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Trip Adler

Moral Reasoning 72
Shorter Paper #3
3/16/05
Ayer’s Meaningless Utterances and the “Frege Point” as Discussed by Blackburn

In Alfred Jules Ayer’s “Critique of Ethics and Theology” from Language, Truth

and Logic, he discusses utterances such as “Murder is wrong,” and makes the point that

such utterances are meaningless. Saying to someone, “You were wrong when you

murdered that person,” makes no further statement than saying “You murdered that

person.” The reason for this is that saying a certain type of action is right or wrong

makes no factual statement. It does not even say something about a person’s state of

mind, because it merely expresses moral sentiments. Another way of wording this is that

such a statement makes no statement at all, because it is just a pure expression of feeling.

In contrast to concepts that can be empirically verified, ethical concepts are pseudo-

concepts, and are therefore unable to be analyzed. To touch on the question of what

utterances such as “Murder is wrong” do, Ayer explains that the function of an ethical

word is “emotive,” which means that it is meant to express feelings. Additionally, ethical

terms can arouse feeling and stimulate action, but never to make an assertion of a genuine

proposition.

In “Frege’s Argument” from Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy

of Language, by Simon Blackburn, the author discusses the “Frege point.” Sentences that

contain given evaluative predicates can occur asserted in utterances by themselves, or

they can occur in the context of other words, which makes them unasserted. The Frege

point is that whether a predicate occurs asserted by itself, or whether it is unasserted


because of the presence of other words, it means the same thing in each occurrence.

To understand the significance of the Frege point, we must understand conditional

statements. A valid conditional argument is of the general form: P; if P then Q; so Q.

We will use the same example that Blackburn uses, so P is “It is wrong to tell lies” and Q

is “It is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies.” When P is used in the phrase “If it is

wrong to tell lies, then it is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies,” it is unasserted

because it is inside the context provided by other words. But since the Frege point says

that the meaning will be the same when it is by itself, even when it is not the antecedent

of the conditional, it must be unasserted in this case. Therefore, it cannot be susceptible

to truth or falsity, which supports Ayer’s account. While Ayer makes the argument that an

ethical utterance makes no factual statement, the Frege point helps make the same

argument in a different way.

Blackburn illustrates the Frege point with the above example.  There are different 

ways to illustrate this point with a conditional statement, such as:  “It is wrong to murder 

someone.  If it is wrong to murder someone, then it is wrong to support capital 

punishment.  It is wrong to support capital punishment.”  According to the Frege point, 

the words “It is wrong to murder someone” mean the same thing, both when they are by 

themselves, and when they are the antecedent of the conditional.

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