truth-apt

One possible and controversial moral of Dreier's ˜Hiyo™ example may be that we could accomplish a number of different speech acts using an utterance with the syntactic surface features of paradigmatically truth-apt sentences.

Boys in White Suits 2009

Thus if there is to be a meaningful division of discourse into truth-apt and non-truth-apt bits, the weight seems to fall on the discipline criterion.

Boys in White Suits 2009

Perhaps even minimal criteria for truth-apt discourse should require that assertions can play this role.

Boys in White Suits 2009

Moral sentences are regarded as genuinely truth-apt.

Boys in White Suits 2009

More concretely, some have proposed that all that is needed to have minimal truth conditions is for a set of judgments to satisfy two constraints: (1) Sentences composed of the relevant expressions must exhibit the syntactic surface features of paradigmatic truth-apt sentences such as assertions, and they must embed grammatically in more complex sentences such as conditionals, propositional attitude ascriptions, and so on.

Boys in White Suits 2009

One suggestion is that paradigmatic truth-apt sentences cannot be replaced with imperatives, whereas those for which non-cognitivism is the right account can be

Boys in White Suits 2009

Another strategy is to find a semantic difference between paradigmatic truth-apt sentences and sentences which can plausibly be given an expressive or prescriptive analysis.

Boys in White Suits 2009

What especially distinguishes the quasi-realist project is an emphasis on explaining why we are entitled to act as if moral judgments are genuinely truth-apt even while strictly speaking they remain neither true nor false.

Boys in White Suits 2009

This variety of subjectivism agrees with one of the positive non-cognitivist theses (that moral utterances conventionally express non-cognitive attitudes), but it does not agree with either of the essential negative non-cognitivist claims (that the judgments don't express beliefs and/or that they are not truth-apt).

Boys in White Suits 2009

But if that is one of the criteria, non-cognitivists will be in a position to use psychological non-cognitivism as a reason to deny that moral judgments are truth-apt (Jackson, Oppy, Smith 1994).

Boys in White Suits 2009