Well, I’m glad to see you’re taking a second crack at an exposition of metaethics.
I wonder if it might be worth expounding more on the distinction between utterances (sentences and word-symbols), meaning-bearers (propositions and predicates) and languages (which map utterances to meaning-bearers). My limited experience seems to suggest that a lot of the confusion about metaethics comes from not getting, instinctively, that speakers use their actual language, and that a sentence like “X is better than Y”, when uttered by a particular person, refers to some fixed proposition about X and Y that doesn’t talk about the definition of the symbols “X”, “Y” and “better” in the speaker’s language (and for that matter doesn’t talk about the definitions of “is” and “than”).¹
But I don’t really know. I find it hard to get into people’s heads in this case.
¹ In general. It is of course, possible that in some speaker’s language “X” refers to something like the english language and “Y” refers to french, or that “better” refers to having more words for snow. But in general most things we say are not about language.
Well, I’m glad to see you’re taking a second crack at an exposition of metaethics.
I wonder if it might be worth expounding more on the distinction between utterances (sentences and word-symbols), meaning-bearers (propositions and predicates) and languages (which map utterances to meaning-bearers). My limited experience seems to suggest that a lot of the confusion about metaethics comes from not getting, instinctively, that speakers use their actual language, and that a sentence like “X is better than Y”, when uttered by a particular person, refers to some fixed proposition about X and Y that doesn’t talk about the definition of the symbols “X”, “Y” and “better” in the speaker’s language (and for that matter doesn’t talk about the definitions of “is” and “than”).¹
But I don’t really know. I find it hard to get into people’s heads in this case.
¹ In general. It is of course, possible that in some speaker’s language “X” refers to something like the english language and “Y” refers to french, or that “better” refers to having more words for snow. But in general most things we say are not about language.