[lit-ideas] Re: What Pigden Ought To Say
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- Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2014 05:24:55 -0400
How vacuous can 'ought' get?
How non-logical can 'ought' ought to be?
And so on.
I realise that McEvoy was commenting NOT on the last passage from Pigden's
online essay on NOFI ("No ought from is") but the last but one. Therefore I
shall provide a reading commentary of the original Pigden passage for the
sake of it.
McEvoy:
In a message dated 9/3/2014 5:50:25 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
The above is an unclear and invalid argument against the so-called
"naturalistic fallacy". It fails to show that even a "vacuous" "ought"
may be
derived or deduced from an "is". Leaving Hume's views (and G.E. Moore's)
aside,
we can defend a version of the "naturalistic fallacy" that would insist
there is never a logically valid deduction of an "ought" from an "is":
what
we may do is deduce an "ought" from an "ought" but never from an "is",
and
it always a confusion to suggest otherwise. Let us say we have a
situation
where what "ought" to be the case is also what "is" the case: for
example,
that not only should Paul repay Peter the money he borrowed but also it
is
the case that Paul repays Peter - from all this, can we now "deduce" that
what is the case here also "ought" to be the case? Yes, but in saying
this
we have not deduced the "ought" from any "is" but from another "ought":
the
fact Paul repays Peter is not a fact from which we can deduce that Paul
ought to repay Peter; rather from the "ought" that "Paul should repay
Peter"
we can deduce that "Paul repays Peter" is what ought to be the case. In
this
kind of deduction there is no deduction of an "ought" from an "is". The
quoted passage fails to give any clear or cogent argument showing that
some
sort of "vacuous" "ought" may be deduced or derived from some "is".
Having
failed in this, we need not take seriously any suggestion that the
passage
offers any serious alternative to the view that an "ought" can never be
derived from an "is". It should be emphasised that this version of the
"naturalistic fallacy" is compatible with claims that what "ought" to be
the case
may be conditional on certain facts:- as long as we recognise these
claims
are themselves "oughts" and never are "oughts" deduced or derived from
facts. What may happen is that certain views [e.g. certain forms of
utilitarianism] assert that what "ought" may be established by certain
facts [e.g.
what "ought" = what in fact produces 'the greatest pleasure for the
greatest
number']. Proponents of such views may lose sight of the fact that their
assertion here is not itself an assertion of non-moral fact but an
"ought". In
this way, they may disguise that such claims - that what "ought" may be
defined in terms of certain facts - are never claims that are provable by
facts or derivable from facts*, but are always an "ought" (however
well-disguised or embedded in factual talk). Donal -- *Even if we could
show it was in
fact the case that "something" would produce 'the greatest pleasure for
the greatest number', that would never show that "something" is what
ought to
be the case. And what ought to be the case could not be deduced or
derived
from any such merely non-moral factual demonstration.
The passage that the above is commening on is by Pigden:
Pigden writes:
"But is No-Ought-From-Is true?"
Oddly, I would think that the question to ask is if it's valid or cogent. I
would take it as a 'principle', and 'principles', or 'rules of inference'
are hardly said to be true.
"Not quite."
Pigden fortunately writes. This allows for 'not' as properly applied to
category mistakes.
"A home is not a house".
"Virtue is not a circle".
And so on.
(Although admittedly, the 'quite' complicates: "Caesar is not quite a prime
number").
Pigden goes on:
"It is an instance of the logical principle"
or perhaps 'meta-logical' -- cfr. Hunter, "Meta-logic". And cfr. all that
Hare wrote about 'meta-ethic' and echoed by Oxford philosopher and fellow of
Trinity, P. H. Nowell-Smith: "We philosophers are meta-ethicists, hardly
moralists" -- as Hume _was_. (For him -- i.e. for Hume -- morals belongs to
the passions -- perhaps alla Witters, and not to what it _is_, which is
judged by reason and opinion, but to what it is valued, or desires, which is a
matter of the OTHER faculty of human nature -- to echo the title of his
book).
"... that in a valid inference," Pigden goes on,
"there can be no matter in the conclusion that is not contained in the
premises, and as the New Zealand logician Arthur Prior pointed out this is not
strictly correct."
Pigden, like Prior, hail from New Zealand. I would call Prior an Oxford
philosopher, and not just a "New Zealand logician", though. His associations
with Oxford were long and influential. And all his papers were compiled by
the Clarendon Press, which is Oxford's official press -- cfr. 'the Clarendon
type' -- and the annual Prior lectures are held in Oxford -- 'the city of
the dreaming spires'.
Pigden goes on:
"However, what we can show is that if you have non-logical words"
I'm never sure what this means. As Humpty Dumpty says, "Give me a word and
I turn it into a 'logical' one. Impenetrability! That's what I say!".
"... in the conclusion of a valid inference that do not appear in the
premises," Pigden alleges,
"they will be vacuous in a certain sense and that in a logically valid
argument you can’t get anything non-vacuous out that you haven’t put in."
This, I agree with McEvoy, merits commentary. I'm never sure what 'vacuous'
means even if Grice wrote an essay on "Vacuous Names" (it was meant for
the Reidel issue on Quine, "Words and Objections", but due to Grice's delay
in composing it, it appeared only in the book format of the issue, as edited
by Davidson and Hintikka.
For Grice, 'vacuous' is best used for 'names': "Pegasus" is a vacuous name,
he claims.
----
This is NOT Pigden's idea, and let's see if by continuing reading we get a
better grasp. "It is raining or it is not raining" may be said to be
vacuous. It ain't of course. It speaks, metalogically, of the Excluded Third,
as
Aristotle called it, and it's certainly false for Intuitionists.
Conclusions are a trick. Grice's example:
"Paul is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave".
Is 'therefore' part of the conclusion? No (It merely marks a conventional
implicature, as he calls it, to the effect that some reasoning has taken
place). But there may be items in the conclusion that are similarly
implicatural in matter, yet not vacuous.
When Stevenson thought to oppose Utilitarianism and created his Emotivism
(that Grice adored), in "Language and Ethics" (Yale Univ. Press, 1941), he
would say that "O" (ought) IS a 'logical' operator, rather than a
non-logical word as Pigden seems to want us to have it. And to "O" we may add
"!"
which expresses emotion:
"Lovely!"
"Fair!"
"Well done!"
"Paul is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave!"
In "Brave!", the "!" is part of the conclusion, but 'emotional' in nature.
I think Blackburn deals with this in his version of con-cognitivism.
----
Pigden goes on:
"This gives us No-Non-Vacuous–Ought-From-Is which is close enough to the
original NOFI to sustain Hume’s key arguments. So for simplicity’s sake we
will stick with No-Ought-From-Is in its original form."
Perhaps we could go on and consult Roget's Thesaurus and find a simpler way
to express 'non-vacuous'. "Substantial"? "Substantive"? God knows.
"Informative" may be closer to what we are looking for.
"It is raining or it is not raining" is VACUOUS because non-informative,
and one of the conversational maxims is "Be informative", or strictly, "As
informative as is required".
Yet some axioms in logic, such as "p v ~ p", p or not-p, is blatantly
NON-informative, and thus vacuous, yet still useful. So I don't see that we may
assume that Hume is wanting to stick to 'oughts' which are informative.
But then, as Pigden says, it's best to stick with Hume's original wordings.
I think Hudson dedicated a whole book to this, and I assume Pigden's PhD
dissertation dealt on this too? As Palma was noting, this was a topic of
interest for J. R. Searle while Searle as a Rhodes scholar (was it?) at Oxford
in the heyday of linguistic philosophy (and studying under Austin and
getting supervised by Strawson).
In the long run we may have to return to Hare who made the best
distinctions in the field, with his tropics, and clistics, and neustics and
phrastics!
Cheers,
Speranza
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