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Emotivism and Deflationary Truth 270 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY EMOTIVISM AND DEFLATIONARY TRUTH KYLE S. SWAN Abstract: The paper investigates different ways to understand the claim that non-cognitivists theories of morality are incoherent. According to the claim, this is so because, on one theory of truth, non-cognitivists are not able to deny objective truth to moral judgments without taking a substantive normat- ive position. I argue that emotivism is not self-defeating in this way. The charge of incoherence actually only amounts to a claim that emotivism is incompatible with deflationary truth, but this claim is based upon a mistake. It relies upon a problematic understanding of both emotivism and the defla- tionary theory of truth. Philosophers concerned to resist any of the varieties of non-cognitivist moral theories have typically relied heavily upon the embeddedness prob- lem, which Peter Geach has articulated.1 According to these theories, normative claims do not express genuine propositions. However, this cannot explain, and, is at odds with, the way people talk. Moral claims, for example, display the same syntax as non-moral claims, which do express genuine propositions. So moral claims are uttered as if they are about facts, but emotivism denies that they are factual. This is a problem for non-cognitivist theories because it seems to follow that they must be committed to rejecting the validity of instances of modus ponens that include as one of the components a normative claim. An alternative to this traditional way for philosophers to resist non- cognitivism has been advanced by Paul Boghossian and, even more recently, Ronald Dworkin. It relies upon a putative tension between non-cognitivism and the deflationary theory of truth.2 At the heart of Dworkin’s argument is the claim that there is a kind of incoherence involved in the idea that a theorist is able, as Dworkin says, “to stand outside a whole body of belief, and to judge it as a whole from premises or attitudes that owe nothing to it.”3 Theories that purport to do this Dworkin calls ‘archimedean.’ Thus the area of philosophy covered by Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2002) 270–281 0279–0750/00/0100–0000 © 2002 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. © 2002 University of Southern California and Blackwell270 Publishers Ltd. PAPQ83.3C05 270 7/31/02, 1:04 PM EMOTIVISM AND DEFLATIONARY TRUTH 271 meta-ethics professes to be archimedean about morality. If a meta-ethical theory professes an external skepticism about morality, it denies object- ive truth to moral judgments, and it does so without taking any substant- ive moral position. One way to do this is to deny that to make a moral judgment is to make an assertion,4 that to make such a judgment is to express a proposition that is either true or false. One version of non-cognitivism has it that to make a moral judgment is not to make a claim that even aspires to objective truth. It is merely to express one’s emotions. Emotivism is archimedean as it purports to stand outside the domain of evaluative discourse and be only a theory about moral judgments. That is, the theory criticizes the domain of evaluative discourse but not by denying the ascription of a moral predicate to some act, event, or person and ascribing a different positive moral predicate. It offers no claim that is on the same level or competitive with the judg- ment, for example, that abortion is wrong because, as a theory, it says nothing at all about the rightness or wrongness of abortion. Instead, it involves a claim about the judgment that abortion is wrong. That judgment, the theory says, is neither true nor false; rather it is the expres- sion of someone’s moral disapproval of the intentional termination of a pregnancy. Dworkin is arguing, in a sense, that emotivism argues against itself: “even this selective form of archimedean skepticism is misconceived. Any successful – really, any intelligible – argument that evaluative proposi- tions are neither true nor false must be internal to the evaluative domain rather than archimedean about it.”5 The emotivist conception of moral discourse, claims Dworkin, necessarily throws emotivists into the realm of making substantive normative claims. For example, to make the judg- ment that abortion is wrong certainly is to make a substantive normative judgment. But to deny this, as Dworkin says an emotivist does, is to make a substantive normative judgment as well. I want to argue against this charge that emotivism is self-defeating. Dworkin’s argument for it seems to be based upon a mistake. His argument that the emotivist claim must be internal to the evaluative domain and must therefore be a sub- stantive moral judgment seems to rely on a problematic take on both emotivism and the deflationary theory of truth. According to this theory of truth, the function of the truth-predicate, for example, in the sentence, ‘“the cat is on the mat” is true’ or in the sentence, ‘the proposition that the cat is on the mat is true’ is not to describe the sentence’s subject. Truth is not a substantive property. An adequate notion of truth is captured in a simple equivalence schema: for any meaningful declarative sentence p there is an equivalent sentence ‘The proposition that p is true.’6 If this is right, then it is true that p if and only if p. In what follows, section 1 will show how Dworkin’s argument that the external skeptic’s position is self-defeating incorporates this © 2002 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. PAPQ83.3C05 271 7/31/02, 1:04 PM 272 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY deflationary theory of truth. Section 2 will suggest that Dworkin’s argu- ment seems to mirror Boghossian’s. Boghossian concluded that A. J. Ayer’s7 endorsement of both an emotivist conception of moral discourse and a deflationary theory of truth is strictly speaking incoherent. Finally, section 3 will argue that external, archimedean skepticism about morality is not incoherent in the way Dworkin and Boghossian suggest. 1. Dworkin denies that external skepticism about morality can make plaus- ible distinctions among the following claims: (1) Abortion is wrong. (2) ‘Abortion is wrong’ is true. (3) The judgment that abortion is wrong is one that is true. External skeptics would like to say that saying (1) involves one in making a substantive moral judgment, while saying (2) and (3) do not. Rather, (2) and (3) are external, meta-ethical statements about the status of the normative judgment in (1). Therefore, external skepticism about morality could allow (1) (although (1) would not express a proposition), but would be skeptical about (2) and (3) ( just because (1) does not express a propo- sition). So, for example, an emotivist can make judgments in the moral realm just like anybody else. But he would go on to say: (4) Statement (1) is not the kind of statement which it makes sense to evaluate as being either true or false. This is because statement (1) does not express a genuine proposition. And: (5) Moral concepts like “wrongness” are rather unanalyzable ejacula- tions, expressions of feeling. Dworkin rejects this sort of distinction because he thinks that (2) and (3) “can only be understood as baroque repetitions of the simpler claim” that abortion is wrong.8 They are, if not redundant, then simply clarifica- tions on the original substantive moral judgment. It is implausible, says Dworkin, to allow (1), but to be skeptical about (2) and (3). The heart of the disagreement then consists in whether or not it is possible to make a distinction between a meta-ethical position and a substantive normative position. Dworkin argues that it is not. If (2) and (3) are simply more elaborate forms of, and continuous with, (1) and external skepticism © 2002 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. PAPQ83.3C05 272 7/31/02, 1:04 PM EMOTIVISM AND DEFLATIONARY TRUTH 273 about morality is skeptical about the statements in (2) and (3), then external skepticism is not really an external skepticism; that is, it is not a genuinely meta-ethical position. Rather, it is a substantive normative one. According to Dworkin: If the further claim [from the claim that abortion is wrong] that abortion is really or objectively wrong means that it is wrong even when and where people do not think it wrong, and the archimedean denies that further claim, he is endorsing the negative moral judgment that there is no moral objection to abortion in societies in which it is approved.9 If the external skeptic really does this, then it would defeat his claim that he stands outside the realm of evaluative discourse and is only making claims about moral claims. But has Dworkin in fact given us good reason to suppose that (2) and (3) are simply continuous with, or just elaborate restatements of, (1)? As I have said, Dworkin’s argument incorporates something like a deflationary theory of truth. External skepticism about morality, says Dworkin, “relies, for example, on the argument that there is no objective moral reality ‘out there’ for moral beliefs to match, and that the idea of objective truth about morality is an illusion for that reason.”10 Dworkin says that external skeptics about morality are skeptical about the further claims of (2) and (3) because these further claims read as if moral con- cepts “‘correspond to’ or ‘represent’ or ‘match’ some moral state of af- fairs.”11 But, according to Dworkin, this is unnecessary and, in fact, not the most natural reading of the further claims.
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