Abstract
The main elements of Stevenson’s theory are by now familiar. A psychological distinction between cognition and interest is used to distinguish two different types of disagreement: disagreement in belief and disagreement in attitude. These are distinguished according to which kinds of psychological orientation (beliefs and/ or attitudes) are called into question or put at stake by the disagreement. The pragmatic meaning of the utterances occurring in the disagreement will indicate which psychological attitudes and/ or beliefs are required as part of one’s commitment in accepting those utterances. The presence of conativeaffective attitudes (or interests) in question preserves the reality of there being an issue. Conative-affective attitudes bring values into play, although value judgements will express not only attitudes but generally also beliefs.
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Cf. Stevenson’s statement (quoted supra, p. 7): ...”ethical analysis”, as here understood, includes most of what R.B. Perry would call the “theory of value”, except that it makes no reference to the terms peculiar to aesthetics, and only passing reference...to those of economics. Evaluation in aesthetics can be analyzed in very much the same way...’ (Ethics and Language, p. 92, n. 9). For Stevenson’s aesthetics see: ‘On “What is a Poem?”’, Philosophical Review, vol. lxvi(1957);’On the Reasons That Can be Given for the Interpretation of a Poem’, in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts; and ‘Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics’, in Max Black (ed.), Philosophical Analysis. Cf. also ‘Richards on the Theory of Value’, in Reuben Bower et. al. (eds.), I.A. Richards: Essays in His Honor.
Stevenson, following Dewey, does not believe that questioning must be confined to the means; practical questions can also be raised with respect to the end qua practical end: ‘...the present work...will endeavor to show that the full range of men’s beliefs, in all their variety, are no less relevant in establishing ends than they are in establishing means’ (EL, p. 12).
Namely, that ‘Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency’ (Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 48 (italics omitted), quoted in EL, p. 9). This is paraphrased by Stevenson as roughly equivalent to the identification of the meaning of ‘X is valuable’ with ‘X will satisfy more appetencies than it frustrates’ (ibid.). Cf. also the article on Richards’s theory of value cited supra, note 1.
See esp. ‘Moore’s Arguments against Certain Forms of Ethical Naturalism’, in Paul Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, and reprinted in Facts and Values; and EL, pp. 25, 108–09, 271 ff.
Cf. EL, pp. 16, 90–92; FV, pp. 58 ff.
Cf., for example, Stevenson’s treatment of the following issues as ethical: whether the government ought to put more restrictions on the sale of patent medicines (EL, p. 120), and whether schools ought to emphasize the humanities (EL, p. 125).
Stevenson, of course, strongly maintains that there is such a thing as ethical argument. Part of the force of the notion of disagreement in attitude is to preserve a strong sense of issue in moral, ethical and value questions—an issue relative to which arguments may be directed. In the preface to Facts and Values Stevenson says that a person who has ‘an unanalyzed half-knowledge’ of how to go about giving reasons for his ethical judgements may be led, when controversy becomes discouraging, to the thought that ‘reasoning about ethical matters is never really worthwhile. Such convictions are not easily dispelled: but it is not too much to say, I think, that they spring in good measure from ignorance, and from a kind of ignorance that analytical ethics can hope to correct’ (p. ix).
Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, pp. 275, 363.
See, e.g. Urmson, The Emotive Theory of Ethics, ch. iii; and G.J. Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, pp. 2–3, 24 ff. According to Urmson: ‘Roughly, the illocutionary force of an utterance is what one is doing in issuing the utterance, whereas the perlocutionary effect is what one brings about by issuing the utterance....Questions about illocutionary force are thus questions about how an utterance is to be taken—as an order, as a request or as advice, for example. Questions about perlocutionary effect are questions about the results of the issuing of the utterance’ (op. cit., pp. 27–28).
G.J. Warnock, ‘Ethics and Language’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, vol. i, The Human Agent (1966–67), pp. 202 ff.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, pp. 155, 159–61.
EL, pp. 139 ff., 144, 156 ff.
Thus, as this example shows, there is no ground for Aiken’s statement that Stevenson wants to reserve the emotive meaning of ‘rational’ and ‘valid’ (see below on ‘valid’) for reasoning involved in logic and science (Reason and Conduct, New York, 1962, p. 62). For in Stevenson’s usage ‘rational’ and ‘valid’ carry no emotive meaning at all. Certainly Stevenson gives no endorsement of scientific methods when he claims that these are the only rational methods of solving disputes; he could just as well have said that they are the only descriptive (cognitive) methods.
Cf. ‘Persuasive Definitions’, Mind, vol. xlvii (1938), reprinted as Essay III in Facts and Values.
Brandt, The Emotive Theory of Ethics’, Philosophical Review, vol. lix (1950), pp. 312–13.
For example, G.J. Warnock takes emotivism to conclude ‘that moral discourse is essentially non-rational, a matter not of argument but of psychological pressure, not of reasons but of efficacious manipulation’ (Contemporary Moral Philosophy, p. 29). Cf. also R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals, pp. 14–15.
‘Brandt’s Questions about Emotive Ethics’ Philosophical Review, vol. lix (1950).
‘...to say that a factual statement S is logically relevant to an ethical statement about an action A is the same thing as to say that, from S as a premise, something about the relative ethical satisfactoriness of A can, at least with probability, be inferred different from what could have been inferred from non-S as a premise....For example, if, as is supposed by some writers, “A is right” means “A is conducive to the survival of society”, then the factual statement “A is conducive to the survival of society” will entail that “A is right” and hence that statement S will be logically relevant to an ethical statement’ (op. cit., p. 310, Brandt’s emphasis). This is precisely how persuasive definitions function to make factual premises logically relevant to ethical judgements.
Ibid., p. 311 (Brandt’s emphasis). Emotivism agrees with what Brandt here calls common sense, but disagrees with what he calls the cognitive theory that logical irrelevance implies ethical irrelevance.
‘Stevenson’s Defense of the Emotive Theory’, Philosophical Review, vol. lix (1950).
Cf. ‘Some Puzzles for Attitude Theories of Value’, in R. Lepley (ed.), The Language of Value, (New York, 1957), and Brandt’s Ethical Theory, (1959), p. 211. The former piece contains the argument that if there is no objective and scientific relevance in ethics then we cannot say that people are mistaken (p. 173). This seems to involve the assumption that people cannot be wrong in any way other than one that is grounded in factual, scientific error.
The Emotive Theory of Ethics, pp. 47–48.
In Ethics and Language Stevenson held that the descriptive meaning of ‘X is good’, according to the first pattern, is that the speaker in fact approves of X; this was abandoned in Facts and Values.
Principia Ethica, pp. 38, 64.
The major exception is in the case of someone who professes a certain principle. When it is pointed out to him that an object falls under the scope of his principle, he is provided with a reason that is logically rather than psychologically related to his judgements. Cf. EL, pp. 115 ff.
For analogous patterns of analysis in aesthetics, see Stevenson’s ‘Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics’, in Max Black (ed.), Philosophical Analysis, esp. pp. 352–56.
Cf. EL, pp. 130–34, 147–51; FV, pp. 55–60, 95 ff., 191 ff., 197–203.
EL, p. 132; FV, p. 58. Cf. also Don Burks, ‘Persuasion, Self-Persuasion and Rhetorical Discourse’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. iii (1970).
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Satris, S. (1987). Reasons and Persuasion. In: Ethical Emotivism. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3507-5_6
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