Document Type : Research

Authors

• Seyyed Mohammad Ali Hodjati ¹
• MOhammad Hassan Arjmandi ²

¹ member of philosophy Dept.Tarbiat Modares University

² MA. in Dept. of Philosophy, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The “Frege-Geach problem” is one of the most challenging problems against the non-cognitivist view. The crisis is rooted in Ayer’s view. While affected by the main thesis of logical positivists –i.e., the verifiability principle, Ayer showed that moral propositions are neither analytic, necessarily true, nor experimental so that their truth rests on reality. He concluded that such propositions are deprived of propositional content and so truth-valueless. His suggested semantics is widely accepted among moral non-cognitivists and today is called ‘nonrepresentational semantics’, one of the negative principles in non-cognitivism. Using the linguistic-logical approach, Searle and Geach, independent from each other, formalized a problem by which non-descriptive semantics for moral judgments fundamentally have undergone criticism. However, this was not the end of the story since the process of responding to the challenge showed that the main source of the problem does not reside in what Geach said, but is rooted in a conspicuous semantics of complex moral judgments in which the moral judgments are embedded. Hence, the problem has confronted a more complicated form, the ‘embedded problem’.

Keywords

• moral expressivism
• performative utterance
• speech act
• semantic completeness
• compositionality
• logical adequacy

Main Subjects

• Analytical Philosophy