Folke Tersman

This is acknowledged by moral realists and non-cognitivists alike, but, for obvious reasons, they relate differently to this resemblance. For realists, it provides arguments, and for non-cognitivists, it provides potential trouble. Realists claim that the various points of resemblance between moral and factual discourse indicate that moral discourse simply is a kind of factual discourse.1 However, in recent years a number of interesting attempts have been made in trying to show that the realist appearance of moral discourse can after all be accommodated within a noncognitivist view.

However, Davidson is not only skeptical towards the view that sensory stimulation provides the basis for meaning. He has also raised some doubts about the idea that such phenomena provide the basis for knowledge. For example, he rejects the idea that the acceptance of an observation sentence could somehow be justified by the stimulations that normally cause it. This in turn leads him to doubt the thesis that observation sentences have a privileged epistemological status; a thesis that is central to all forms of empiricism, Quine’s included.

An increasingly popular strategy among critics of ethical anti-realism is to stress that the traditional arguments for that position work just as well in the case of other areas. For example, on the basis of that claim, it has recently been claimed that ethical expressivists are committed to being expressivists also about epistemic judgments (including the judgment that it is rational to believe in ethical expressivism). This in turn is supposed to seriously undermine their position. The purpose of my paper is to examine this challenge. I argue that, in spite of the many similarities between the discourses, there are also crucial differences and that those differences justify a mixed verdict about them.

W.V. Quine has expressed a fairly conventional form of non-cognitivism in those of his writings that concern the status of moral judgments. For instance, in Quine (1981), he argues that ethics, as compared with science, is ‘methodologically infirm’. The reason is that while science is responsive to observation, and therefore ‘retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth’ (p. 63), ethics lacks such responsiveness. This in turn leads Quine to contrast moral judgments with judgments that make cognitive claims (i.e., judgments that are true or false). In Quine (1986), he argues that ‘[m]oral judgments differ [...] from cognitive ones in their relation to observation’ (p. 664).