Comment: Defense of Noncognitivism Defended

Extract

Professor VanDeVeer has given a scrupulously fair account of my defense of noncognitivism (N), and has raised questions which are both searching and stimulating.

His most basic criticism is that I fail to demonstrate N—the thesis that the utterance of a moral principle expresses the speaker's moral commitment, but does not affirm or deny that something is the case, and therefore does not result in a statement which is true or false. To provide adequate positive support for N would involve me—so he claims—in complicated problems of the theory of meaning. My reply is that I do, and can, rely on the very theory of meaning which, as Hempel states it, is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science, namely that

… a sentence makes a cognitively significant assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, if and only if either (1) it is analytic or contradictory—in which case it is said to have purely logical meaning or significance—or else (2) if it is capable, at least potentially, of test by experiential evidence—in which case it can be said to have empirical meaning or significance.

Given this basic principle (which Hempel says [p. 101] “is not peculiar to empiricism alone”), and given my demonstration that moral principles are neither analytic nor empirical, it follows that they are not cognitively either true or false.