#114 Simon Blackburn - What is Ethical Emotivism?

27:40Simon Blackburn:That's the idea behind the metaphor, the ladder's lying horizontal. That's this ladder that goes sideways. It's not going any higher. The first philosopher to use that argument you've just used, which is a very powerful argument, was Frege. Yes, yeah. And an argument that's good enough for Frege and Ramsey and Wittgenstein and Storsen and Quine is good enough for me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think this might also have some interesting implications for believers in God. Because God is omniscient, which means he knows all true facts. And if you have this problem of regress, that every time you say something is true, you create a new fact.

28:21And that sort of gives you this infinite regress, that would mean that God needs to know an actually infinite number of things, which almost seems a bit redundant. Like most of God's cognition is taken up and it's true that it's true that it's true that it's true. Yes. And so maybe this isn't a good way to think about truth. Well, exactly. And if it doesn't add anything to say it's true that, like for the 15th time, maybe it also doesn't add anything to say it for the first time. Yeah, indeed. And so we have this idea of deflationary theories of truth that to say the chair is red is true is just to say the chair is red.

28:57and one of the reasons this is so popular amongst non-cognitivist ethicists is because in the moral environment what the realist says to criticize someone like me for example they'll come along and they'll say well alex i know you think that murder is wrong but can you say that it's

29:12Simon Blackburn:true i just did yeah i already did say that it's true it doesn't add anything to say that it's true and so it fits in quite nicely with a with an expressivist got it exactly you got it exactly That's right. And from about 1990 onwards, I mentioned Paul Horwich wrote then, that's become gradually much more accepted, which is why I think the old labels of cognitivist, non-cognitivist, and so on are less popular today than they used to be. Those battle lines are not quite as solid as people used to think. For a long time now on this show, I've been telling people that, broadly speaking, I'm an ethical emotivist.

29:59I never like to commit myself to it just because I'm agnostic about most things, as I like to say. But I do try to make sense of what's going on when I see somebody kick a homeless person, and I feel something more than just the descriptive fact that a person's been kicked. What's this extra thing that I'm aware of in my mind? It seems like it's a feeling. It's something like stop or don't or boo or something like that, right? And so I think, okay, it might make sense to say that the ethical component of these statements is an expression of emotion. You yourself are not an emotivist.

30:37Simon Blackburn:Well, emotion, you know, if you study emotion, you start to get... very tied up with things like anger and fear, things which have a very pronounced phenomenology. You know, your skin breaks into a sweat and this sort of thing. And that's what people associate with the idea of emotion. I prefer to work with the term attitude. I think it has the same force and it's got the same seat in our sentiments. But an attitude doesn't necessarily make you hot under the collar. I mean, I've got the attitude that Donald Trump's—no, I won't take that because that does make me hot under the collar. But I suppose I have the attitude that it was a pity that Cromwell won the Civil War.

31:43Simon Blackburn:I regret that. I think it's such a shame. That doesn't make me hot under the collar. It's a perfectly, as it were, inert attitude. Interesting. It doesn't by itself give me much of a motive to do anything. It would give me a motive to dissent from somebody you thought that Cromwell was a thoroughly good thing. But that's about all, because it's not part of my practical life. But emotions, I think, are essentially episodes in your practical life. And so that's why I don't entirely recommend the term emotivist. But of course, there's no term attitudinalist, which is a pity. Well, perhaps we can start a trend.

32:31and let's get that going. I don't know though, because I think that's interesting what you're saying, that you can have attitudes towards something, ethically speaking, without, as you say, getting hot under the collar. But even the way you just said then, because it's such a shame that that didn't happen. I feel like maybe you have to pick something which, in order to find something which isn't that emotionally moving you also have to pick something which you wouldn't actually find that morally important like genuinely as something you would express um

33:08Simon Blackburn:yes i mean it's unusual it's it's not that unusual um i mean consider people talking about fiction.

33:22Simon Blackburn:Was Emma just a silly little girl, or was she a heroine? And you can imagine a couple of literary critics getting the pros and cons of that, bringing it up, knowing the text, knowing the episodes, what Jane Austen told us, what she didn't tell us, and so on. and they do it far better than I can do it off the top of my head. But it's not going to be something, I mean, in any profession, as it were, if they're professionally arguing it, they can probably get hot under the collar. But in itself, it's not being hot under the collar about Emma's behavior. It's being hot under the collar about what's said about Emma's behavior.

34:09Simon Blackburn:Yeah. And that's a different object of criticism. I think that, you know, there are obviously history and fiction are two cases where you don't have episodes of emotion in the same way that you do if you, as it were, walked into Auschwitz. and you'd feel the horror. But nevertheless, it's the case where you walk into Auschwitz, which gives you your moral basis, your moral bearings. That's where you start, I think. Do you think it would be possible in principle? This is just a question about motivation and ethics, I suppose. Would it be possible in principle for somebody to walk into Auschwitz, feel absolutely nothing, like nothing about their emotional disposition changes, and yet they truthfully express, this is wrong?

35:14Simon Blackburn:I don't think so, no. I think that they might mouth a sentence, it's wrong, but if they feel nothing, I think they're misusing it. I think they're not expressing a feeling that they've got. They're not expressing revulsion or a sense of shame or sense of horror, any of the things which you'd expect. And I think insofar as they're absolutely cold, then they may be mimicking moral disapproval, perhaps to show that they're part of the gang or something. But they're mimicking it. We said that... With the Venmo debit card, you can Venmo everything. Your favorite band's merch? You can Venmo this. Or their next show?

36:02You can Venmo that. Visit Venmo.me slash debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. The card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. It's difficult to define what, like, wrongness is. We just talk about, like, what it does. When somebody looks at Auschwitz and they say that's wrong, and I'm not talking about someone who's steeped in ethical literature here, just someone you meet on the street. I say, what do you mean by that? And they'd probably say, well, I struggle to define this thing wrongness or badness, but they still mean that there is this thing about something like Auschwitz that is wrong and that's true.

36:44And if I try to offer an account of saying, well, I think you're essentially just expressing an attitude there, they would say, no, no, no, it's more than that. I'm saying something true about this thing called wrongness. At the very least, if we can't define wrong or bad, in terms of what it is. Can we at least get to grips with what people think they mean by those terms?

37:06Simon Blackburn:Could I pick you up on something? You did this before as well. When you talk about expressing an attitude, you tend to insert the word just, or just expressing an attitude, or merely expressing an attitude. And I think that has to be resisted. I mean, attitudes are extremely important. It's far more important to me if your attitude towards me is that I ought to be shot than it is if your attitude towards me is the belief that I was at university in Oxford, which I wasn't. I was at university in Cambridge. you've got that wrong, but it's unimportant. Whereas if you think that I ought to be shot, that's not a mere attitude.

37:56Simon Blackburn:It's potentially a very dangerous attitude. But some people will say that they're different kinds of statements, like the idea that you studied at Oxford is not an attitude. It's a belief. It's a truth claim that's false. else. And I think that the person I'm embodying here would say that in the same way, when I say that the Nazis were wrong, I'm making a truth claim. I'm stating a belief. This is something that I believe to be true about the world. And yet here we are saying that what will sound to them is like it's just an expression. I think that the contrast between attitude and belief is not straightforward.

38:40Simon Blackburn:Me too. So I think that we're apt to go down another rabbit hole there.

38:51Simon Blackburn:We've already established that if you use the indicative form, you can use it. It's true that without blushing.

39:02Simon Blackburn:I think it's important to put on top of that, and this takes us on to the notorious Frege-Geach problem. The difference between expressing an attitude by means of an indicative sentence and expressing it in some other way is not cast iron. Language is very flexible at this point. So, to take a favorite example of mine, um cato allegedly said that carthage was to be destroyed uh carthage delendom est and latin has the gerundum there um now he could just have said let's go and destroy carthage That would have been an imperative form, but expressing an attitude of dislike of the existence of Carthage, wishing to abolish it.

40:12Simon Blackburn:He could have expressed his wish that way, or he could have said Carthage is to be destroyed. I think the second has a slightly more public face. It makes it plain that Cato doesn't think that he's out of line or idiosyncratic about this. He thinks that, you know, all right-thinking people are going to agree with me, or I'm going to try and get them to agree with me. Carthage is to be destroyed. But the difference then is a difference that Peter Geach did emphasize. If you just say, boo to Carthage, or boo to the existence of Carthage, let's do away with Carthage, you can't say if, let's do away with Carthage, then one thing or another.

41:07If you say Carthage is to be destroyed, you can say, if Carthage is to be destroyed, then is Tyre and Sidon to be destroyed with it?

41:20Simon Blackburn:Or if Carthage is to be destroyed, we'll need a bigger navy than we've got at present. Interesting. That's a great example, yeah. So, the advantage of giving the attitude, or the injunction in this case, the plan, an indicative form, is that it renders inference and discussion possible. Mm-hmm. Now, Geach famously said, ah, this is an abyss that nothing can cross. Either it's on the side of woo-hooray, it can't enter into these inferences, or it's on the other side, it's proposition, and then it can. But never the twain shall meet. and that's emotivism's problem. And a lot of ink's been spilt about this.

42:15Simon Blackburn:This impressed philosophers and worried them. I tend to, nowadays, to reverse it, to say, no, the exact reason that we have these interchanging forms is that when we use the indicative form, we know about making inferences and we need to make inferences.

42:39Simon Blackburn:The commander of the army needs to say things like, if Carthage is to be destroyed, then we're going to need a lot more ships. If Carthage is to be destroyed, we can't do it with the army we've got. We're going to have to employ some Spaniards and so on. So anybody intent on serious planning is going to have to take the fruition of a plan as something he can make hypotheses about. And he can embed into other statements. But there's a reason for that. The reason is the one I mentioned, namely that it enables inference. And inference is important. If you just go around saying boo to Garthage, you haven't yet, as it were, given the commander-in-chief his marching orders.

43:38Simon Blackburn:Yes. You've just expressed a feeling or an attitude. Yes, exactly. So it may be right to say that in ethics, or in some of the forms in which ethics takes, we go beyond just expressing feeling and attitude. You see, I use the word just there, just expressing feeling and attitude. I think we, and this was first pointed out by a man called Charles Stevenson in the 1940s in the book Ethics and Language, we offer ethical discourse to each other partly as a matter of persuading people, not just content to say, this is how it is for me. we're also saying this is how i want it to be for you i want you to share this attitude so it's a persuasive exercise as much as anything else or a reassuring exercise if i think you do share it but i'd like to just hear that you share it um but having um thought of it as shared, we then can also switch to the gerundive and think of it as something to be done.

45:00Simon Blackburn:So there's something to be done. Carthage is to be destroyed. Let's build the army, let's build the navy. Yeah. I mean, you can't make inferences from expressions of emotion, like logically speaking. You can't say, if, boo, Carthage, then open a window. No, that's right. That just isn't, it's like saying, if three, then go and open a window. It just doesn't make sense. Just grammatically not sensible. And so, as far as I understand it, the so-called Frager-Geach problem, named after Frager and Geach, also known as the embedding problem, is a problem for, I'll use the term emotivism, because with the caveat that we've said it might describe attitudes.

45:42emotivism basically says that when i say murder is wrong i'm just expressing an emotion just about murder yeah i that's that's that's what i'm doing and to be clear one confusion i'm not reporting what i feel like murder is wrong doesn't mean i don't like murder it's not made true by your like or dislike yeah because that could it could be true that i don't like murder that's not expression that's a fact about my brain instead murder is wrong is the expression of that of that dislike so it's as a famously had it something like boo murder right or murder and then an angry emoji next to it right with a bunch of exclamation marks okay that's what is wrong ads okay so it's just an expression the embedding problem is about what happens when we use those phrases embedded in other contexts.

46:35So if I say something like, I wonder if murder is wrong, those words murder is wrong can't mean I'm expressing boo murder because I'm saying, well, I wonder if murder is wrong. But I can't say, I wonder if boo murder, if in order to say boo murder, I have to express something. And so you have this so-called embedding problem that either the emotivist is right, but this is what ethical statements mean. But as soon as they show up in, you know, if-then statements, or suddenly it changes, or that's not what was meant all along. And what I want to focus in on here, because I want to take this somewhere, is specifically the context of syllogisms.

47:19So a syllogism, for our listeners, is an argument that has two premises and a conclusion. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, for example. Now, here's one syllogism. If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong. Premise two, murder is wrong. Conclusion, therefore, murdering Simon is wrong. That seems valid. Absolutely. And everybody would look at that and go, the conclusion follows from those premises. The problem is, for an argument to be valid means that the conclusion can't be false if the premises are true. But if premise two, murder is wrong, it's just an expression of emotion, I'm just going boo murder, then it can't be true.

48:08It can't be false. It can't be true. Any more than saying stand up can be true or false.

48:13Simon Blackburn:It's an expression of emotion in the indicative form. Yeah. So in this particular context, it helps understand what this means. Most people think of logical validity as requiring true and false statements, with true statements following from true statements. And yet the emotivist says that premise two there is an expression of emotion, which most people think expressions don't have truth value. So how do you get a logically valid syllogism from non-truth apt sentences? Well, that's a beautiful exposition of exactly Geech's problem. He took the example, if lying is wrong, then getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong.

49:02Simon Blackburn:Lying is wrong, so getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong. It's exactly the same problem. Yes, well, it means there's got to be a complication. Now, the complication that I think does the job is the transition to the indicative form. Because we've already established, I think, as we talked about deflationism, that truth isn't going to be the problem. It's just if you've got the indicative form, you've got the possibility of inference. And my countergeach is to say, we've got the indicative form because it gives us the possibility of inference. Now, of course, you can give a functional account of why you want inference when you're expressing your attitude.

50:01Simon Blackburn:I mean, one example was if you approve of giving money to the homeless, then you approve of giving money to female homeless.

50:22Simon Blackburn:you need to be, as it were, able to be taken to account for your attitudes. If your attitudes are all in pieces, so you think that lying is wrong, if lying is wrong, then getting your little brother to lie for you is wrong. And then you don't say, no, no, but getting your little brother-clife for you isn't wrong, well, you may be about to do a modus tollens saying, since not the conclusion, not the premises, not one of the premises. But otherwise, if you try and hold everything there, you're going to be in contradiction. But can you have a contradiction if there's no... Do you mean to say that when we put these ethical expressions into their indicative form, they do now have truth value?

51:14They are now the kind of thing that can be true or false yeah absolutely and that's because truth and falsity kind of is just an expression yeah because to say it's true is just to express it yes in that case then when i look at a statement like if murder is wrong then murdering simon is wrong i might say okay so maybe when i say that that's that's a true conditional that that's just an expression of the same thing, but what is the thing that I'm expressing in a conditional? Because when I say if murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong. If I say that conditional is true, I'm not expressing either of those component parts.

51:57I could think murder is fine, but I could say if murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong, but I think murder is fine. So what am I expressing when I say that the conditional claim is true?

52:06Simon Blackburn:Well, there are various ways of putting it. I mean, one thing, this is going to sound more complicated than it is, would be you're expressing disapproval of holding the one attitude without holding the other. Right. So you're actually amongst your objects of concern is the lattice of implications. Prime delivery is fast. How fast are we talking? We're talking puzzle toys and look pad delivered so fast you can get this puppy under control. Fast. We're talking chew toys at your door without really waiting fast. Pea pads, clothing mat, and peg hem, fast and fast. And there's training T-R-E-A-T-S faster than you can say sit fast.

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53:02Simon Blackburn:In your approvals and disapprovals. Because approvals and disapprovals don't stand by themselves. We feel the need to defend them, feel the need to say what they involved. Supposing, you know, if Keir Starmer says, I approve of, I don't know, industry or something. You know, you might say, do you approve of all industry? If you approve industry, do you approve of unpaid housework? You know, and so on. We want to know what the implications of his approval are. Similarly, for ourselves, we may not have realized that our attitudes carry an implication which we may not be all that happy with. And teasing that out is part of the stuff and substance of ethical debate.

54:03Simon Blackburn:I mean, take, for example, the, what do they call themselves, resolute kind of benevolent people who think you ought to give away all your surplus income above of whatever the minimum you settle on is.

54:28Simon Blackburn:Have they worked it out? Well, if you do that, if everyone does that, then what will the consequences be for consumption and therefore for production and therefore for wages and the economy in general? I mean, if everybody does that, Are you sure that the world as you know it will go on the same as you always expected it to? It would be very nice for people who get richer, but it may be very nasty for everyone else, and it may in turn become very nasty for the people you thought you were helping. So unless you've sorted all that out, it's not a very sensible policy to go around advocating. similarly pours just stop oil have you any idea about the number of things oil is used in you know would you any longer be able to buy your fruit drinks in the cartons that you're used to would you anymore be able to wear your fleece do you anymore be way able to wear your trainers um the answer to all those questions is no but seeing that implication is something which i think you've got a duty to do yeah it's really important to be able to talk about the implications of ethical claims but the problem for the emotivist is that if it's just an expression it seems tricky to get these logical corollaries of ethical expressions.

56:03But the strategy I really like, and a strategy that sent me down a path of all kinds of thinking when I first read it, was this particular strategy you just referred to in response to the Fregegeach problem. Let's take that conditional statement, which I just asked you about. If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong. And we want to say that conditional is true without expressing either of those individual components. And you said, well, okay, what you're expressing there is a disapproval of holding one of those beliefs without the other. And there's this wonderful sort of language you can construct around this.

56:40So if we adopt the boo-yay language of Aya, murder is wrong means boo murder, and murdering Simon is wrong means boo murdering Simon. So how can we make sense of if boo Simon, then if boo murder then boo murdering simon because that that that's not just like true

57:03Simon Blackburn:you don't necessarily hold of those both well suppose i mean it's let's just say for simplicity's sake that the opposite of boo is hooray yeah so hooray would cover just tolerating something doesn't mean you actively approve of it but you don't disapprove okay um well um boo Boo to boo-murder without boo-murder Simon. You could put that in a parenthesis. Booing murder without booing murdering Simon. That seems really weird. I can't get on all fours with somebody who says that, it seems, as it were, illogical in the strictest sense. Okay, so boo to that. Boo to that whole thing. So we end up with something like boo brackets, boo murder at the same time as yay murdering Simon.

58:09Boo to all of that at the same time. And that's what we mean when we say if murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong, because what we're saying is boo to boo murder and yet yay murdering simon yes exactly so and you have to do it in this

58:23Simon Blackburn:annoyingly negative negative way yes and and and that itself um gives us a motive for going over to the form we're all familiar with the indicative form so let's take a look at this syllogism that we've got which is if murder is wrong then murdering simon is wrong murdering simon is murder is wrong conclusion therefore murdering simon is wrong so the emotivist says something like, premise one, boo towards, bracket, so we're booing, brackets, boo murder and yay murdering Simon. Premise two is, well, boo murder. And because we've previously expressed boo towards boo murdering Simon and - Not. Towards boo murder and hurrah murdering Simon, if we do express boo murder, then we've kind of committed ourselves to boo murdering Simon.

59:16And that's what the conclusion is. It's like this emotional corollary of expressing your discontent with these two simultaneous things and saying one of those things and therefore having to say the second thing.

59:28Simon Blackburn:Yeah, I developed a logic like that in a long, long time ago. This was in Spreading the Word. And it's got its wrinkles. I mean, I still think it was very important to do it because it showed that we're not, as it were, founding things on sand. It showed that we need our attitudes to have the kind of structure and the kind of integrity as a whole that we also want through our beliefs. And that was, I thought, an important step in answering Geach, Prager Geach. It attracted a lot of discussion, some of it rather silly, some of it not. The most acute critic was probably a man called Bob Hale, who worked at St.

1:00:32Simon Blackburn:Andrews, and he was a logician. And he had some quite interesting things about the recursions involved, about the increases in complexity.

1:00:51Simon Blackburn:I think now I've sort of lost interest in the actual complexities of the 1984, it was, 1984 construction. I haven't defended those in recent years, because I think the nerve of my current answer to Geech is that it's precisely because we want the inferential simplicity that we're used to in syllogistic reasoning, that we transfer to the indicative form. Can I ask you then, and I know, as you say, this is a language that was concocted a while ago, and it might not best represent how you think about things now, but the thought that this calls to arise in me, let's say, is that I thought, wow, this is a really interesting way to emotivize if-then statements, right?

1:01:54Because I've got this problem that I think morals are emotive, but what about if it's a conditional? Oh, well, I can just emotivize the conditional. There we go. Problem solved. Then I suddenly thought, well, couldn't we also then, in principle, emotivize all conditionals? So outside of just the moral, like boo murder and yay murder let's take a non-moral claim like if it's raining outside then i'll get wet could i not also sort of say that what i'm doing there if if if a deflationary theory of truth is correct and by saying something is true i'm just sort of expressing it in some sense what i'm saying is boo brackets yay it will rain at the same time as boo yeah i will get wet And so I've sort of emotivized non-moral syllogisms as well.

1:02:46Simon Blackburn:Well, I wouldn't use the term emotivized, but the same kind of theory was given for conditionals. In fact, it's implicit in Hume. If we go back to Hume on causation, he's going to give the same sort of story about if the billiard ball, if billiard ball A hits billiard ball B, billiard ball B must go. So he's going to give the same story about the if-them. You're daft if you think that billiardball A hits billiardball B without also expecting billiardball B to go. But Gilbert Ryle wrote a famous paper, If So Because, back in about 1950. And he said that by issuing an implication, you're issuing an inference ticket.

1:03:41Simon Blackburn:That is, you're permitting or allowing or maybe insisting. I mean, somebody who gives you a ticket doesn't usually insist that you go to the concert. but it may be that if you issue the inference ticket, you're entitled to go from A to B. If A, then B. It's also, as it were, an injunction that you've got to go from A to B, that you're at fault if you don't. So he talked about inference tickets, the licensing of inference tickets. Well, of course, licensing something is like expressing an attitude. It's not in itself saying something, but it becomes saying something if saying something is the way to issue the license, which was exactly how Raoul thought of it.

1:04:33Interesting. Because for me, I've hinted at this a few times, and careful listeners to the show might have picked up on it. I'm really interested in the extent to which the way the emotivist looks at ethics and says, I know you think you're being all propositional and truth claims and correspondence, but actually you're just expressing emotions. I wonder the extent to which we can apply that same thinking outside of ethics. So we've just done something like that to conditionals. Right. But like the emotivist wants to say that just even the statement murder is wrong is some kind of expression or attitude.

1:05:12And I'm interested to the extent that we might be able to apply that to statements like, the table is brown, or you are wearing a jacket. And I don't know how much that has been explored in this context before, and where I could begin to look to find interesting

1:05:29Simon Blackburn:thinking on that. I think you could find it probably at its most richest. I mentioned Ryle. Ryle, unfortunately, I think, worked in the 1950s in Oxford. And, of course, ordinary language was the sort of be-all and end-all under J.L. Austin. But Ryle had some roots in the pragmatist tradition. that is the Americans' person, James, and perhaps to some extent Dewey. And the pragmatists, rather like I mentioned the Scottish sentimentalists, having told you about the tripartite story, what the properties are in ordinary natural terms, what they do, the exciter, an admiration in us, what we express, the admiration.

1:06:31Simon Blackburn:Just as they had that three-part story and then stopped. So the pragmatists were very keen that you didn't look at abstractions, didn't look at things like truth or logic. Um, uh, Peirce has a wonderful saying, um, we, we, we must not start with pure ideas, vagabond thoughts, which tramp the public highways with no human habitation, but with men and their conversation. So what you have to do is look at what people are up to or doing. Yeah. To that extent, this is a link with the ordinary language movement of Oxford. You don't immediately go for the big abstract terms. So as I put it in one of my books, when Pontius Pilate says, what is truth?

1:07:36Simon Blackburn:The right answer, for deflationists especially, is to say, you tell me what you're interested in. If you're interested in whether this guy is guilty, then the truth consists in him being guilty. If you're interested in showing that Barabbas is right about everything, then the truth is Barabbas has been right about everything. But you can't say in general what truth is because I don't know what you're interested in. Yeah, it's like, what is, well, I guess you could say truth is, well, no, it's not even right to say that truth is affirmation. No, you could affirm falsehoods. I agree that the important thing to do is to look at what people are actually doing, right?

1:08:22And I'll run this by you just to round things up here, because I wanted to see what you think of this. because it's kind of fun to think about but some people think i'm losing my mind when i start going down this this train of thought like let's take a the most non-emotive statement we could think of like you know the table exists right and then i ask myself okay what am i doing when i say when i affirm the table exists well well why do i think the table exists because i can see it okay why do i believe that because i can see it it's there well because i believe that my sense data is accurate okay why do i believe that my sense data is accurate because if i didn't i'd be in some kind of you know cartesian skeptical hell right okay why not just do that and i have to say something like i just i just boo you know and so if what i'm kind of expressing at least to some degree by saying the table exists is my discontent with the negation of this fundamental premise, you know, sense data accurate.

1:09:32If I say it's false that my sense data is accurate, and I'm sort of like, no, no, boo. And when I say that my sense data is accurate, the motivation for saying that, what I'm doing is I'm reacting badly to the opposite. If that's like an expression, like a boo to that, then when I express that the table exists, if that's what I'm fundamentally expressing, then is it not in some sense, is it not sensible to say that when I say the table exists, I'm to some degree expressing an emotion?

1:10:08Simon Blackburn:Well, I think you're expressing confidence in your own the deliverance of your own senses. But of course, we're often not aware of the interconnectedness and therefore the complexity of what we're expressing. I mean, I thought you were going to get not so much onto a general anti-Cartesian view of your own sense experience that can't be just the, there's a matrix reality. But to point out that to say that the table exists is to have a huge variety of commitments. If you try and occupy that space, you'll fail. If you try to do all sorts of things, you'd meet resistance from the table. if you put your glass down, it'll be held up.

1:11:12Simon Blackburn:If, if, if, if, then. And so, you know, insofar as conditionals have an expressive side to them, they're inference tickets. You've handed yourself a great sheaf of inference tickets. And just by saying the table exists, you're committed and your expectations spread across far more than you might have thought. Yes. And that, I think, is fine. It reminds us of the, to use a word I've used quite often, the interconnectedness of things. That is that you know philosophy likes to split up into you know there's lectures on epistemology and then there are lectures on metaphysics and then there are lectures on ethics and so on and maybe that's an artifact of the curriculum yeah nothing to do with the way things come together in our minds That certainly seems plausible to me.

1:12:23But when I say to people, there is some degree to which I think when I say the table exists, as I say, what I'm doing is expressing an attitude indirectly because I'm expressing an attitude towards my sense data. And it might not be your sense data. It's just wherever it happens to bottom out for you, whatever you're doing. So suppose that somehow I broke down my belief that the table existed and I kept breaking it down and why and why. And I got down to the laws of logic themselves. I said, well, because something can't be true and false at the same time. And then you said, why not? I would then still have to say, it just has to be that way.

1:13:02It says, okay, well, just consider for a moment that P is true and false at the same time. What does your brain do? It kind of goes, no. It kind of goes, boo. I'm not I just and it doesn't reason it it's almost pre-rational it doesn't justify it it just feels it yes you can't play the game if you exactly and see the truth and false but if that foundational thing that you are I see people call it an intuition it's just intuitively or maybe self-evidently true again as I mentioned before I think another good word for that might just be

1:13:34Simon Blackburn:like really strong feeling well it's um possible to um expand feeling yeah to all so all the dispositions of our minds i think that yeah yeah i suppose that's what i'm interested in in the legitimacy not even so much of doing that but but of conceiving of of it in that way of widening our scope of emotive understanding. Well, I think it's a good line to follow because it gets us away from what Wilfred Sellers called the myth of the given. I mean, Sellers thought that one of the great mistakes of modern philosophy, a mistake which was basically the split between the analytical movements, Russell and Moore, and the preceding Oxford idealists or Hegel or Kant, was that they thought in atomistic terms, they thought that the table being there is a datum, it's an item of experience which is given, it's a given to you.

1:14:53Simon Blackburn:Then what was given might only be sense data, but it might be the table, if you're less of an indirect realist.

1:15:06Simon Blackburn:and you know Sellars thought and of course the idealist thought that this was a mistake a wonderful metaphor Russell mentions is that Bradley and this is the Oxford idealist of the 19th century thought that the world was a pot of treacle whereas Moran he think that it's a heap of shot A heap of shot has these sort of atomistic individual shot. There's nothing much to relate them. If you pour them out, they're just a heap. Whereas pot of treacle, you can't separate anything out. And the idea of so-called holism came back into philosophy in the middle of the 20th century after it had been exiled by the original analytical philosophers.

1:16:09Simon Blackburn:And with holism comes the kind of view that you've been sympathetic to, that you can't just have one inference. A piece of datum is going to be a cornucopia of many inferences and many ripples throughout your whole web of belief. Okay, then one more thing then to round out, which is just one more strategy, a bit of a novel one, let's say, to emotivize propositions or things which are generally not thought to be emotional, like simple propositions, like the table exists or whatever. Here's one strategy. We might say, okay, let's suppose that we're like materialists. Let's suppose that all that exists is matter.

1:17:00There's no God. There's no ultimate mind, right? What is a proposition? Well, a proposition is a declarative statement. It says that something is the case, something like that. Okay. So where and in what way and when do propositions exist? Well, for the materialist, propositions only exist when they're being thought or when they're being spoken. Otherwise, propositions don't exist. The things they refer to, like chairs, might exist. But the proposition, the chair is read, only exists when someone's thinking it or speaking it.

1:17:31Simon Blackburn:Can I just interrupt? Please. It seems to me that you're trespassing against Peirce's dictum, but proposition is an abstraction. Asking what it is is already trespassing against the dictum. We must not start with pure ideas, vagabond thoughts that tramp the public highways with no human habitation, but with men and their conversations. Now, how do we use the idea of a proposition in a conversation? Well, we talk about what you said, what you think. Those are propositions. And they're used to locate items of information or misinformation that we want to tell each other about. That is, they have their home in the conversations of people.

1:18:25Simon Blackburn:And I think it's a mistake to ask what they are, as it were.

1:18:33Simon Blackburn:Obviously, it's like asking whether the tree falling alone in the forest makes a sound. I think they are, whether or not anybody's talking, they are what they will be saying if they were talking. Yeah. But okay, so is it fair to say then that if a proposition exists when it's being spoken or when it's being thought, given that speaking and thinking are both things that people do, they're actions, does that mean I could sort of say that a proposition is an action? No, I don't think so. Is it a thing that's thought or a thing that's spoken? Actions make it salient to talk about them. Hmm. Interesting.

1:19:19Simon Blackburn:You don't want to talk about them if there's no action. Yeah, because of course the rounding up of that argument might be that, well, if propositions are in some sense actions or things that people do, actions or things that people do don't have truth value, and therefore propositions wouldn't have truth value, which seems a little bit strange. So I wanted to, I guess, probe how you understand what a proposition is, but I guess just like with the ethical question from earlier, I feel like that's trespassing somewhere that philosophers dare not tread. Well, I think we've learned the wisdom of not treading there.

1:19:55Right, I see. Yeah, that's an interesting way of thinking about that problem too. Or whatever the case, it's something that, as I said earlier, I think has a surprising connection to what listeners of this show might have heard recently in some of my discussions with physicists about the nature of what science does. In other words, I think if anybody's a little bit dissatisfied with the ethicist sort of saying, well, we just don't do that. We just don't talk about that. We don't go there. You say, well, why not? We could ask the same thing for the scientist who doesn't go there when it comes to the metaphysics of what stuff is actually made of.

1:20:32Simon Blackburn:Yes. Well, there is a wisdom in paring down the number of things that there are to trouble one's pretty head about. I think that's also true. enough to trouble oneself about in the world as we have it, not only in the flights of metaphysics. Yeah, I think it's another great example of why so many people could ridicule philosophy, because you could sit here for four hours and discuss what a proposition is, and then go out and not change anything about the way that you actually use them in practice. Yes, that's right. But one proposition that I can… I think philosophers need to shake off that unreal kind of image by not dealing with questions which we don't have to deal with.

1:21:19Yeah. Well, an interesting message and injunction, and I'm genuinely interested to see what people will make of it. Simon Blackburn, thank you so much for taking the time.

1:21:27Simon Blackburn:Thank you for giving me the time.