> Hilary Putnam (is he still considered a proper analytic philosopher
> these days?)takes on this matter in a recent volume of essays, _The
Collapse of the
> Fact/Value Dichotomy_. He does mention Hume w/r/t this topic and glosses
the
> passage most commonly interpreted as "inferring 'ought' from 'is'" to mean
rather
> that ethical terms have a different ontological status from terms with
empirical
> reference and goes on to say that Hume was indeed deeply concerned with
matters
> ethical (caveat: I don't have the book by my side, and I hope everyone
reading this knows
> that my memory isn't the best)
>
> Whether or not this is a plausible reading of Hume, I think Putnam's
> point is well taken anyway. Maybe some will find it trivial, but (a) that
there
> is a difference of kind between the terms and (b) that there is a
possibility of a
> relationship between them is interesting and useful to me.
>
> That said:
> 1. w/r/t the original topic, I think an "I'm not sorry day"
> for women who've had abortions is a good thing. I've known
> women who've had abortions and whose attitude towards having
> terminated their pregnancies was nothing but relief pure and
> simple. The practice is legal, yet it's surrounded by shame,
> which is a ridiculous situation. It's their right--well, last
> time I checked it is, and you can't check too often under
> Bush the Younger--to have their say.
>
> That's a hopelessly unsophisticated non-argument, I know. But
> even if you're not an emotivist, emotive statements play a role
> in discussion.
>
> 2. Chomsky's attempts at a universal grammar underlying
> languages are all *descriptive*, not *prescriptive*. His
> famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
> is supposed to demonstrate that humans recognize an utterance
> as a sentence on the basis of its syntax, not its semantics.
> By extention, I don't see how one could postulate that he
> would support a prescriptive, substantial universal grammar
> of human behavior. The basis for his ethical thought must
> lie elsewhere.
>
> Curtiss
My bet is that Chomsky is a cognitivist (factualist) about morality, and/or he simply doesn't care about metaethics.
Anyway, if expressivism (fancy new name for emotivism) is just some sort of nihilism or subjectivism (as 1. would seem to imply), then it fails: expressivism is supposed to explain the realistic, non-subjectivist features of moral discoure, and not to explain them away.
(BTW, if Putnam's not analytic, none of us are.)
-- Luke