Ah, I stand corrected; I got the impression from the intro of the book that the author was trying to slay relativism by slaying emotivism, which really doesn’t work. I basically agree with the point against emotivism; it does not capture meaning well. I ascribe to projectivism myself, but it looks like I’ve mistaken where the original argument was going, so sorry for adding confusion.
If you understand the point, could you spell it out? Weren’t there supposed to be three points? I don’t see anything in the above to distinguish emotivism from projectivism. I suspect that you just assumed an argument against something you rejected was the argument you use.
There are three points, marked with bullet points.
1) “Moral approval” is magical.
2) Reducing “This is good” to “I like this” misrepresents the way people actually speak.
3) Emotivism doesn’t account for the use of sentences in a context—which is the whole of actual ethical speech.
Emotivism is very different from projectivism. One is a theory of ethical language, and one is a theory of mind.
EDIT: Perhaps this wasn’t so clear—one consequence of projectivism is a theory of ethical language as well; see Psychohistorian below. My point was that it’s a category error to consider them as indistinguishable, because projectivism proper has consequences in several other fields of philosophy, whereas emotivism proper is mostly about ethical language and doesn’t say anything wrt how we think about things other than moral approval.
Ethical projectivism isn’t quite so much a theory of mind as it is a theory of ethical language. It’s clear that in most cases where people say, “X is wrong” they ascribe the objective quality “wrongness” to X. Projectivism holds that there is no such objective quality, thus, the property of wrongness is in the mind, but it doesn’t feel like it, much like how the concepts of beauty and disgust are in the mind, but don’t feel like it. You can’t smell something disgusting and say, “Well, that’s just my opinion, that’s not really a property of the smell;” it still smells disgusting. Thus, projectivism has the same rejection of objective morality as emotivism does, but it describes how we actually think and speak much better than emotivism does.
The attack on emotivism as not accurately expressing what we mean is largely orthogonal to realism vs. subjectivism. Just because we speak about objective moral principles as if they exist does not mean they actually exist, anymore than speaking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it existed conjures it into existence. But the view that moral statements actually express mere approval or disapproval seems clearly wrong; that’s just not what people mean when they talk about morality.
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.
I think some confusion here might arise from missing the distinction between “projectivism” and “ethical projectivism”. Projectivism is a family of theories in philosophy, one of which applies to ethics.
Ah, I stand corrected; I got the impression from the intro of the book that the author was trying to slay relativism by slaying emotivism, which really doesn’t work. I basically agree with the point against emotivism; it does not capture meaning well. I ascribe to projectivism myself, but it looks like I’ve mistaken where the original argument was going, so sorry for adding confusion.
If you understand the point, could you spell it out? Weren’t there supposed to be three points? I don’t see anything in the above to distinguish emotivism from projectivism. I suspect that you just assumed an argument against something you rejected was the argument you use.
There are three points, marked with bullet points.
1) “Moral approval” is magical. 2) Reducing “This is good” to “I like this” misrepresents the way people actually speak. 3) Emotivism doesn’t account for the use of sentences in a context—which is the whole of actual ethical speech.
Emotivism is very different from projectivism. One is a theory of ethical language, and one is a theory of mind.
EDIT: Perhaps this wasn’t so clear—one consequence of projectivism is a theory of ethical language as well; see Psychohistorian below. My point was that it’s a category error to consider them as indistinguishable, because projectivism proper has consequences in several other fields of philosophy, whereas emotivism proper is mostly about ethical language and doesn’t say anything wrt how we think about things other than moral approval.
Ethical projectivism isn’t quite so much a theory of mind as it is a theory of ethical language. It’s clear that in most cases where people say, “X is wrong” they ascribe the objective quality “wrongness” to X. Projectivism holds that there is no such objective quality, thus, the property of wrongness is in the mind, but it doesn’t feel like it, much like how the concepts of beauty and disgust are in the mind, but don’t feel like it. You can’t smell something disgusting and say, “Well, that’s just my opinion, that’s not really a property of the smell;” it still smells disgusting. Thus, projectivism has the same rejection of objective morality as emotivism does, but it describes how we actually think and speak much better than emotivism does.
The attack on emotivism as not accurately expressing what we mean is largely orthogonal to realism vs. subjectivism. Just because we speak about objective moral principles as if they exist does not mean they actually exist, anymore than speaking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it existed conjures it into existence. But the view that moral statements actually express mere approval or disapproval seems clearly wrong; that’s just not what people mean when they talk about morality.
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.
I think some confusion here might arise from missing the distinction between “projectivism” and “ethical projectivism”. Projectivism is a family of theories in philosophy, one of which applies to ethics.
You might be talking past each other.
Psychohistorian and I seem to be in agreement, actually.
I didn’t say I can’t distinguish them, I said the particular attack on emotivism applies just as well to projectivism.
My bad; I misread you.
As much as I’d like to think so, I’ll try to learn a lesson about pronouns and antecedents in high latency communications.