The Meaning Theoretical Basis Of Moral Anti-Realism

Moral anti-realism or moral non-cognitivism faces the problem that how to properly explain the meaning of moral language.This problem stems from moral anti-realists' seemingly contradictory views about moral language.On the one hand,anti-realists claim that our moral judgements do not aim to describe facts in the world,but aim to express non-cognitive sentiments or attitudes.Thus,moral judgements are not truth-apt,we cannot make truth-evaluations of moral discourses.On the other hand,anti-realists recognize that our moral thinking are rational,we have the ability to make moral reasoning,which means moral language must obey the basic semantic rules and logical rules.As the standard explanation of logic and meaning appeals to the notion of truth,this implies that some notion of truth should be applicable to moral language.Moral anti-realism thus seems to be self-defeating: rejecting the notion of truth while accepting it.In order to dissolve this problem and maintain the moral anti-realist view,one of the strategies is to discriminate two different notions of truth.If moral language has a kind of meaning that is compositional and logical,and our explanation of logic and meaning must use a notion of truth,then this notion of truth must be applicable to moral language.However,this application of a notion of truth does not imply that moral language is just like factual language,which is descriptive or representative.In this paper,I firstly investigate four important philosophers' views about truth and logic,with the aim to distinguish two notions of truth from the point of view of the history of philosophy.Aristotle's two different definitions of ‘metaphysics' already indicate the discrimination of two notions of truth: one in the justificative sense,and the other in the universal or formal sense.Kant gives an exact characterization of the formal notion of truth,which has nothing to do with materials or contents,but only involves the formal combination of contents.This conception of formal truth and formal logic is rejected by Frege,but is succeeded by Tarski's semantic notion of truth.However,Tarski only think about factual languages such as scientific language while neglecting other languages such as moral language when he tries to determine the formal structures of language.The existence of various deontic paradoxes indicates that moral language does not obey the formal rules represented by classic logic and standard deontic logic.Moral terms have an effect on the way of combination and do not provide contents,from this point we can naturally arrive at the position of moral anti-realism as a kind of meta-semantic anti-realism.Corresponding to the two notions of truth,we need discriminate two different levels of meaning,that is,semantic value and pragmatic content.The former is the input to the formal,mechanical process of meaning-combination,and appeals to the formal notion of truth.The latter is the level of meaning an expression has when it is used in contexts.These two kinds of meanings have quite different qualities.Basing on the discrimination of semantic value and pragmatic content,we can raise a response to an important and famous rejection to moral anti-realism,the Frege-Geach problem.This rejection made by Geach using Frege's point involves a mistake: it tries to drive a conclusion about pragmatic content from premises about semantic value.Many anti-realists such as psychologistic semanticists,minimalists,and hybrid expressivists just make the same mistake.Gibbard realizes the difference between semantic value and pragmatic content,and his solution succeeds on the semantic level,but on the meta-semantic level,Gibbard's psychologist approach inevitably ends as circular.This problem can be escaped by a descriptive or a priori meta-semantic position.