Infectious and transparent emotivism

Abstract

Emotivists like Ayer claim that moral sentences are devoid of cognitive meaning since they only evince attitudinal approval or disapproval of actions. In this paper, I explore two non-classical semantic frameworks for such a view. In particular, I look into the semantics for an infectious logic and a transparent logic. Finally, I show how each of these semantic frameworks accounts for the logical behaviour of these meaningless moral sentences and their upshots to moral reasoning; in particular, how each framework addresses (an emotivist variant of) Jörgensen's dilemma.

Keywords:

• Emotivism
• immune logics
• infectious logics
• Jörgensen's dilemma
• transparent logics

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Jc Beall, Hazel T. Biana, Ben Blumson, Peter Eldridge-Smith, Brian Garrett, Shawn Standefer, Damian Szmuc, Raymond R. Tan, and the referee and editors of this journal for their useful comments and suggestions that greatly improved this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ayer distinguishes between sentences that are cognitively meaningless (i.e. devoid of factual content) from those that are literally senseless (Ayer, 1946, pp. 73–75). While all literally senseless sentences are cognitively meaningless, not all cognitively meaningless sentences are literally senseless. For example, analytic sentences – logical tautologies – while cognitively meaningless, are not as literally senseless as metaphysical utterances like ‘Nothing can be coloured in different ways at the same time with respect to the same part of itself’.

2 Omori and Szmuc (2017) offer an alternative construction of WK in terms of a plurivalent logical framework due to Priest (2017). On the other hand, going against Bochvar's meaningless semantics, Beall (2016) offers an alternative, ‘off-topic’ interpretation of WK. It should be acknowledged that both the WK and the SL semantics were already anticipated by C. S. Peirce in his ‘Logical Notebook’. This historical fact was first reported by Fisch and Turquette (1966) and was later explored by Belikov (2021).

3 Curiously, Da Ré and Szmuc refer to SL-semantics as ‘immune logic’. But given how the semantics is constructed, ‘transparent logic’ might be a better label.

4 For a discussion of the negation problem for emotivists, see Ayer (1946, pp. 110–112). For further discussions of the problem for noncognitvists in general, see Schroeder (2008).

5 Note that Jörgensen's original dilemma concerns arguments that contain imperative sentences (Jörgensen, 1937). But his question applies to noncognitivist theories in general.

6 Designated values are the values that are preserved in logically valid arguments. This follows the standard characterisation due to Priest (2008).

7 Definition 3.1 is similar to the definition proposed by Belikov (2021) for his logical system $T{L}_1$.

8 For a discussion of what the failure of addition implies to the broader philosophical issues about moral reasoning, e.g. Prior's dilemma and Hume's no-ought-from-is principle, see Beall (2012) and Joaquin (2020), respectively.

9 This was also observed by Humberstone (2011, pp. 1050–1052).

10 My thanks to this journal's referee for highlighting this question.

11 Again, my thanks to this journal's referee for this suggestion.

12 This strategy was already explored by Da Ré and Szmuc (2021) and Belikov (2021), respectively.