Copy of Cognitivism vs. Non Cognitivism

Relativism

Relativism is not a single doctrine but a family of views whose common theme is that some central aspect of experience, thought, evaluation, or even reality is somehow relative to something else.

Relativistic arguments often begin with plausible, premises that we are culturally and historically built creatures, that finding something to be right cannot go on forever, only to end up with failing something to be convince irregular conclusions.

Relativism is then stuck within the two most popular contrasts of right and wrong.............

Ethical AND Cultural Relativism.

How Does Relativism Still Impact On Us Today......

Relativistic themes have also spilled over into areas outside of philosophy; for example, they play a large role in today's "culture wars." Some strains of ethical relativism (also described below) even pose threats to our standards and practices of evaluation and, through this, to many of our social and legal institutions. And the suggestion that truth or justification are somehow relative would, if correct, have a dramatic impact on the most fundamental issues about objectivity, knowledge, and intellectual progress.

Ethical Vs. Cultural Relativism

Theoretical Problems

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/

Ethical Relativism

• is the position that there are no moral right and wrongs. Instead right and wrong are based on social normals.

Cultural Relativism

• is the principle that an individuals beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individuals own culture.

Cultural relativism theorizes that the way people act, behave and perceive things is relative to their cultures. It is not possible to truly understand certain actions or customs without also understanding the culture from which those actions are derived. Based on the concepts of ethical relativism, if someone holds to moral standards that differ from those of the prevailing culture, then that person must adapt to the prevailing standards to avoid acting unethically. Some relativist arguments leave room for cultural diversity, while some ethical absolutes, such as those pertaining to basic human rights, might apply universally.

HOW WILL ANY ACTION THAT YOU TEND TO SEE AS ABNORMAL BE CONSIDERED WRONG IF YOU DO NOT understand THE FULL LOGIC OF ONE'S CULTURE.?

http://carm.org/ethical-relativism

plato.standford.edu/entries/relativism

Cognitivism

Cognitivism

• is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny.

Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, non-cognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense. Roughly put, non-cognitivists think that moral statements have no substantial truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes more similar to desires, approval or disapproval(The opposite view is that of Non-Cognitivism, the view that moral statements lack truth-value and do not assert propositions)

Cognitivism is perhaps best defined as the denial of non-cognitivism. Cognitivists think that moral sentences are apt for truth or falsity, and that the state of mind of accepting a moral judgment is typically one of belief. They think that typical utterances of indicative sentences containing moral predicates express beliefs in the same way that other sentences with ordinary descriptive predicates typically do. (There is some reason to be careful here since cognitivists may not need to employ the sense of ‘express’ that expressivists need to get their theory off the ground.(Cognitivism is the view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false)

Immanuel Kant

( 1724-1804 )

Theory

(open ended question )

Kant

Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant's model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

1.The mind is complex set of abilities (functions).

2.The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.

3.These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.

To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure are called transcendental arguments.

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, G. E. Moore's open question argument convinced many philosophers that moral statements were not equivalent to statements made using non-moral or descriptive terms. For any non-moral description of an action or object it seemed that competent speakers could without confusion doubt that the action or object was appropriately characterized using a moral term such as ‘good’ or ‘right’. The question of whether the action or object so described was good or right was always open, even to competent speakers. Furthermore, in the absence of any systematic theory to explain the possibility of synthetic as opposed to analytic identity claims, many were convinced that this showed that moral properties could not be identified with any natural (or supernatural) properties. Thus Moore and others concluded that moral properties such as goodness were irreducible sui generis properties, not identical to natural properties (Moore 1903, 15).

*Born in Konigsberg, Prussia

*First Modern Philosophy Professor

*(early)Influences/ Studied Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff

*(1747)- "Thoughts On The True Estimate Of Living Forces" (1764)"Observations On The Beautiful And Sublime" (1747)" The Metaphysics Of Morals"

Hume, Kant And Locke

Knowing the 'SELF'

Hume claims that we never directly apprehend the self. Unlike Descartes, he concludes from this that there is no substantial self. In a famous passage, Hume uses introspective awareness to show that the self is a non-substantial “bundle” of perceptions.

My Understanding

Locke's view of the self is usually considered less deflationary than Hume's view. But these philosophers agree that, in a very real sense, the nature of the self is bound up with one's reflections on one's states. For Hume, this means that the self is nothing over and above a constantly varying bundle of experiences. For Locke, it means that the self is defined by what we do—or, perhaps, can—self-attribute, through recollection and/or appropriation.

Kant repudiates the basic strategy shared by Locke and Hume, for he denies that self-awareness reveals objective facts about personal identity. He concurs with Descartes and Hume that we never directly apprehend the self (this fact is what he calls “the systematic elusiveness of the ‘I’”). And while he holds that we cannot avoid thinking of ourselves as persisting, unitary beings, he attributes this self-conception to necessary requirements for thought

Cognitivism

cognitivism and non-cognitivism is basically two objectives with defining whats right or wrong that focus on morality . With dealing Cognitivism there is a belief that there is a separation of wrong and right doing and as far as for non- cognitivism there is belief that there is no such thing.Non-cognitivism focus on how conclusions are concluded by feeling and what we understand is right or what we feel to be right or wrong.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

R.M Hare

Background on Peter Geach

• Born March 29 1916 in Chelsea, London
• Died December 21 2013 at the age of 97

• At the age of eight he bame a boarder at Llandaff Cathedral School.

• He studied classics and philosophy and Balliol Collge, Oxford,and converted to Catholicism while a student.

• Geach's marriage to fellow Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe was a fertile philosophical coupling like that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, only in the Geaches' case, literally so, since they had four daughters and three sons.

Catholicism

• Catholicism is used as broad term for describing specific traditions in the christian churches in theology, doctrine, liturgy, ethics, and spiritually

Born March 21, 1919

Beliefs of Catholicism

• They were a daunting duo in philosophical debate, and collaborated in translating Descartes, and in the movement (later called Analytical Thomism) to connect analytic philosophy with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. If anything, though, she was the more renowned philosopher of the two.

1. To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world. Man must know, love and serve God in a supernatural manner in order to gain happiness of heaven. Man is raised to the supernatural order only by grace, a free gift of God.

2. We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches us through the Catholic Church.

3. In order to be saved, all persons who have attained the use of reason must believe explicitly that God exist and that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked; in practice they must also believe in the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation.

4.By the Blessed Trinity we mean one and the same God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

5. By the Incarnation is meant that the Son of God, retaining His divine nature, took to Himself a human nature, that is, a body and soul like ours.

6.The Church is the congregation of all baptized persons united in the same true faith, the same sacrifice, and the same sacraments, under the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops in communion with him.

7. We find the chief truths taught by Jesus Christ through the Catholic Church in the Apostles' Creed.

http://www.catholic.org/prayers/beliefs.php

Peter Geach

Non- Cognitivism

Died January 29, 2002

Hare is the best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory.

A non-cognitivist theory of ethics implies that ethical sentences are neither true nor false, that is, they lack truth-values. Non-cognitivists think that moral statements have no substantial truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes more similar to desires, approval or disapproval.

Expressivism

Hare was a a English Moral Philosopher at the University of Oxford form 1966 until 1983

R.M Indifference of Logic

According to Hare, normative sentences are characterized by three ingredients: prescriptivity, universalizability and overridingness/supervenience; these three ingredients are logical characteristics of normative sentences by virtue of their meaning

moral sentences are prescriptions that are sentences used for guiding an action or to reply at the question: “What shall I do?”

In other words, an indicative sentence is used for telling someone that something is the case; an imperative is not about that – it is used for telling someone to make something the case. Differently from emotive theories, Hare claims that telling someone to make something the case implies a persuasive process from the speaker to the listener. Emotive theories, according to Hare, judge the success of imperative solely by their effects, that is, by whether the person believes or does what we are trying to get him or her to believe or do. It does not matter whether the means used to persuade him are fair or foul, so long as they persuade him/her. Persuasions imply a lack of rationality by moral theories; therefore using persuasion does not mean rationally replying to the question “What shall I do?”, but rather it is an attempt to answer the question in a particular way.

Areas of Interest:

*The history of Philosophy

*Philosophical logic

*Theory of knowledge

Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus it holds that moral statements do express beliefs and that they are apt for truth and falsity. But cognitivism need not be a species of realism since a cognitivist can be an error theorist and think all moral statements false. Still, moral realists are cognitivists insofar as they think moral statements are apt for robust truth and falsity and that many of them are in fact true.

Expressivism is a meta-ethical position which claims that moral judgements express attitudes rather than facts.

The problem of a logic of norms

Definitions of ethical non-cognitivism

The main challenge non-cognitivist theories face is about the possibility of a logic of norms. Cognitivist theories are not facing this dilemma as they claim there is no difference between normative and descriptive sentences; therefore the classic logic based on truth-values is sufficient for normative reasoning.

What about norms lacking truth-values?

Ethical non-cognitivism claims that prescriptions have a different nature than descriptive sentences; they have no truth-values, they are not describing anything, and they have a different illocutionary role. That is to say, they do not express factual claims or beliefs and therefore are neither true nor false they belong to a different illocutionary force, the prescriptive mood.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/26/peter-geach

His Career

These theories, as opposed to cognitivist theories, are not holding that ethical sentences are objectively and consistently true or false, neither even presupposing new entities platonic-like (in the way naturalistic theories do), and therefore they do not need to explain the way in which we can epistemically access these theories. In other words, non-cognitivism claims that the principal feature of normative sentences (their lacking of truth values) is a consequence of the illocutionary role of such sentences. In fact, these sentences are not bearing any cognitive meaning (such as assertions or descriptions), but they are just used to utter prescriptions.

• Peter Geach was the professor of logic at Leeds University (1966-81)

• From 1971 to 1974 Geach gave the Stanton Lectures at Cambridge on the philosophy of religion.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/

• He and Anscombe were very traditional on matters of sexual morality, and in 1968 they toasted the Humanae Vitae encyclical, which forbade Catholics' use of contraception, with champagne.

I you were to say that murder is wrong, you are not describing a moral aspect of reality, which in some way that could be true or false, but expressing an evaluative attitude towards murder

Frege-Geach Problem

The Frege-Geach problem is used as the main “test” to understand rationality in non-cognitivist theories. The problem was posed in P. Geach’s article “Assertion”, but the discussion starts back from Geach’s article “Imperatives and Deontic Logic”. In particular, Geach used his own test to attack non-cognitivist claims. If we find a positive solution to the Geach-Frege Problem we are de facto giving significance to non-cognitivist moral reasoning. On the contrary, if no solution to the problem is provided, the only option left open to moral reasoning is cognitivism or excluding ethics into the realm of rationality .

The problem is that sentences that express moral judgments can form part of semantically complex sentences in a way that an expressivist cannot easily explain

Final Project