision to the use of word[s], but that [they] covertly lay down standard[s] of conduct’ (AMJ 245), they are, as Stevenson put it, unlikely to represent detached, neutral analysis, and are therefore less likely to clarify normative ethics than to participate in it (EL 218). require supporting reasons, all second pattern semantic analyses will eventually be replaced by first pattern justificatory ones. Returning to our previous example: If, in response to Person A’s judgement ‘Pornography is wrong’, Person B were to pursue a semantic line of inquiry by asking ‘What do you mean when you say that pornography is wrong?’, then his question may well initiate something like the following exchange.
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Wilks, C. (2002). The Original Emotive Theory. In: Emotion, Truth and Meaning. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9866-8_1
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