= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Amanojack comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (550)
Tangent: I think Ayer's observation was correct but he had the implication backwards. The English sentence "Yuck!" contains the assertion "That is bad." and is truth-apt.
I have launched into arguments with people after they expressed distaste, and I think it was at least properly grammatical. A start: "What's yucky about that?"
When I was in Thailand, I saw some local tribesmen eat a popular snack of giant beetles. I said "Yuck!" and couldn't watch them. However, I recognize that there's nothing weirder about eating a bug than about eating a chicken and that they're perfectly healthy and nutritious to people who haven't been raised to fear eating them.
To interpret "Yuck!" as "That is bad/yucky" is to turn what is ostensibly an expression of subjective experience into an ostensibly "objective" statement. You may as well keep it subjective and interpret it as "I am experiencing revulsion." But you'd have to be a pretty cunning arguer to get into a debate about whether another person is really having a subjective experience of revulsion!
It's both - expressing revulsion has a normative component, and so does even experiencing revulsion.
To illustrate: If I eat something and exclaim, "Oishii!", that not only expresses that I am "experiencing deliciousness", but also that the thing I'm tasting "is delicious" - my wife can try it out with the expectation that when she eats it she will also "experience deliciousness". It is a good-tasting thing.
It still sounds just like two people experiencing subjective deliciousness. What if a third person, or a dog, or Clippy, finds it not so delicious?