Stevenson why believe what people say

In effect, then, it asks for a generic description, given in psychological terms, of those ethical doubts and uncertainties, or discords and disagreements, that we often resolve by inquiry, deliberation, and discussion, but which on some occasions can lead us into an impasse, and on other occasions can induce us temporarily to suspend judgment, acknowledging that we are not yet in a position to come to a trustworthy conclusion.

Moral problems can be interpersonal or personal. A moral problem is interpersonal when there is disagreement among two or more people and personal when an individual is uncertain about a moral issue. But what is the nature of this disagreement or uncertainty? These are the questions around which Stevenson organizes all of his work in metaethics and with which he begins both Ethics and Language and Facts and Values a.

Interpersonal disagreement is of two broad kinds: disagreement in belief and disagreement in attitude. Their disagreement is resolved when they modify their beliefs in ways that make them compatible, or when both cease to care about coordinating their incompatible beliefs. Analogously, disagreement in attitude occurs when two or more people have attitudes—e. Importantly, disagreement in attitude is to be distinguished from disagreement about attitudes, which is a kind of disagreement in belief b, 3; see also , 9— If Smith and Jones desire to dine together, but Smith desires to dine at a restaurant where there is music, while Jones desires to dine at a quiet restaurant, they disagree, in a quite ordinary sense of the term, about where to dine , 3.

For Stevenson, disagreement in attitude is a very common phenomenon:. Further examples are easily found. A has social aspirations, and wants to move with the elite. A is easy-going, and loyal to his old friends. They accordingly disagree about what guests they will invite to their party. The curator of the museum wants to buy pictures by contemporary artists; some of his advisors prefer the purchase of old masters. They disagree. John, even though he agrees in belief about the dangers, wants to play anyhow.

Again, they disagree. The former demands that in order for two persons to disagree at least one must be motivated to coordinate the relevant beliefs or attitudes, whereas the latter only demands that the two persons have, roughly, beliefs that cannot be jointly true or attitudes that cannot be jointly satisfied.

The former account of disagreement may seem implausible. It seems that two persons may disagree, both in belief and in attitude, without even being aware of the existence of each other Ridge , 45— The latter option, the Stevensonian view—which has been the more influential one in later discussions of the idea of a disagreement in attitude—avoids this problem Ridge , 41— Plausibly, Stevenson is operating with a distinction along these lines, and simply wishes to focus on disagreement in the sense of a kind of activity.

This is understandable, given his focus on moral problems and on the ways of dealing with such problems. So, when Stevenson contrasts merely differing with having a disagreement , 4—5 and the contrast is plausibly meant to capture the contrast between merely being in a state of disagreement and having a disagreement.

He writes, for instance:. There are times, of course, when people differ in their attitudes without having a sufficient motive for resolving the difference. They may feel that the difference will lead to no clash; they may be too timid, too aloof, or too economical of their time to make an issue of the matter; they may consider certain men too fixed in their ways to be changed, and others capable of leading their own lives. Stevenson , Clearly, in these sorts of cases, Stevenson sees the relevant people as disagreeing in an important sense, despite the fact that they see no point in engaging or in arguing with each other.

Indeed, he then goes on to point out that in certain kind of circumstances e. Stevenson does not assume that interpersonal disagreement always signals that one is intending to get another to change their beliefs or attitudes, to win the argument as it were.

It may, and often is, the case that one is open to having their own beliefs or attitudes changed in the course of open-minded discussion or deliberation. Uncertainty in attitude occurs when an individual is uncertain about how to feel or about what to do. For example, Smith may have conflicting attitudes about some particular legislation proposal being in disagreement with themselves, so to speak. Alternatively, they may, while currently having no attitudes regarding the proposal, wish to determine whether to be for or against it, so that they can vote responsibly b, —; a, 55— Rather, he is supposing that personal uncertainty may be usefully understood in terms of a person being in disagreement with themselves , However, Stevenson later came to have some regrets over the lack of emphasis on personal deliberation and uncertainty, which, he thought, also contributed to a somewhat misleading picture of interpersonal moral problems.

How, then, is the crucial distinction between beliefs and attitudes to be understood? Stevenson adopts a dispositional theory, according to which these states are distinguishable by their respective complex causal relations , 7—8; a. While he concedes that the complexity of the relevant dispositions makes them difficult to specify, he does think that beliefs and attitudes are easily distinguishable in our daily experience.

Consider an onlooker who witnesses a chess expert open weakly against a novice and wonders:. The distinction here between a belief and a want attitude is certainly beyond any practical objection. One can imagine the expert, with constant beliefs about the opening, using it or not in accordance with his changing desires to win; or one can imagine him, with constant desires to win, using it or not in accordance with his changing beliefs.

Such an argument clearly represents a disagreement in attitude. In addition to this disagreement in attitude, of course, the argument may represent no little disagreement in belief.

Perhaps the parties disagree about how much the cost of living has risen and how much the workers are suffering under the present wage scale. Like any typical ethical argument, then, this argument involves both disagreement in attitude and disagreement in belief.

However, although moral problems almost always involve both types of disagreement or uncertainty, their distinguishing feature is disagreement or uncertainty in attitude. If the men come to agree in belief about all the factual matters they have considered, and if they continue to have divergent aims in spite of this … they will still have an ethical issue that is unresolved. But if they come to agree [in attitude], they will have brought their ethical issue to an end; and this will be so even though various beliefs … still remain debatable.

Both men may conclude that these remaining beliefs, no matter how they are later settled, will have no decisive effect on their attitudes. Stevenson accepts, then, non-cognitivism , a view according to which moral judgments are essentially constituted at least in part by attitudes and moral disagreement is essentially disagreement in attitude. However, he does support his claim that moral disagreements would essentially involve disagreement in attitude by considering a number of examples e.

In addition to the kinds of cases mentioned above, Stevenson invites us to consider, for instance, a person who seems to be fully persuaded that what he did was wrong and, for that very reason, is more in favor of doing it again:.

But whatever we may make of his meaning and there are several other interpretations possible we shall scarcely take seriously his protestations of agreement. Were we not trying all along to make him disapprove of his action? Would not his ethical agreement with us require that he share our disfavor—that he agree with us in attitude? Here Stevenson seems to appeal to motivational internalism , or to the idea that, roughly, a moral judgment is necessarily accompanied with having some motivation to act accordingly see Section 3.

If one now wishes to determine whether some action would be good, it turns out that one only needs to consider its impact on the instantiation of D ness.

This may be part of what is cognitively relevant. But it is at least possible to deem all sorts of descriptive features as relevant to determining what is good. And so most non-emotive accounts Stevenson grants that there are exceptions will be too restrictive regarding what may be deemed to be cognitively relevant to ethics a, 60— One type of non-emotive view that would escape this argument is Moorean non-naturalism, according to which moral judgments are beliefs concerning sui generis , non-natural properties.

Stevenson also appeals, in passing, to an argument from the best explanation about the cause of the disparity of ethical views that often occur between people of widely different generations, ethnic or geographic locations. For Stevenson, language is an instrument or tool for serving certain purposes; ethical language is thus suited especially for the central purposes of ethics. Since the central purposes of ethics are to resolve or coordinate attitudes, an analysis of ethical language must reveal how ethical language serves these dynamic purposes.

The problem, as Stevenson saw it, is that the meaning of an expression must be relatively stable across a variety of social and linguistic contexts, lest the expression be unhelpful to our understanding of the many contexts in which the expression is used; however, the psychological states associated with an expression vary widely across social and linguistic contexts.

The power of an expression, like the purchasing power of a dollar, or the stimulating power of coffee, is to be understood as a complex network of causal relations:. Just as the stimulating power of coffee remains relatively unchanged despite varied reactions or responses to the ingestion of coffee, so too does the meaning of an expression remain relatively unchanged despite varied psychological states resulting from or leading to the articulation of an expression , 46— The stimulating power of coffee, for instance, is a disposition constituted by a complex causal network consisting of: i stimuli , such as the variable amounts of coffee ingested; and ii responses , such as the resulting changes in energy, attention, anxiety, or irritation.

For Stevenson, the meaning of a sign is, then, a complex dispositional property. Consequently, since the sentences of a language have distinguishable kinds of dispositions, they have distinguishable kinds of meaning. The emotive meaning of a sign is a disposition that relates the sign to a range of attitudes , 59— As a disposition, the emotive meaning of a sign remains relatively stable, though responses may vary across contexts given different attendant, or contextual, circumstances , Cognitive states, like attitudes, are complex dispositions.

The emotive and descriptive meanings of signs are related in a variety of ways. Signs may have both emotive and descriptive meaning, and often do. According to Stevenson, almost all words in a natural language have both emotive and descriptive meaning owing to their historical uses in emotional contexts , Download references.

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. I am indebted for helpful discussions of earlier versions of this paper to audiences at Macquarie University where I was kindly given research facilities , at the conference of the Australasian Association for Philosophy in Sydney in , at St. Andrews, and also to a referee for this journal. Reprints and Permissions. Why believe what people say?. Synthese 94, — Download citation.

Issue Date : March Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Abstract The basic alternatives seem to be either a Humean reductionist view that any particular assertion needs backing with inductive evidence for its reliability before it can retionally be believed, or a Reidian criterial view that testimony is intrinscially, though defeasibly, credible, in the absence of evidence against its reliability.

References Ayer, A. Google Scholar Baker, G. Google Scholar Coady, C. Google Scholar Davidson, D. At first, these findings distressed us.

On further reflection, however, we concluded that this system was fine, both from a moral and a material point of view. The moral advantages are simple. Concepts of trust and, more broadly, of virtue would be empty if bad faith and wickedness were not financially rewarding.

If wealth naturally followed straight dealing, we would only need to speak about conflicts between the long term and the short, stupidity and wisdom, high discount rates and low. It is the very absence of predictable financial reward that makes honesty a moral quality we hold dear. Trust based on morality rather than self-interest also provides a great economic benefit.

Consider the alternative, where trust is maintained by fear. A world in which the untrustworthy face certain retribution is a small world where every one knows and keeps a close eye on! A village, really, deeply suspicious not only of commodities brokers but also of all strangers, immigrants, and innovators. No shades or ambiguities exist here. They do not take chances on schemes that might fail through the tangled strands of bad faith, incompetence, overoptimism, or plain bad luck.

A dark pessimism pervades this world. Opportunities look scarce and setbacks final. In this world, there are no second chances either. A convicted felon like Thomas Watson, Sr. A Federal Express would never again be extended credit after an early default on its loan agreements.

The rules are clear: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Kill or be killed. Little, closed, tit-for-tat worlds do exist. Trust is self-reinforcing because punishment for broken promises is swift—in price-fixing rings, loan-sharking operations, legislative log rolling, and the mutually assured destruction of nuclear deterrence. Exceed your quota and suffer a price war. At best such a world is stable and predictable. In outcome, if not intent, moral standards are high, since no one enters into relationships of convenience with the untrustworthy.

On the other hand, such a world resists all change, new ideas, and innovations. It is utterly inimical to entrepreneurship. Fortunately, the larger world in which we live is less rigid. It is populated with trusting optimists who readily do business with strangers and innovators.

People are allowed to move from Maine to Montana or from plastics to baked goods without a lot of whys and wherefores. Projects that require the integrity and ability of a large team and are subject to many market and technological risks can nonetheless attract enthusiastic support. Optimists focus more on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow than on their ability to find and punish the guilty in case a failure occurs.

Our tolerance for broken promises encourages risk taking. Tolerance also allows resources to move out of enterprises that have outlived their functions. When the buggy whip manufacturer is forced out of business, we understand that some promises will have to be broken—promises that perhaps ought not to have been made.

Even unreconstructed scoundrels are tolerated in our world as long as they have something else to offer. The genius inventors, the visionary organizers, and the intrepid pioneers are not cast away merely because they cannot be trusted on all dimensions. And this, perhaps unprincipled, tolerance facilitates a dynamic entrepreneurial economy.

Fortunately, we have created something that is neither Beirut nor Bucharest. Like a kaleidoscope, we have order and change. We make beautiful, well-fitting relationships that we break and reform at every turn. We should remember, however, that this third way works only as long as most of us live by an honorable moral compass. And, indeed, we all know of organizations, industries, and even whole societies in which trust has given way either to a destructive free-for-all or to inflexible rules and bureaucracy.

Only our individual wills, our determination to do what is right, whether or not it is profitable, save us from choosing between chaos and stagnation. Reprinted with permission. His solution? He simply refused to honor the contract. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more.

Business ethics. To our surprise, our pet theories […] by Amar Bhide and Howard H. Right is right and wrong is wrong.

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