To illustrate: in Ayer’s view, if I state that “helping others is good,” then I’m not stating any sort of belief that could be true or false. Instead, I’m merely expressing approval towards a certain kind of behavior.
Emotivism has faced numerous criticisms. For a start, it doesn’t seem able to adequately capture moral disagreement: Ayer suggested that if we’re in agreement about all the non-moral facts, then, in a moral debate, there’s nothing left to disagree about. Secondly, the verification principle has fallen out of favor — with many philosophers arguing that, because it is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytic, it is meaningless in its own terms!
But let’s turn now to a more general problem for expressivism as a whole.
The Frege-Geach problem
Expressivism faces a number of criticisms. But one of the most discussed and debated is the infamous Frege-Geach problem. It’s a notable problem to outline, as it’s one which more contemporary forms of expressivism strive to tackle from the outset.
Peter Geach, the philosopher behind the Frege-Geach problem, points out that “a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition” (“Assertion,” Logic Matters, 1964, [1972]).
An asserted context occurs when a statement is used as an assertion — as with the statement: “murder is wrong.” But statements can also be embedded into unasserted contexts like questions (“is murder wrong?”) and conditionals (“if murder is wrong, then asking your friend to murder is wrong”).
Now let’s think again about emotivism: according to emotivism, the meaning of a moral statement like “stealing is morally wrong” is non-cognitive, and is more similar to an emotional expression like “ugh!” or “boo!” — which is why emotivism is sometimes nicknamed “the boo-hurrah theory.” In an asserted context, then, the meaning of “stealing is wrong” is accounted for: it’s a statement which expresses a negative attitude toward the behavior in question (stealing).
But it’s when we get to moral language used in a non-asserted context that emotivism runs into the Frege-Geach problem. Take a conditional (non-asserted context) claim like “if stealing is wrong, then asking your friend to steal is wrong”: it’s not a statement, and thus it can’t be neatly said to express approval or disapproval. What, then, does the meaning consist in?
Peter Geach took note of this phenomenon, and then argued that if non-cognitivism is true, it fails to account for the fact that moral language appears to have certain logical properties. Geach used the example of a conditional, and applied it to a logical rule of inference known as modus ponens. With a modus ponens argument, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must automatically be true too, regardless of the argument’s content. Geach’s example is:
