Evaluative Statements

1
Evaluative Statements

• When you judge an action or behavior to be good
  or bad, moral or immoral, right or wrong.

2

• Your judgment about the positive or negative
  worth or value of an act, behavior, object, or
  event.
• When you prescribe what should or ought to be
  done or when you state what actions are
  obligatory or prohibited

3

• Pursuing excellence in everything you do is good.
• Sex outside of marriage is a sin.
• Cheating on your partner is bad.
• ---
• You ought to practice what you preach.
• Thou shall not kill.
• Abortion should be legalized in the Philippines.

4
The Logical Positivists View

• Evaluative statements are meaningless because
  they are neither true or false
• Simply because these statements cannot be
  guaranteed by the two sources of knowledge
  therefore cannot be verified under either
  Correspondence or Coherence Theory of Truth
• No cognitive content thus cognitively meaningless

5
The Logical Positivists (Logical Empiricism)

• Based their beliefs/tenets on the early
  Wittgenstein
• Members the Vienna Circle by Moritz Schlick
  including Rudolf Carnap, A. J. Ayer (Britain)
  Sympathizers Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr

6
Acc. to Rudolf Carnap

• "the elimination of metaphysics through the
  logical analysis of language."
• The idea was that, once people were no longer
  plagued by metaphysical nonsense (strictu sensu),
  they would confine themselves to verifiable,
  scientific statements on the one hand, and poetry
  on the other, and cease to act like mad beasts. 

7
Emotive Theory of Meaning by A.J. Ayer

• You acted wrongly in stealing money.
• Is the same thing as saying
• You stole the money.
• In adding the term wrongly, one is merely
  evincing your moral disapproval of stealing and
  as such, have not added any factual content to
  the statement.

8
Ethical Statements are pure expressions of
feelings as such do not come under the category
of truth falsehood. They are utterances that
are unverifiable for the same reason that a cry
of pain or a word of command is
unverifiablebecause they do not express genuine
propositions.

• Alfred Jules Ayer in
• Language, Truth Logic

9
P.H Nowell-Smith Ethical terms as well as
ethical judgments have different roles.

• They are used to express tastes and preferences,
  to express decisions choices, to grade
  evaluate, to advice, to admonish, warn, persuade
  dissuade, to praise, encourage reprove, to
  prolong draw attention to rules.

10
Evaluative Statements

• The statements may be shared by the public, a
  group of individuals, the society in general and
  not just mere personal sentiment.
• They derive their meaning from various language
  games in which they are accepted as norms of
  behavior.
• Part of the intra inter subjective consensus of
  players in a language game.

11
Pragmatic Criterion of Truth

• States that a proposition is true if it leads to
  good and practical consequences. And false, if
  not.
• Workability, satisfaction, consequences, and
  results are the key terms.

12
Problems with the Pragmatic Criterion of Truth

• Relativism
• The good can vary from one individual to
  another.
• This means that the criterion doesnt pass the
  inter subjectivity test.