PHIL 3225 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Linguistic Description

• School: Temple University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 3225
• Professor: David Wolfsdorf

Document Summary

Good expresses a feeling or emotion; it does not denote a feeling or emotion. Painful or delightful are descriptive terms: ouch or yum cannot be used grammatically the same as painful or. There is no evaluative properties of goodness/badness, etc. There are no facts to support such qualities: x is good does not have propositional content, so we cannot know whether x is good/bad, etc, emotivism is a form of non-cognitivism about evaluative and ethical contents. There cannot be rational debate over these contents: is x good? is not a genuine question because it does not seek the truth-value of. X is good. : if evaluative or ethical con icts are to be settled, this requires alteration of the pro/ con attitudes of the participants. Evaluative attitudes can be in uenced by more fundamental or deeply held evaluative attitudes. S and t might agree to compromise on something if they value compromise more deeply than they value antagonism.