Sean Martin at common sense philosophy and Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera have lately been puzzling over the claim that so-called sentences, such as…

If I say “Ceasar is not a *prime* number”, then it might be thought that I’ve said that Caesar is a number but is not prime - which is plausibly meaningless.

However, if I say “Caesar is not a *prime number*”, perhaps this is the statement that Caesar is not a prime number, but may a non-prime number, or indeed, not a number at all.

Perhaps your natural reading (and mine) is the latter, whereas Carnap et al’s is the former, and this is the source of the disagreement.
(Perhaps its more obvious in the following case: “I am not a black man” - does that imply that I’m not black, not a man, or both? Again, it seems to me that it depends on hows its said, and that can’t be discerned from the formal structure of the sentence)

ps. Your comment box is a little small - a preview button might be handy.

I’ve also been thinking about this a great deal since Thursday, and as far as I can tell, this question is one that should be answered empirically. Whether a statement/proposition/sentence is meaningful is not so much a normative claim as a descriptive one. Consider

(1) Caesar is and.

Now clearly, this is meaningless, but what does it mean to call it meaningless. Seemingly, it means that descriptively (1) is without meaning. We might even say that it is presciptively meaningless - we just ought not utter such statements. But is it a good idea to value meaningfulness in such a way? Carnap clearly did because in the case of

(2) Caesar is a prime number

he declared it to be meaningless even though its syntactic structure is meaningful. I suspect this is where the disjunction between you and Carnap occurs. If we are to take Carnap seriously then we must assert that meaningfulness has a normative aspect, such that when we utter meaningless statements and descriptively attribute meaning to them (as is the case with (2)) we are mistakenly doing something that we ought not.

But, I think that commonsense approach to understanding meaningfulness is that of description. To say that (1) is meaningless is simply to say that it has no meaning, not that it should not be attributed meaning. Similarly, to say that (2) is meaningful is simply to say that it has meaning, not that we ought to attribute meaning to it.

So who determines meaningfulness? I would be quite happy to let the folk decide what’s meaningful and what is not. They are the primary users of the language, and I suspect, mainly due to their apparent success in communication, that they are pretty good arbitrators of meaningfulness. So lets hook them up to those brain machines and read ‘em a variety of statements (including (1) and (2)) and see if they respond to (2) in the same way that they do to meaningful statements like “apples are red,” or see if they respond to (2) in the same way that they do to meaningless statements like “Caesar times 17 is purple.”

I think that not attributing normativity to meaningfulness is one way out, so there you go, but there are probably some significant mistakes with that response.

Came across this blog while doing research for my paper on Sanfey’s results.

I don’t know if this will help at all, but one way that Sanfey might be able to claim that his results are reliable is by appealing to the overwhelming amount of research that has been done on the ultimatum game. In particular, the game has been studied outside of the lab with very similar behavioral results to the one’s he got in the lab. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to argue that if the behavioral results are consistent both inside and outside of the lab, then the brain activity would be similar in and out of the lab as well.

Anyway, nice blog you guys have here.

Good question.

In response, I suppose I would challenge the idea that there really are “wildly conflicting intuitions people have had historically, and across cultures” that cannot be explained by appeal to morally relevant circumstantial facts (e.g., the dependence condition pointed out in my post).

Further, in direct opposition to Unger, I would say that presumption is on the side of reliability. And so the burden must fall on the one urging that moral intuitions are not reliable to suggest a counterexample.

Best,

Jim

Typically, in everyday conversation, if we morally evaluate an act, we tend to assign it to one of four categories (although the last is often only implicit):
a) Wrong/Blameworthy (e.g. torturing small child)
b) Permissible/Non-moral (e.g. drinking tea ra

Do you think that their point can be better demonstrated by the wildly conflicting intuitions people have had historically, and across cultures? Wouldn’t the difference there show that if moral argument is to proceed at all, intuition is a bad way to do it, since what it tells us is bound to be incredibly culturally and temporally contingent?

(and, following from that, the counter-intuitiveness of utilitarianism is irrelevant since any theory is bound to be counter-intuitive to /some/ large group of people)

Thanks,
Alex