A.J. Ayer is an emotivist, which is a non-cognitivist meta-ethical position which classifies all ethical statements as meaningless displays of emotion. Meta-ethics, not to be confused with normative ethics, is meant to establish whether morality truly exists, and not which particular ethical statements are true. According to Ayer, there are no such things as genuine ethical judgements, rather, all ethical judgments are distinguished as pseudo-judgements (i.e. judgements that sound like they make sense but are truly meaningless). I find Ayer's position to be weak on a number of fronts, most notably how his emotivism is built upon flawed definitions of meaning, truth and emotion itself. In order to properly refute emotivism, I will analyze each
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So if I were to find one example where an ethical statement is either true or false, that would falsify this position. It is, therefore, vitally important for Ayer to be very clear as to what he considers to be true. Ayer adopts the deflationary/redundancy truth theory, which states that because truth is not a property of the senses, the word truth exists only for grammatical convenience. This means, that to Ayer, there is no difference between the statements "the apple is red" and "it is true that the apple is red." But, if truth were not a property then it would be impossible to distinguish between truth and falsity. Moreover, truth goes beyond grammatical convenience. For instance, I'm drawn to believe that the statement "it is true that the apple is blue" is false, regardless of its claim. This is because that statement does not possess the property of truth. So where does this property of truth come from? My reason and intuition lead me to adopt the correspondence theory of truth as a more suitable alternative. This theory holds that truth is a relationship between sentences and the world. In other words, when we say "it is true that the apple is red," we are saying that the apple is red corresponds to the apple being red in the word. In contrast, the deflationary theory states that these two sentences are identical and that the only truth condition is the sentence itself. Now that I have adopted a correspondence theory of truth, I will attempt to demonstrate how the principles of emotivism do not correspond with
So if I were to find one example where an ethical statement is either true or false, that would falsify this position. It is, therefore, vitally important for Ayer to be very clear as to what he considers to be true. Ayer adopts the deflationary/redundancy truth theory, which states that because truth is not a property of the senses, the word truth exists only for grammatical convenience. This means, that to Ayer, there is no difference between the statements "the apple is red" and "it is true that the apple is red." But, if truth were not a property then it would be impossible to distinguish between truth and falsity. Moreover, truth goes beyond grammatical convenience. For instance, I'm drawn to believe that the statement "it is true that the apple is blue" is false, regardless of its claim. This is because that statement does not possess the property of truth. So where does this property of truth come from? My reason and intuition lead me to adopt the correspondence theory of truth as a more suitable alternative. This theory holds that truth is a relationship between sentences and the world. In other words, when we say "it is true that the apple is red," we are saying that the apple is red corresponds to the apple being red in the word. In contrast, the deflationary theory states that these two sentences are identical and that the only truth condition is the sentence itself. Now that I have adopted a correspondence theory of truth, I will attempt to demonstrate how the principles of emotivism do not correspond with