Abstract
This paper focuses on value as ascribed to what can be desired, enjoyed, cherished, admired, loved, and so on: value that putatively serves as ground for evaluating such attitudes and for justifying conduct. The main question of the paper is whether such value ascriptions are property ascriptions as traditional cognitivism claims. The paper makes the case that although the linguistic evidence favors traditional cognitivism over non-cognitivism about evaluative language, the main tenet of cognitivism is best restated as the thesis that evaluative terms are linguistically encoded classificatory devices. This opens up the theoretical possibility, for even inflationists about properties, to embrace cognitivism without inviting any metaphysical worries about the properties ascribed in evaluative language.
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Notes
Why say that the semantic function of a predicate is that of ascribing a property? Why not say that the semantic value of predicates is a property? As will become clear presently, I am seeking to characterize a disagreement between traditional cognitivists and non-cognitivists about the meaning of evaluative terms. This is not a disagreement about their semantic value: i.e., their contribution to the truth-conditions of sentences in which they occur, but a disagreement about how these terms semantically (rather than syntactically) function in the language. Also, I have a preference for staying away from the jargon of truth-conditional semantics as much as feasible since I am not doing formal compositional semantics and its jargon is not coined for articulating the more fundamental issues with which I grapple here.
This is Stevenson’s example. See his Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944): 37–41.
Needless to say, even if both lexicographers and philosophers study word-meaning, their aims and methods significantly differ.
This is one of the lessons to be drawn from the so-called “Frege–Geach problem.” See Peter Geach, “Assertion,” Philosphical Review 74 (1965): 449–465. For an excellent discussion of the problem, see pp. 30–32 of James Dreier, “Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth,” Philosophical Studies 83 (1996): 29–51.
Simon Blackburn’s and Allan Gibbard’s proposals are the best known. See especially Blackburn’s proposal in Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 192–193, and Blackburn’s more mature proposal in “Attitudes and Contents” (1988) reprinted in Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 182–197. Blackburn’s proposals preserve a clear connection to the traditional emotivist idea that atomic evaluative sentences express sentiments, it is less clear whether Gibbard’s proposals do so. In this context, see especially Gibbard’s proposal in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 83–102.
At least, it favors cognitivism about the part of evaluative language in terms of which value ascriptions are couched. The dispute between cognitivists and non-cognitivists is usually construed as pertaining to all evaluative or normative language. I will have nothing to say about the meaning of ‘ought’ or the adverb ‘ideally’. Thanks to Tristram McPherson for pressing me to make my limited ambitions clear.
I first made the above case for cognitivism in Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Thinking in Moral Terms (1993), published in the series Dissertations in Ethics edited by R. Nozick. (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 2001): pp. 13–14.
Arguably, these two properties stand in the relation of a determinate (being gorgeous) to a determinable (having value).
This is what Stephen Schiffer refers to as “the pleonastic sense of the word ‘property’”. See his “Meaning and Value,” The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 602–614. Acknowledging this pleonastic use of ‘property’ is not the same as accepting Schiffer’s view of properties as “pleonastic entities”. See footnote 12 below.
This is an allusion to Plato’s “one over many” puzzle.
Stephen Schiffer, The Things We Mean. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): p. 62.
Ibid., p. 62. Notice that whereas it is fairly uncontroversial that ‘the property of __’ has a pleonastic use (i.e., inserting it into a sentence does not add any content), it is indeed controversial to claim that properties are pleonastic entities in Schiffer’s sense: i.e., “entities whose existence is typically secured by something-from-nothing transformation” (ibid., p. 61), when that is a valid inference from “a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind…to a statement in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind” (ibid., p. 51). For it is indeed controversial to claim that a sentence like ‘Shore is curving’ does not make a reference to a property, while a sentence like ‘Shore has the property of curving’ does. Indeed, how could that be true if they are meaning equivalent? It seems that if they are meaning equivalent, either both or neither make such a reference.
Ibid., p. 63. The metaphor originates with David Armstrong, who uses it when characterizing the predicate nominalist view of properties. See D. M. Armstrong, Nominalism & Realism: Universals Scientific Realism. Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 13.
A more prosaic way of stating minimalism about properties is as the view that all the instances of the schema ‘x has the property of being F iff x is F’ (when ‘F’ is a meaningful predicate) collectively give all there is to know about properties. For this formulation, see p. 26 of James Dreier, “Meta-Ethics and the Problem of Creeping Minimalism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 18 (2004): 23–44.
See Paul Horwich, Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
This contrasts with William Quine’s influential criterion for the ontic commitments of a language. According to him, it is a mistake to think that a predicate stands in a referential relation to a single entity, shared by the members of the predicate’s extension. Instead, a predicate has a divided reference in the sense that it is true of all the individuals within its extension. Its applicability to these individuals is an ultimate and irreducible fact. Thus, predication does not import ontic commitments to properties. The only feature of language that imports ontic commitments to properties is a quantification over a variable that is true only if the value of the variable is a property. See W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953).—The pleonastic view of properties is indeed a close relative of Quine’s predicate nominalism.
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass: Merriam-webster Inc., 1983).
Of course, this is the part of a simple sentence that is represented with a predicate-symbol in the formal language of predicate logic and, in standard semantic interpretations of the formal language, predicate-symbols are assigned properties or relations, defined over objects in the domain of the interpretation. See, for example, Geoffrey Hunter, Metalogic: And Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 137, 141.
I.e., all there is to know about what it is for a predicate to designate a property is collectively given by all the instances of the schema: ‘is F’ designates the property being F.
The principles of classification may even yield paradoxes. Say what is being classified are sets, and they are being classified depending on whether they are or are not a set that does not contain itself as a member.
In some cases, we use other means, e.g. a numerical system or a color code.
I use ‘robust’ as the contrastive of ‘pleonastic’.
This leaves open the possibility that there are also nonlinguistic mental acts that are tokens of these types. In other words, the possibility of classifying particulars without any linguistic articulation of one’s classifications (not even in a silent internal monologue) has not been ruled out.
The relevant philosophical literature suggests as much. For example, in Meaning, Horwich claims that his use-theory of meaning is compatible with the idea that the meaning of an utterance is the mental state it expresses (pp. 98–99). Moreover, Horwich gives account of “the semantic features of a word” in terms of “the circumstances in which certain specified sentences containing the word are accepted” (p. 45), and he makes explicit that acceptance is a psychological relation that is to be explicated in non-semantic terms (p. 95).
Compare a similar point made with respect to the suitability of a creature to enter into the relation sister-of: only creatures of the kind female are suitable for entering into the relation sister-of to another entity of the suitable kind, but not everyone who is female stands in the relation sister-of to someone.
This should not be thought to suggest that, when (demonstratively) applying a predicate ‘F’, we explicitly say to ourselves ‘that is in the category of the Fs’. However, it suggests that the application is accompanied with some awareness that the object is being grouped together with and apart from certain others.
One thing that can safely be said about that system is that it has a taxonomical structure: for example, the category of the valuable is inclusive of the category of the extrinsically valuable and the category of the intrinsically valuable; the category of the extrinsically valuable is inclusive of the category of the instrumentally valuable and may include other categories as well; arguably, the category of the intrinsically valuable is inclusive of inter alia the category of the gorgeous.
A maximum parallel between syntactic and semantic structures would be secured by accepting the fully generalized version of classificatory cognitivism, which claims that any meaningful predicate is a device for ascribing only the property of being classified in a certain way within the taxonomical system that is linguistically encoded in the relevant fragment of language. This would also mean that the claim that an evaluative predicate ‘E’ designates the property of being in the category that ‘E’ regiments in language would follow from a general theory of how a predicate comes to designate a property.
Take a particular modus ponens: the major premise ‘if the towel stinks, then the towel has not been washed’ asserts a relationship between falling in the category of the things that stink and falling in the category of the things that have not been washed; everything that falls in the former category also falls within the latter category. It is because of this assumed relation that the conclusion that the towel has not been washed follows given the minor premise that the towel stinks.
This is the cross-world extension of the predicate. Alternatively, the semantic value of an evaluative predicate can be given as a set of ordered pairs in which the first term is a possible world and the second term is the predicate’s extension in that world, when its extension in a world is understood as the principled result of the type of classification that the predicate regiments in language when applied to the relevant domain of objects in that world.
In addition to those summarized at the beginning of Sect. 3, these features include: the linguistically appropriate application of the truth predicate to evaluative sentences and the linguistically appropriate use of evaluative sentences as complements of locutions like ‘believes that’, ‘knows that’, ‘the proposition that’, ‘the fact that’, and ‘the truth that’.
Simon Blackburn, “Attitudes and Contents,” (1988) reprinted in Essays in Quasi-Realism, pp. 182–197; here, pp. 184–185. See also Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word, pp. 167–171, and 190–196. However, his project is broader than to account for the evaluative language that is my concern here. His ambition is to give an account of all “normative” language, deontic and evaluative alike.
Allan Gibbard also accepts this as a characterization of the project in which he is engaged. See Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), especially p. 18.
A notable exception is James Dreier. See his “Expressivist Embeddings,” p. 34ff.
Acknowledgements
Drafts of this paper were presented at the Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy, May 2017, at the GRIN workshop on normativity at the University of Montreal, October 2017, and in my graduate seminar at Tufts University, September 2018. I thank all the participants in the 2017 Oberlin Colloquium, my 2017 GRIN workshop, and my 2018 graduate seminar for helpful feedback, not the least my commentator at Oberlin, Tristram McPherson, who also generously sent written comments. I am also grateful to Jody Azzouni for feedback on an early draft.
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Svavarsdóttir, S. Value ascriptions: rethinking cognitivism. Philos Stud 176, 1417–1438 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01246-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01246-8