Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following

Abstract

A supposed ground for non-cognitivism about values lies in a conception according to which descriptions of the world must be intelligible from no special point of view, whereas ascriptions of value are essentially made from within an affectively and conatively shaped form of life (§ 1). This paper expresses a skepticism about whether repeated applications of a value concept can be made out to be cases of going on in the same way, consistently with this kind of non-cognitivism, by explaining them as repeated responses to instances of a non-evaluatively specifiable kind (§ 2). Wittengstein's discussions of rule-following undercut a motivation for supposing that consistency in the application of a value concept would have to be like that ( § 3).The paper considers how this connects with a familiar argument that recommends non-cognitivism on the ground that moral judgments are action-guiding ( § 4). Finally, it urges that this conception of consistency in evaluative thinking cannot easily be rebutted by proponents of non-cognitivism( § 5).

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