As I see it, you ignore the first and third bullet points and take the second bullet point to promote projectivism over emotivism. It’s certainly true that projectivism takes speech more at face value than emotivism. But since emotivism is up-front about this, this is a pretty weak complaint. Maybe it means that emotivism has to do more work to fill in a psychological theory of morality, but producing a psychological theory of morality seems big enough that it’s not obvious whether it makes it harder or easier.
What if I posited a part of the mind that tried to figure out what moral claims it could (socially) get away with making and chose the one it felt was most advantageous to impose on the conscious mind as a moral imperative. Would you call that emotivism or projectivism?
What if I posited a part of the mind that tried to figure out what moral claims it could (socially) get away with making and chose the one it felt was most advantageous to impose on the conscious mind as a moral imperative. Would you call that emotivism or projectivism?
I have trouble understanding this; mostly, I don’t get if you think it exists or if you just want me to pretend it does. But, if I do understand the concept correctly, if something is being imposed on the conscious mind as a moral imperative, that would be projectivist, as it would feel real. If you had part of the unconscious mind that imposed the most socially acceptable, expedient concept of “disgust” on the rest of the mind, one would still feel genuinely disgusted by whatever it “thought” you should be disgusted by. The problem with emotivism is that most people who make moral statements genuinely believe them to be objective, so rendering them into emotive statements loses meaning. Projectivism retains this meaning without accepting the completely unsupported (and I believe unsupportable) claim that objective morals exist.
The magical category objection doesn’t really make sense, even for emotivism. If “Murder is bad” means, “Boo murder!” no category is evoked and none need be. Furthermore, from any anti-realist perspective, any thing or act could potentially be viewed as immoral, so trying to describe a set of things or acts that count as valid subjects of “moral approval” makes no sense. “Perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds” makes no (or at the best, very ill-defined) sense. The author doesn’t mention a single kind, and it is unclear what would distinguish kinds in a way that meets his own standards. Forcing the other side to navigate an ill-defined, context-free classification system and claiming their definition is defective when they fail to do so proves nothing.
As for the third point, it’s a straw man. Claiming that emotivism must act as a mapping function such that any sentence XYZ → a new sentence ABC irrespective of context is a caricature; English doesn’t work like this, and no self-respecting theory of language would pretend it does. Unless emotivists consistently claim that context is irrelevant and can be ignored, this point shouldn’t even be made. I could write a paper about how “Murder is wrong” can be replaced with, “Boo murder!” You can’t then use ‘”Murder is wrong” contains the word “is”’ as a legitimate counterexample, because it is quite obviously a different context.
I don’t remember why I asked that question. It sure reads as a trick question. It’s certainly reasonable to treat things as a dichotomy if the overlap is not likely, but I think that’s wrong here. I endorse this very broad projectivist view that includes this example, and I imagine most emotivists agree; I doubt that most emotivists are sociopaths projecting their abnormality onto the general population. But I also think emotivism is possible, such as along the lines of this example, or more broadly.
I do think you’re treating projectivism as broad, and thus likely, and emotivism as narrow, and thus unlikely. In theory, that’s fine, except for miscommunication, but in practice it’s terrible. Either you give emotivism’s neighbors names, greatly raising their salience, or you don’t, greatly lowering their salience. (Contrast this to the first bullet point, which seems to reject emotivism on the ground that it’s broad. That’s silly.)
Since projectivism is a theory of mind and emotivism a theory of language or social interaction, they are potentially compatible, though it seems tricky to merge their simple interpretations. But neither minds nor meaning are unitary. If projectivism says that there’s a part of the mind that does something, that’s broad theory, thus likely to be true, but it also doesn’t seem to predict much. Emotivism is a claim about the overall meaning. That’s narrower than a claim that there exists a part of the mind that takes a particular meaning and broader than the claim that the mind is unitary and takes a particular meaning. But the overall meaning is the most important.
As I see it, you ignore the first and third bullet points and take the second bullet point to promote projectivism over emotivism. It’s certainly true that projectivism takes speech more at face value than emotivism. But since emotivism is up-front about this, this is a pretty weak complaint. Maybe it means that emotivism has to do more work to fill in a psychological theory of morality, but producing a psychological theory of morality seems big enough that it’s not obvious whether it makes it harder or easier.
What if I posited a part of the mind that tried to figure out what moral claims it could (socially) get away with making and chose the one it felt was most advantageous to impose on the conscious mind as a moral imperative. Would you call that emotivism or projectivism?
I have trouble understanding this; mostly, I don’t get if you think it exists or if you just want me to pretend it does. But, if I do understand the concept correctly, if something is being imposed on the conscious mind as a moral imperative, that would be projectivist, as it would feel real. If you had part of the unconscious mind that imposed the most socially acceptable, expedient concept of “disgust” on the rest of the mind, one would still feel genuinely disgusted by whatever it “thought” you should be disgusted by. The problem with emotivism is that most people who make moral statements genuinely believe them to be objective, so rendering them into emotive statements loses meaning. Projectivism retains this meaning without accepting the completely unsupported (and I believe unsupportable) claim that objective morals exist.
The magical category objection doesn’t really make sense, even for emotivism. If “Murder is bad” means, “Boo murder!” no category is evoked and none need be. Furthermore, from any anti-realist perspective, any thing or act could potentially be viewed as immoral, so trying to describe a set of things or acts that count as valid subjects of “moral approval” makes no sense. “Perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds” makes no (or at the best, very ill-defined) sense. The author doesn’t mention a single kind, and it is unclear what would distinguish kinds in a way that meets his own standards. Forcing the other side to navigate an ill-defined, context-free classification system and claiming their definition is defective when they fail to do so proves nothing.
As for the third point, it’s a straw man. Claiming that emotivism must act as a mapping function such that any sentence XYZ → a new sentence ABC irrespective of context is a caricature; English doesn’t work like this, and no self-respecting theory of language would pretend it does. Unless emotivists consistently claim that context is irrelevant and can be ignored, this point shouldn’t even be made. I could write a paper about how “Murder is wrong” can be replaced with, “Boo murder!” You can’t then use ‘”Murder is wrong” contains the word “is”’ as a legitimate counterexample, because it is quite obviously a different context.
I don’t remember why I asked that question. It sure reads as a trick question. It’s certainly reasonable to treat things as a dichotomy if the overlap is not likely, but I think that’s wrong here. I endorse this very broad projectivist view that includes this example, and I imagine most emotivists agree; I doubt that most emotivists are sociopaths projecting their abnormality onto the general population. But I also think emotivism is possible, such as along the lines of this example, or more broadly.
I do think you’re treating projectivism as broad, and thus likely, and emotivism as narrow, and thus unlikely. In theory, that’s fine, except for miscommunication, but in practice it’s terrible. Either you give emotivism’s neighbors names, greatly raising their salience, or you don’t, greatly lowering their salience.
(Contrast this to the first bullet point, which seems to reject emotivism on the ground that it’s broad. That’s silly.)
Since projectivism is a theory of mind and emotivism a theory of language or social interaction, they are potentially compatible, though it seems tricky to merge their simple interpretations. But neither minds nor meaning are unitary. If projectivism says that there’s a part of the mind that does something, that’s broad theory, thus likely to be true, but it also doesn’t seem to predict much. Emotivism is a claim about the overall meaning. That’s narrower than a claim that there exists a part of the mind that takes a particular meaning and broader than the claim that the mind is unitary and takes a particular meaning. But the overall meaning is the most important.