Wiggins - Truth, Invention, and The Meaning of Life

Ill
Truth, Invention, and the Meaning

of Life*
Nul n’est besoin d’esperer pour entreprendre,

ni de reussir pour perseverer.
WILLIAM THE SILENT
Eternal survival after death completely fails to

accomplish the purpose for which it has
always been intended. Or is some riddle solved
by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life
as much of a riddle as our present life?
WITTGENSTEIN
1. Even now, in an age not much given to mysticism, there are

people who ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Not a few of them
make the simple ‘unphilosophical’ assumption that there is
something to be known here. (One might say that they are
‘cognitivists’ with regard to this sort of question.) And most of
these same people make the equally unguarded assumption that
the whole issue of life’s meaning presupposes some positive
answer to the question whether it can be plainly and straight¬
forwardly true that this or that thing or activity or pursuit
is good, has value, or is worth something. And then, what is
even harder, they suppose that questions like that of life’s mean¬
ing must be among the central questions of moral philosophy.
The question of life’s having a meaning and the question of
truth are not at the centre of moral philosophy as we now have
it. The second is normally settled by something bordering on
stipulation,1 and the first is under suspicion of belonging in the
* A lecture delivered on November 24th, 1976. First published in Proceedings of the

British Academy LXII (1976), and reprinted here, with some editorial changes, by
permission of the British Academy. The quotations from Richard Taylor are made by
kind permission of Macmillan.
1 Cp. Essay TV. In 1976, at the time of speaking, the remark stood in less need of
qualification than it does now.
88 ESSAY III
same class as ‘What is the greatest good of the greatest

number?’ or ‘What is the will?’ or ‘What holds the world up?’
This is the class of questions not in good order, or best not
answered just as they stand.
If there is a semantical crux about this sort of occurrence of
the word ‘meaning’, then all logical priority attaches to it; and
no reasonable person could pretend that a perfectly straight¬
forward purport attaches to the idea of life’s meaning
something. But logical priority is not everything; and, most
notably, the order of logical priority is not always or
necessarily the same as the order of discovery. Someone who
was very perplexed or very persistent would be well within his
rights to insist that, where a question has been asked as often as
this one has, a philosopher must make what he can of it: and
that, if the sense really is obscure, then he must find what
significance the effort to frame an answer is apt to force upon
the question.
In what follows, I try to explore the possibility that the
question of truth and the question of life’s meaning are among
the most fundamental questions of moral philosophy. The
outcome of the attempt may perhaps indicate that, unless we
want to continue to think of moral philosophy as the casuistry
of emergencies, these questions and the other questions that
they bring to our attention are a better focus for ethics and
meta-ethics than the textbook problem ‘What [under this or
that or the other circumstance] shall I do?’ My finding will be
that the question of life’s meaning does, as the untheoretical
suppose, lead into the question of truth—and conversely.
Towards the end I shall also claim to uncover the possibility
that philosophy has put happiness in the place that should have
been occupied in moral philosophy by meaning. This is a
purely theoretical claim, but if it is correct, it is not without
consequences; and if (as some say) weariness and dissatisfaction
have issued from the direct pursuit of happiness as such, then it
is not without all explanatory power.
2. I have spoken in favour of the direct approach, but it is

impossible to reach out to the perplexity for which the question
of meaning is felt to stand without first recording the sense
that, during relatively recent times, there has been some shift in
TRUTH, INVENTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 89
the way the question of life’s meaning is seen, and in the kind of
answer it is telt to require. Here is an answer made almost
exactly two hundred years ago, two years before the death of
Voltaire:
We live in this world to compel ourselves industriously to

enlighten one another by means of reasoning and to apply
ourselves always to carrying forward the sciences and the arts.
(W.A. Mozart to Padre Martini: letter of 4 December 1776.)2
What we envy here is the specificity, and the certainty of

purpose. But, even as we feel envy, it is likely that we want to
rejoice in our freedom to disbelieve in that which provided the
contingent foundation of the specificity and certainty. I make
this remark, not because I think that we ought to believe in
what Mozart and Padre Martini believed in, but in outright
opposition to the hope that some relatively painless accommo¬
dation can be made between the freedom and the certainty. The
foundation of what we envy was the now (I think) almost
unattainable conviction that there exists a God whose purpose
ordains certain specific duties for all men, and appoints
particular men to particular roles or vocations.
That conviction was not only fallible: there are many who
would say that it was positively dangerous—and that the risk it
carried was that, if the conviction were false, then one might
prove to have thrown one’s life away. It is true that in the cases
we are considering, ‘throwing one’s life away’ seems utterly the
wrong thing to say of the risk carried by the conviction. It
seems wrong even for the aspects of these men’s lives that
were intimately conditioned by the belief in God. But if one
doubts that God exists, then it is one form of the problem of
meaning to justify not wanting to speak here of throwing a life
away. It is a terrible thing to try to live a life without believing
in anything. But surely that doesn’t mean that just any old set of
concerns and beliefs will do, provided one could live a life by
them. Surely if any old set would do, that is the same as life’s
being meaningless.
2 Compare the composer’s choice of expression on the occasion of his father’s

birthday anniversary in 1777: ‘I wish you as many years as are needed to have nothing
left to do in music.’
90 ESSAY III
If we envy the certainty of the 1776 answer, then most likely

this is only one of several differences that we see between our
own situation and the situation of those who lived before the
point at which Darwin’s theory of evolution so confined the
scope of the religious imagination. History has not yet carried
us to the point where it is impossible for a description of such
differences to count as exaggerated. But they are formidable.
And, for the sake of the clarity of what is to come, I must pause
to express open dissent from two comments that might be
made about them.
First, someone more interested in theory than in what it was
like to be alive then and what it is like now may try to diminish
the differences that we sense, by arguing from the accessibility
to both eighteenth and twentieth centuries of a core notion of
God, a notion that he may say persists in the concept of God
championed by modern theologians. To this use of their ideas I
object that, whatever gap it is which lies between 1776 and
1976, such notions as God as the ground of our being cannot
bridge it. For recourse to these exemplifies a tendency towards
an a priori conception of God which, even if the eighteenth
century had had it, most of the men of that age would have
hastened to amplify with a more hazardous a posteriori
conception. Faith in God conceived a posteriori was precisely
the cost of the particularity and definiteness of the certainty
that we envy.
The other thing someone might say is that, in one crucial
respect, our situation is not different from a late Enlightenment
situation, because there is a conceptually determined need in
which the eighteenth century stood and in which we stand
equally. This, it might be said, is the need for commitment. In
the eighteenth-century case, this extra thing was commitment
to submission to God’s purpose. We shall come in §4 to what
these theorists think it is in our case. Faced however with this
second comment, one might wonder how someone could come
to the point of recognizing or even suspecting that it was God’s
purpose that he should be a composer (say) and yet be
indifferent to that. Surely no extra anything, over and above
some suspicion that this or that is God’s purpose, is required to
create the concern we should expect to find that that suspicion
would have implanted in him. On the other hand, if this extra
thing were supplied, then it would bring too much. For the
commitment to submission seems to exclude rebellion; and
rebellion against what is taken as God’s purpose has never
been excluded by the religious attitude as such.
What then are the similarities and the differences between
the eighteenth-century orientation and our own orientation
upon the meaning of life? It seems that the similarities that
persist will hold between the conceptual scheme with which
they in that century confronted the world of everyday
experience and the scheme with which we, in spite of our
thoroughgoing acceptance of natural science, confront it: and
the dissimilarities will relate to the specificity and particularity
of the focus of the various concerns in which their world-view
involved them and our world-view involves us. For us there is
less specificity and much less focus.
If this is still a dark statement, it is surely not so dark as to
obscure the relationship between this difference between them
and us and a cognate difference that will have signalled its
presence and importance so soon as I prepared to approach the
divide between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries by
reference to the purposive or practical certainty of individual
men. Unless we are Marxists, we are much more resistant in the
second half of the twentieth century than eighteenth- or
nineteenth-century men knew how to be against attempts to
locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical
or metaphysical conceptions—in the emancipation of mankind,
or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit. It is not
that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress
themselves. But, whether temporarily or permanently, we have
more or less abandoned the idea that the importance of
emancipation or progress (or a correct conception of spiritual
advance) is that these are marks by which our minute speck in
the universe can distinguish itself as the spiritual focus of the
cosmos. Perhaps that is what makes the question of the
meaning we can find in life so difficult and so desolate for us.
With these bare and inadequate historical assertions,
however, the time is come to go straight to a modem
philosophical account of the matter. There are not very many
to choose from.
92 ESSAY III
3. The account I have taken is that given in Chapter 18 of

Richard Taylor’s book Good and Evil—an account rightly
singled out for praise by the analytical philosopher who
reviewed the book for the Philosophical Review.3
Taylor’s approach to the question whether life has any
meaning is first to ‘bring to our minds a clear image of
meaningless existence’, and then determine what would need to
be inserted into the meaningless existence so depicted in order
to make it not meaningless. Taylor writes:
A perfect image of meaninglessness of the kind we are seeking is
found in the ancient myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, it will be
remembered, betrayed divine secrets to mortals, and for this he
was condemned by the gods to roll a stone to the top of the hill,
the stone then immediately to roll back down, again to be
pushed to the top by Sisyphus, to roll down once more, and so
on again and again, forever.
Two ways are then mentioned in which this meaninglessness

could be alleviated or removed. First:
... if we supposed that these stones . . . were assembled [by

Sisyphus] at the top of the hill... in a beautiful and enduring
temple, then . . . his labours would have a point, something
would come of them all . . .
That is one way. But Taylor is not in the end disposed to place
much reliance in this species of meaning, being more impressed
by a second mode of enrichment.
Suppose that the gods, as an afterthought, waxed perversely

merciful by implanting in [Sisyphus] a strange and irrational
impulse ... to roll stones . . . To make this more graphic,
suppose they accomplish this by implanting in him some
substance that has this effect on his character and drives
This little afterthought of the gods . . . was . . . merciful. For
they have by this device managed to give Sisyphus precisely
what he wants by making him want precisely what they inflict
on him. However it may appear to us, Sisyphus’. . . life is now
filled with mission and meaning, and he seems to himself to
have been given an entry to heaven ... The only thing that has
happened is this: Sisyphus has been reconciled to [his existence]
3 See Richard Taylor, Good and Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1970), The
review was
by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philosophical Review vol. 81, 1973, p 113
... He has been led to embrace it. Not, however, by reason or
persuasion, but by nothing more rational than the potency of a
new substance in his veins . . .
So much for meaninglessness, and two ways of alleviating it.
Meaninglessness, Taylor says,
is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is
therefore the opposite. Activity, and even long drawn out and
repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant
culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be
considered to have been the direction and purpose of the
activity.
That is the temple-building option, of course.
But the descriptions so far also provide something else; namely,
the suggestion of how an existence that is objectively meaningless,
in this sense, can nevertheless acquire a meaning for him whose
existence it is.
This ‘something else’ is the option of implanting in Sisyphus
the impulse to push what he has to push. Here Taylor turns
aside to compare, in point of meaninglessness or meaningfulness,
the condition of Sisyphus and the lives of various animals,
working from the lower to the higher animals—cannibalistic
blindworms, the cicada, migratory birds, and so on up to
ourselves. His verdict is that the point of any living thing’s life
is evidently nothing but life itself.
This life of the world thus presents itself to our eyes as a vast
machine, feeding on itself, running on and on forever to
nothing. And we are part of that life. To be sure, we are not just
the same, but the differences are not so great as we like to think;
many are merely invented and none really cancels meaningless¬
ness . . . We are conscious of our activity. Our goals, whether in
any significant sense we choose them or not, are things of which
we are at least partly aware and can . . . appraise . . . Men have
a history, as other animals do not. [Still]... if we think that,
unlike Sisyphus’, [our] labours do have a point, that they
culminate in something lasting and, independently of our own
deep interests in them, very worthwhile, then we simply have
not considered the thing closely enough . . . For [Sisyphus’
temple] to make any difference it had to be a temple that would
at least endure, adding beauty to the world for the remainder of
time. Our achievements . . ., those that do last, like the sand-
94 ESSAY III
swept pyramids, soon become mere curiosities, while around

them the rest of mankind continues its perpetual toting of
rocks, only to see them roll down . . .
Here is a point that obsesses the author. Paragraph upon

paragraph is devoted to describing the lamentable but
undoubted impermanence (futility sub specie aeternitatis) of
the architectural or built monuments of human labour. It is not
entirely clear that the same effect could have been contrived if
the gradual accumulation of scientific understanding or the
multiplication of the sublime utterances of literature or music
had been brought into the argument. What is clear is that
Taylor is commmitted to a strong preference for the second
method of enriching Sisyphus’ life—that is the compulsion
caused by the substance put into Sisyphus’ veins. For as for the
first method, and temple-building for the sake of the temple,
Suppose . . . that after ages of dreadful toil, all directed at this
final result [Sisyphus] did at last complete his temple, [so] that
now he could say his work was done, and he could rest and
forever enjoy the result. Now what? What picture now presents
itself to our minds? It is precisely the picture of infinite
boredom! Of Sisyphus doing nothing ever again, but contem¬
plating what he has already wrought and can no longer add
anything to, and contemplating it for eternity! Now in this
picture we have a meaning for Sisyphus’ existence, a point for
his prodigious labour, because we have put it there; yet, at the
same time, that which is really worthwhile seems to have
slipped away entirely.
The final reckoning would appear to be this: (a) a lasting end or

telos could constitute a purpose for the work; but (b) there is no
permanence; and (c), even if there were such permanence, its
point would be effectively negated by boredom with the
outcome of the work. And so we are thrown inexorably into the
arms of the other and second sort of meaning.
We can reintroduce what has been resolutely pushed aside in an
effort to view our lives and human existence with objectivity;
namely, our own wills, our deep interest in what we find
ourselves doing . . . Even the glow worms . . . whose cycles of
existence over the millions of years seem so pointless when
looked at by us, will seem utterly different to us if we can
somehow try to view their existence from within. ... If the
philosopher is apt to see in this a pattern similar to the unending
cycles of the existence of Sisyphus, and to despair, then it is
indeed because the meaning and point he is seeking is not
there—but mercifully so. The meaning of life is from within us,
it is not bestowed from without, and it far exceeds in its beauty
and permanence any heaven of which men have ever dreamed
or yearned for.
4. Connoisseurs of twentieth-century ethical theory in its

Anglo-Saxon and Continental variants will not be slow to see
the affinities of this account. Practitioners of the first of these
kinds are sometimes singled out for their failure to say
anything about such questions as the meaning of life. But, if the
affinities are as strong as I think, then, notwithstanding
Taylor’s philosophical distance from his contemporaries, what
we have just unearthed has a strong claim to be their secret
doctrine of the meaning of life.
Consider first the sharp supposedly unproblematic distinction,
reinforced by the myth as told and retold here, between what
we discover already there in the world—the facts, including the
gods’ enforcement of their sentence—and what is invented or,
by thinking or willing, somehow put into or spread onto the
factual world—namely the values.4 Nobody who knows the
philosophical literature on value will be surprised by Taylor’s
variant on the myth. . . . Here, however, at the point where the
magic stuff is to be injected into the veins of Sisyphus, I must
digress for the sake of what is to come, in order to explain the
deliberate way in which I shall use the word ‘value’.
I propose that we distinguish between evaluations (typically
recorded by such forms as \x is good’, ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’,
‘ignoble’, ‘brave’, ‘just’, ‘mischievous’, ‘malicious’, ‘worthy’,
‘honest’, ‘corrupt’, ‘disgusting’, ‘amusing’, ‘diverting’, ‘boring’,
etc.—no restrictions at all on the category of x) and directive or
deliberative (orpractical) judgements (e.g. ‘I must \|/’, ‘I ought to
\j/’, ‘it would be best, all things considered, for me to vp’, etc.).5 It
4 On the differences between discovery and invention, and on some abuses of the
distinction, see William Kneale, ‘The Idea of Invention’, Proceedings of the British
Academy vol. 39, 1955.
5 Note that this is not a distinction whose rationale is originally founded in a
difference in the motivating force of judgments of the two classes, even if such a
difference may be forthcoming from the distinction. In both cases, the thinking thatp is
arguably derivative from the finding that p. (Cp. Essay V. §11.)
96 ESSAY III
is true that between these there is an important no-man’s-land

(comprising, e.g., general judgments of the strongly deprecatory
or commendatory kind about vices and virtues, and general or
particular statements about actions that it is ignoble or
inhuman or unspeakably wicked to do or not to do).6 But the
fact that many other kinds of judgment lie between pure
valuations and pure directives is no objection; and it does
nothing to obstruct the discrimination I seek to effect between
the fact-value distinction and the is-ought or is-must distinction.
The unavailability of any well-grounded notion of the factual
that will make the fact-value distinction an exclusive distinction
can only promote our interest in the possibility of there being
some oughts or musts that will not count as a case of an is. If we
then conceive of a distinction between is and must as
corresponding to the distinction between appreciation and
decision and at the same time emancipate ourselves from a
limited and absurd idea of what is, then there can be a new
verisimilitude in our several accounts of all these things.7
This being proposed as the usage of the word ‘value’ to be
adhered to in this paper, let us return now to Sisyphus and the
body of doctrine that is illustrated by Taylor’s version of his
story. At one moment Sisyphus sees his task as utterly futile
and degrading: a moment later, supposedly without any
initiating change in his cognitive appreciation, we are told that
he sees his whole life as infinitely rewarding. What I was about
to say before the digression was that there is only one
philosophy of value that can even attempt to accommodate
this possibility.
Consider next Taylor’s account of the escape from meaning¬
lessness—or what he might equally well h&ve followed the
Existentialists in calling absurdity. Taylor’s mode of escape is
simply a variation on the habitual philosophical reaction to the
For some purposes, judgments that philosophers describe as judgments of prima

facie obligation (better pro tanto obligation) might almost, or without excessive
distortion be assimilated to valuational judgments.
7 See below, §§6 and 10. In the language of note 20, ad fin, my own view is that the
fact-value distinction is not like a bat/elephant distinction, but like an animal/elephant
distinction. On the other hand, if §11 is right, then the is/must distinction is more like a
mammal/carnivore distinction. For this possibility, see the diagram (p. 108) illustrating
overlap of concept extensions.
perception of the real or supposed meaninglessness of human
existence. As a method for escape it is co-ordinate with every
other proposal that is known, suicide (always one recognized
way), scorn or defiance (Albert Camus), resignation or drift
(certain orientally influenced positions), various kinds of
commitment (R.M. Hare and J.-P. Sartre), and what may be
the most recently enlisted member of this equipe, which is
irony.8
Again, few readers of Freedom and Reason will fail to
recognize in Sisyphus, after the injection of the gods’ substance
into his veins, a Mark I, stone-rolling model of R.M. Hare’s
further elaborated, rationally impregnable ‘fanatic’.9 As for
the mysterious substance itself, surely this is some extra
oomph, injected afterwards ad libitum, that will enable
Sisyphus’ factual judgments about stone-rolling to take on
‘evaluative meaning’.
Finally, nor has nineteenth- or twentieth-century Utilitarian¬
ism much to fear from Taylor’s style of fable-telling. For the
locus or origin of all value has been firmly confined within the
familiar area of psychological states conceived in independence
of what they are directed to.10
In order to have a name, I shall call Taylor’s and all similar
accounts non-cognitive accounts of the meaning of life. This
choice of name is not inappropriate if it helps to signal the
association of these accounts with a long-standing philosophical
tendency to strive for descriptions of the human condition by
which will and intellect-cum-perception are kept separate and
innocent of all insider transactions. The intellect supplies
uncontaminated factual perception, deduction, and means-
end reasoning. Ends are supplied (in this picture) by feeling or
will, which are not conceived either as percipient or as
determinants in any interesting way of perception.
What I shall argue next is that, in spite of the well-tried
familiarity of these ideas, the non-cognitive account depends
for its whole plausibility upon abandoning at the level of
8 See Thomas Nagel, ‘The Absurd’ in Journal of Philosophy vol. 68, 1971.
9 R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford University Press, 1963). I mean that
Sisyphus is the stuff of which the fanatic is made.
10 For efforts in the direction of a better account of some of these states, see below §6
and Essay V, passim.
98 ESSAY III
theory the inner perspective that it commends as the only

possible perspective upon life’s meaning. This is a kind of
incoherence, and one that casts some doubt upon the
distinction of the inside and the outside viewpoints. I also
believe that, once we break down the supposed distinction
between the inner or participative and the outer, supposedly
objective, viewpoints, there will be a route by which we can
advance—though not to anything like the particularity of the
moral certainty that we began by envying.
5. Where the non-cognitive account essentially depends on

the existence and availability of the inner view, it is a question
of capital importance whether the non-cognitivist’s account of
the inner view makes such sense of our condition as it actually
has for us from the inside.
The first ground for suspecting distortion is that, if the non-
cognitive view is put in the way Taylor puts it, then it seems to
make too little difference to the meaningfulness of life how well
or badly our strivings are apt to turn out. Stone-rolling for its
own sake, and stone-rolling for successful temple building, and
stone-rolling for temple building that will be frustrated—all
seem to come to much the same thing. I object that that is not
how it feels to most people. No doubt there are ‘committed’
individuals like William the Silent or the doctor in Camus’
La Peste who will constitute exceptions to my claim. But in
general, the larger the obstacles nature or other people put in
our way, and the more truly hopeless the prospect, the less
point most of us will feel anything has. ‘Where there is no hope,
there is no endeavour’ as Samuel Johnson observed. In the end
point is partly dependent on expectation of outcome; and
expectation is dependent on past outcomes. So point is not
independent of outcome.
The non-cognitivist may make two replies here. The first is
that, in so far as the outcome is conceived by the agent as
crucial for the value of the activity, the activity is merely
instrumental and must lead back to other activities that are
their own outcome. And these he will say are what matter. But
in opposition to this,
(a) I shall show in due course how activities that can be

regarded as ‘their own goals’ typically depend on valu¬
ations that non-cognitivism makes bad sense of (§6 below);
(b) I shall question whether all activities that have a goal
independent of the activity itself are perceived by their
agents as only derivatively meaningful (§13 below).
The non-cognitivists’ second reply will be directed against the
objection that he makes it matter too little how well or badly
our strivings turn out. Is it not a point on his side that the
emptier and worse worlds where one imagines everything
having even less point than it has now are worlds where the will
itself will falter? To this I say Yes, I hear the reply. But if the
non-cognitive view was to make the sense of our condition that
we attribute to it, then something needed to be written into the
non-cognitive account about what kinds of object will engage
with the will as important. And it is still unclear at this stage
how much room can be found within non-cognitivism for the
will’s own distinctions between good and bad reasons for
caring about anything as important. Objectively speaking
(once ‘we disengage our wills’), any reason is as good or as bad
as any other reason, it seems to say. For on the non-cognitive
account, life is objectively meaningless. So, by the non-
cognitivist’s lights, it must appear that whatever the will
chooses to treat as a good reason to engage itself is, for the will,
a good reason. But the will itself, taking the inner view, picks
and chooses, deliberates, weighs, and tests its own concerns. It
craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward
unless it thought it had them. The extension of the concept
objective is quite different on the inner view from the extension
assigned to it by the outer view. And the rationale for
determining the extension is different also.
There is here an incoherence. To avoid it without flying in
the face of what we think we know already about the difference
between meaning and meaninglessness, the disagreement
between the inner and the outer views must be softened
somehow. The trouble is that, if we want to preserve any of the
distinctive emphases of Taylor’s and similar accounts, then we
are bound to find that, for purposes of the validation of any
given concern, the non-cognitive view always readdresses the
problem to the inner perspective without itself adopting that
100 ESSAY III
perspective. It cannot adopt the inner perspective because,

according to the picture that the non-cognitivist paints of these
things, the inner view has to be unaware of the outer one, and
has to enjoy essentially illusory notions of objectivity, import¬
ance, and significance: whereas the outer view has to hold that
life is objectively meaningless. The non-cognitivist mitigates
the outrageousness of so categorical a denial of meaning as the
outer view issues by pointing to the availability of the
participant perspective. But the most that he can do is to point
to it. Otherwise the theorist is himself engulfed by a view that
he must maintain to be false.
So much for the first distortion I claim to find in non¬
cognitivism and certain inconclusive defences of that approach.
There is also a second distortion.
To us there seems to be an important difference between the
life of the cannibalistic blindworms that Taylor describes and
the life of (say) a basking seal or a dolphin at play, creatures
that are conscious, can rest without sleeping, can adjust the end
to the means as well as the means to the end, and can take in far
more about the world than they have the immediate or
instrumental need to take in. There also seems to us to be a
difference, a different difference, between the life of seals or
dolphins and the life of human beings living in communities
with a history. And there is even a third difference, which as
participants we insist upon, between the life of a man who
contributes something to a society with a continuing history
and a life lived on the plan of a southern pig-breeder who (in
the economics textbooks, if not in real life) buys more land to
grow more corn to feed more hogs to buy more land, to grow
more corn to feed more hogs . . . The practical concerns of this
man are at once regressive and circular. And we are keenly
interested, on the inner view, in the difference between these
concerns and non-circular practical reasonings or life plans.
For the inner view, this difference undoubtedly exists. If the
outside view is right to commend the inside view, then the
outside view must pay some heed to the differences that the
inner view perceives. But needing to depreciate them, it cannot
accord them an importance that is commensurate with the
weight that the non-cognitive theory of life’s meaning thrusts
upon the inner view. ‘The differences are merely invented,’
Taylor has to say, ‘and none really cancels the kind of
meaninglessness we found in Sisyphus’.
To the participant it may seem that it is far harder to explain
what is so good about buying more land to grow more corn to
feed more hogs to buy more land, to grow more corn to feed
more hogs . . . than it is to explain what is good about digging a
ditch with a man whom one likes, or helping the same man to
talk or drink the sun down the sky. It might seem to a
participant that the explanation of the second sort of thing, so
far from having nowhere to go but round and round in circles,
fans out into a whole arborescence of concerns; that, unlike
any known explanation of what is so good about breeding hogs
to buy more land to breed more hogs . . ., it can be pursued
backwards and outwards to take in all the concerns of a whole
life. But on the non-cognitive view of the inner view there is no
way to make these differences stick. They count for so little that
it is a mystery why the non-cognitivist doesn’t simply say: life is
meaningless; and that’s all there is to it. If only he would make
that pronouncement, we should know where we were.
But why do the differences just mentioned count for so little
for the non-cognitivist? Because they all arise from subjective
or anthropocentric considerations, and what is subjective or
anthropocentric is not by the standards of the outer view
objective. (Taylor insists that to determine whether something
matters, we have to view it ‘independently of our own deep
interest’.) I shall come back to this when I reconstruct the non-
cognitive view; but let me point out immediately theprimafacie
implausibility of the idea that the distinction between objectivity
and non-objectivity (which appears to have to do with the
existence of publicly accepted and rationally criticizable
standards of argument, or of ratiocination towards truth)
should coincide with the distinction between the anthropocentric
and the non-anthropocentric (which concerns orientation
towards human interests or a human point of view). The
distinctions are not without conceptual links, but the prima
facie appearance is that a matter that is anthropocentric may
be either more objective or less objective, or (at the limit)
merely subjective.11 This is how things will appear until we have
11 For an independent account of the subjective, see Essay V.

102 ESSAY III
an argument to prove rigorously the mutual coincidence of

independently plausible accounts of the anthropocentric/non-
anthropocentric distinction, the non-objective/objective dis¬
tinction, and the subjective/non-subjective distinction.12
The third and last distortion of experience I find in Taylor’s
presentation of non-cognitivism I shall try to convey by an
anecdote. Two or three years ago, when I went to see some film
at the Academy Cinema, the second feature of the evening was
a documentary film about creatures fathoms down on the
ocean-bottom. When it was over, I turned to my companion
and asked, ‘What is it about these films that makes one feel so
utterly desolate?’ Her reply was: ‘apart from the fact that so
much of the film was about sea monsters eating one another,
the unnerving thing was that nothing down there ever seemed
to rest.' As for play, disinterested curiosity, or merely contem¬
plating, she could have added, these seemed inconceivable.
At least about the film we had just seen, these were just the
points that needed to be made—untrammelled by all pseudo-
philosophical inhibitions, which are irrelevant in any case to
the ‘inner’ or participant perspective. And the thought the film
leads to is this. If we can project upon a form of life nothing but
the pursuit of life itself, if we find there no non-instrumental
concerns and no interest in the world considered as lasting
longer than the animal in question will need the world to last in
order to sustain the animal’s own life; then the form of life must
be to some considerable extent alien to us.13 Any adequate
12 A similar observation needs to be entered about all the other distinctions that are
in the offing here—the distinctions between the neutral and the committed, the neutral
and the biased, the descriptive and the prescriptive, the descriptive and the evaluative,
the quantifiable and the unquantifiable, the absolute and the relative, the scientific and
the unscientific, the not essentially contestable and the essentially contestable, the
verifiable or falsifiable and the neither verifiable nor falsifiable, the factual and the
normative. ... In common parlance, and in sociology and economics—even in
political science, which should know better—these distinctions are used almost inter¬
changeably. But they are different. Each of these contrasts has its own rationale. An
account of all of them would be a contribution not only to philosophy but to life.
13 Here, I think, or in this neighbourhood, lies the explanation of the profound
unease that some people feel at the systematic and unrelenting exploitation of nature
and animals which is represented by factory farming, by intensive livestock rearing, or
by the mindless spoliation of non-renewable resources. This condemnation of evil will
never be understood till it is distinguished by its detractors from its frequent, natural,
but only contingent concomitant—the absolute prohibition of all killing not done in
self-defence.
description of the point we can attach to our form of life must

do more than treat our appetitive states in would-be isolation
from their relation to the things they are directed at.
For purposes of his eventual philosophical destination,
Richard Taylor had to forge an intimate and direct link
between contemplation, permanence, and boredom. But, at
least on the inner view, the connection between these things is
at once extremely complex and relatively indirect.14 And, once
one has seen the final destination towards which it is Taylor’s
design to move the whole discussion, then one sees in a new
light his obsession with monuments. Surely these are his
hostages for the objects of psychological states in general; and
all such objects are due to be in some sense discredited.
(Discredited on the outer view, or accorded a stultifyingly
indiscriminate tolerance on the outer account of the inner
view.) And one comprehends all too well Taylor’s sour grapes
insistence on the impermanence of monuments—as if by this
he could reduce to nil the philosophical (as opposed, he might
say, to subjective) importance of all the objects of psychological
states, longings, lookings, reverings, contemplatings, or what¬
ever.
6. Leaving many questions still dangling, I shall conclude

discussion of the outer account of the inner perspective with a
general difficulty, and a suggestion.
There is a tendency, in Utilitarian writings and in the
writings of economists,15 to locate all ultimate or intrinsic value
14 On permanence, cf. Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4312 quoted

adinitF.P. Ramsey, ‘Is there anything to discuss?’, Foundations of Mathematics and
other Essays (London, 1931):
‘I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and
everything will die; but that is a long time off still and its percent value at compound
discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be
blarik.’
15 Cf Wilfred Beckerman, New Statesman, 21 June 1974, p. 880.
The second, and real question is: at what rate should we use up resources in order to
maximise the welfare of human beings . . . Throughout existence man has made use of the
environment, and the only valid question for those who attach—as I do (in accordance
with God’s first injunction to Adam)—complete and absolute priority to human welfare is
what rate of use provides the maximum welfare for humans, including future generations.
I quote this relatively guarded specimen to illustrate the hazards of making too easy a
104 ESSAY III
in human appetitive states.16 They are contrasted (as we also

see Taylor contrasting them for his purposes) with everything
else in the world. According to this sort of view, the value of
anything that is not a psychological state derives from the
psychological state or states for which it is an actual or
potential object. See here what Bentham says in An Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:
Strictly speaking, nothing can be said to be good or bad, but
either in itself; which is the case only with pain or pleasure; or
on account of its effects; which is the case only with things that
are the causes or preventives of pain and pleasure.
One has only to put the matter like this, however, to be

troubled by a curious instability. Since nothing at all can count
for the outer view as inherently or intrinsically good, the
doctrine must belong to the inner or inside view. But, as
experienced, the inner view too will reject this view of value.
For, adopting that inner view,17 and supposing with Bentham
that certain conscious states are good in themselves, we must
take these states as they appear to the inner view. But then one
cannot say without radical misconception that these states are
all that is intrinsically valuable. For (a) many of these
conscious states have intentional objects; (b) many of the
conscious states in which intrinsic value supposedly resides are
strivings after objects that are not states, or are contemplations
of objects that are not themselves states; and (c) it is of the
essence of these conscious states, experienced as strivings or
contemplations or whatever, to accord to their intentional
distinction between human welfare on the one side and the environment on the other.
But it also illustrates the purely ornamental role which has devolved upon the Hebrew
scriptures. They constitute matter for the literary decoration of sentiments formed and
apprehended by quite different methods of divination. It is irrelevant for instance that
the world-view given voice in the first chapters of Genesis is perceptibly more
complicated than the one Beckerman expresses.
16 Or in the case of vegetarian utilitarian writings, to locate all ultimate value in
conscious animal appetitive states.
17 Perhaps some one individual man’s inner view. For here and only here could it be
held to be perfectly or fully obvious that the special goodness in themselves of certain
of his pleasurable states is something simply above or beyond argument for him.
Beyond that point—notwithstanding utilitarian explanations of the superfluity of
argument on something so allegedly evident—it is less obvious to him.
objects a non-instrumental value. For from the inside of lived
experience, and by the scale of value that that imposes, the shape
of an archway or the sound of the lapping of the sea against the
shore at some place at some time may appear to be of an
altogether different order of importance from the satisfaction
that some human being once had from his breakfast.18
The participant, with the going concepts of the objective and
the worth while, descries certain external properties in things
and states of affairs. And the presence there of these properties
is what invests them with importance in his eyes. The one thing
that properties cannot be, at least for him, is mere projections
resulting from a certain kind of efficacy in the causation of
satisfaction. For no appetitive or aesthetic or contemplative
state can see its own object as having a value that is derivative
in the special way that is required by the thesis that all non¬
instrumental value resides in human states of satisfaction. But,
if that is right, then the outer view cannot rely for its credibility
upon the meaning that the inner view perceives in something.
To see itself and its object in the alien manner of the outer view,
the state as experienced would have to be prepared to suppose
that it, the state, could just as well have lighted on any other
object (even any other kind of object), provided only that the
requisite attitudes could have been induced. But in this
conception of such states we are entitled to complain that
nothing remains that we can recognize, or that the inner
perspective will not instantly disown.19
18 This feature of experience is of course lamented by thinkers who seek to make

moral philosophy out of ((‘formal value theory’ + moral earnestness) + some values of
the theorist’s own, generalized and thereby tested) + applications. But the feature is
part of what is given in the phenomenology of some of the very same ‘satisfaction’
experiences that are the starting-point of the utilitarians themselves. And there is
nothing to take fright at in this feature of them, inconsistent though it is with absurd
slogans of the literally absolute priority of human welfare.
19 An example will make these claims clearer perhaps. A man comes at dead of night
to a hotel in a place where he has never been before. In the morning he stumbles out
from his darkened room and, following the scent of coffee out of doors, he finds a sunlit
terrace looking out across a valley on to a range of blue mountains in the half-distance.
The sight of them—a veritable vale of Tempe—entrances him. In marvelling at the
valley and mountains he thinks only how overwhelmingly beautiful they are. The value
of the state depends on the value attributed to the object. But the theory I oppose says
all non-instrumental value resides here in the man’s own state, and in the like states of
others who are actually so affected by the mountains. The more numerous such states
are, the greater, presumably, the theory holds, is the ‘realized’ value of the mountains.
106 ESSAY III
I promised to conclude the critique of non-cognitivism with

a suggestion about values. It is this: no attempt to make sense
of the human condition can really succeed if it treats the
objects of psychological states as unequal partners or derivative
elements in the conceptual structure of values and states and
their objects. This is far worse than Aristotle’s opposite error:
We desire the object because it seems good to us, rather than the
object’s seeming good to us because we desire it. Metaphysics,
1072a29
Spinoza appears to have taken this sentence as it stood and
deliberately negated it (Ethics, part III, proposition 9, note).
But maybe it is the beginning of real wisdom to see that we may
have to side against both Aristotle and Spinoza here and ask:
‘Why should the because not hold both ways round?’ Surely an
adequate account of these matters will have to treat psycho¬
logical states and their objects as equal and reciprocal partners,
and is likely to need to see the identifications of the states and
of the properties under which the states subsume their objects
as interdependent. (If these interdependencies are fatal to the
distinction of inner and outer, we are already in a position to be
grateful for that.)
Surely it can be true both that we desire x because we think x
good, and that x is good because x is such that we desire x. It
does not count against the point that the explanation of the
‘because’ is different in each direction. Nor does it count
against the particular anti-non-cognitivist position that is now
emerging in opposition to non-cognitivism that the second
‘because’ might have to be explained in some such way as this:
such desiring by human beings directed in this way is one part
of what is required for there to be such a thing as the
perspective from which the non-instrumental goodness of x is
there to be perceived.
There is an analogy for this suggestion. We may see a pillar-
The theory says that the whole actual value of the beauty of the valley and mountains is
dependent upon arranging for the full exploitation of the capacity of these things to
produce such states in human beings. (Exploitation now begun and duly recorded in
Paul Jennings’s Wordsworthian emendation: ‘I wandered lonely as a crowd.’) What I
am saying about the theory is simply that it is untrue to the actual experience of the
object-directed states that are the starting-point of that theory.
box as red because it is red. But also pillar-boxes, painted as
they are, count as red only because there actually exists a
perceptual apparatus (e.g. our own) that discriminates, and
learns on the direct basis of experience to group together, all
and only the actually red things. Not every sentient animal that
sees a red postbox sees it as red. But this in no way impugns the
idea that redness is an external, monadic property of a postbox.
‘Red postbox’ is not short for ‘red to human beings postbox’.
Red is not a relational property. (It is certainly not relational in
the way in which ‘father of is relational, or ‘moves’ is relational
on a Leibniz-Mach view of space.) All the same, it is in one
interesting sense a relative property. For the category of colour
is an anthropocentric category. The category corresponds to
an interest that can only take root in creatures with something
approaching our own sensory apparatus.
Philosophy has dwelt nearly exclusively on differences be¬
tween ‘good’ and ‘red’ or ‘yellow’. I have long marvelled at
this.20 For there resides in the combined objectivity and
anthropocentricity of colour a striking analogy to illuminate
not only the externality that human beings attribute to the
properties by whose ascription they evaluate things, people,
and actions, but also the way in which the quality by which the
thing qualifies as good and the desire for the thing are
equals—are ‘made for one another’ so to speak. Compare the
20 Without of course wishing to deny the difference that good is ‘attributive’ to a

marked degree, whereas colour words are scarcely attributive at all. I think that, in
these familiar discussions, philosophers have misdescribed the undoubted fact that,
because there is no standing interest to which yellowness answers, ‘yellow’ is not such
as to be cut out (by virtue of standing for what it stands for) to commend a thing or
evaluate it favourably. But, surely, if there were such a standing interest, ‘yellow’
would be at least as well suited to commend as ‘sharp’ or ‘beautiful’ or even ‘just’ are.
Against the suggestion that axiological predicates are a species of predicate not
clearly marked off from the factual, there is a trick the non-cognitivist always plays and
he ought not to be allowed to play. He picks himself a ‘central case’ of a descriptive
predicate, and a ‘central case’ of a valuational predicate. Then he remarks how very
different the predicates he has picked are. But what on earth can that show? Nobody
thinks you could prove a bat was not an animal by contrasting some bat (a paradigm
case of a bat) with some elephant (a paradigm case of an animal). Nothing can come
clear from such procedures in advance of explanation of the point of the contrast. In
the present case the point of the factual/non-factual distinction has not been
explained; and it has to be explained without begging the question in favour of the non-
cognitivist, who picked the quarrel in the first place. What was the nature or rationale of
the difference which was by these means to have been demonstrated? Till it is explained
there must remain all the following possibilities:
108 ESSAY III
way in which the quality by which a thing counts as funny and

the mental set that is presupposed to being amused by it are
made for one another.
7. The time has come to sort out the non-cognitive theory to
accommodate these findings and expel contradiction. But it is
possible that I have not convinced you that any sorting out is
necessary, and that you have found more coherent than I have
allowed it to be the non-cognitivist’s use of the idea of
perspective, and of different and incompatible perspectives.
Perspective is not a form of illusion, distortion, or delusion.
All the different perspectives of a single array of objects are
perfectly consistent with one another. Given a set of perspectives,
we can recover, if only they be reliably collected, a unified true
account of the shape, spatial relations, and relative dimensions
of the objects in the array. If we forget these platitudes then we
may think it is much more harmless than it really is that the so-
called outer and inner perspectives should straightforwardly
contradict one another. There is nothing whatever in the idea
of a perspective to license this scandalous idea—no more than
the truism that two perspectives may include or exclude
different aspects will create the licence to think that the
participant and external views, as the noncognitivist has
described them, may unproblematically conflict over whether
a certain activity or pursuit is really (or objectively) worth
It would be unfair to say there have been no attempts at all to elucidate the point of the
fact-value contrast as exclusive. Wittgenstein tried (unsuccessfully) to explain it so in
his Lecture on Ethics , Philosophical Review vol. 74, 1965, p. 6. And prescriptivists
explain it as exclusive by reference to the link they allege holds between evaluation and
action. But, although there is some such link between deliberative judgment and
action, the required link does not hold between evaluation and action. That was one
part of the point of the contrast I proposed at the beginning of §4.
while or not.21
There are several different reasons then why the non-cognitivist
theory must be redeployed, if it is to continue to be taken
seriously. The traditional twentieth-century way of amending
the theory to secure its self-consistency would have been meta¬
ethics, conceived as an axiologically neutral branch of ‘logic’.
Meta-ethics is not as neutral as was supposed. But it may be
that it is still the best .way for us to understand ourselves better.
Let us take the language of practice or morals as an object
language. Call it L. The theorist’s duty is then to discover, and
to explain in the meta-language which is his own language,
both a formal theory and a more discursive informal theory of
L-utterances, not least L-utterances concerning what is worth
while or a good thing to do with one’s life. In place of philosophi¬
cal analysis, let him concentrate on the informal elucidation of
such judgements, then study the assertibility predicate in its
application to various types of moral judgment and in each
case determine its approximation there to genuine truth.
What does this involve? First, and this is the humble formal
task that is presupposed to his more distinctively ethical
aspirations, the theorist needs to be able to say, or assume that
someone can say, what each of the sentences of the object
language means. To achieve this, a procedure is needed for
parsing L-sentences into their primitive semantic components,
and an axiom is required for each primitive component
accounting for its particular contribution to assertion conditions.
Then, given any L-sentence s, the axioms can be deployed to
derive a pairing of s with an assertion condition p, the pairing
being stated in the metalanguage by a theorem in the form:
s is assertible if and only if p.

Moral philosophy as we now know it makes many sophisticated
claims about meaning and meanings, all hard to assess.
Compared with everything that would be involved in making
those assessments, what we are assuming here is minimal. What
21 Still less does the language of perspective license the supposition that the
philosopher who answers the question of the meaning of life could make a virtue out of
committing himself to neither, or neither and both perspectives. Does he think of
himself as one who somehow looks at everything from no perspective at all? For the
closest approximation he could coherently conceive of attaining to this aspiration, see
§10 below.
110 ESSAY III
we are assuming is only that the informal remarks the moral

theorist hopes to make about the status of this, that, or the other
judgment in L will presuppose that such a biconditional can be
constructed for each sentence of L. These assertion conditions
give the meaning of the judgments he wants to comment upon.
If no such principled understanding of what they mean may be
thought of as obtainable, then (whatever other treasures he
possesses) he cannot even count on the first thing.
I speak of assertion conditions as that by which meaning
is given, and not yet of truth conditions, but only because
within this meta-ethical framework the non-cognitivisf s most
distinctive non-formal thesis is likely to be the denial that the
assertibility of a value judgment or of a deliberative judgment
can amount to anything as objective as we suppose truth to be.
To do justice to this denial of his, we leave undecided—as
Dummett in one way and Davidson and McDowell in another
have shown to be possible—the relationship of truth and
assertibility.22 In this way we arrange matters so that it can turn
out—as it does for empirical or scientific utterances—that
truth is a special case of assertibility; but it is not theoretically
excluded that, for certain classes of judgments, assertibility
should fall short of truth. The matter is left open, and it is for
meta-ethics and the informal theory that is built around the
formal theory to close it. I come now to this informal theory.
Adapting Tarski’s so-called ‘Convention T’ to the purposes
of the formal theory, we may say now that the meta-language
has a materially adequate definition of the predicate ‘assertible’
just in case it has as consequences all sentences obtained from
the schema ‘5 is assertible if and only if p' by substituting for ‘5’
a name of any sentence of L and substituting for %p' the
translation or interpretation of this sentence in the meta-
2 See M.A.E. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973)

and John McDowell, Bivalence and Verificationism’ in Truth and Meaning' Essays in
Semantics (Oxford University Press, 1972), edited by Gareth Evans and John
McDowell. McDowell shows how we can build up an independent account of what a
semantical predicate F will have to be like if the sentences of an object language are to
be interpreted by means of equivalences which will say what the object language
sentences mean. His way of showing that it can be a discovery, so to speak, that it is the
truth predicate which fulfils the requirements on F is prefigured at p. 210 of Donald
Davidson, Truth and Meaning’, Synthese vol. 17, 1967.
language.23 So if the ethical theorist is to erect a theory of

objectivity, subjectivity, relativism, or whatever upon these
foundations, then the next thing we need to say some more
about is how a theory of L-assertibility is to be constrained in
order to ensure that the sentence used on the right-hand side of
any particular equivalence that is entailed by the theory of
assertibility should indeed interpret or translate the sentence
mentioned on the left. What is interpretation or translation in
this context? If we can supply this constraint then, as a bonus,
we shall understand far better the respective roles of participant
and theorist and what assertibility would have to amount to.
It seems obvious that the only way to by-pass Tarski’s
explicit use of the word ‘translation’ is by reference to what
Davidson has called radical interpretation.24 A promising
proposal is this. Rewrite convention T to state that the meta¬
language possesses an empirically correct definition of‘assertible’
just in case the semantical axioms, in terms of which the
definition of assertibility is given, all taken together, entail a set
L of equivalences ‘s is assertible just in case p\ one equivalence
for each sentence of L, with the following overall property: a
theorist who employs the condition p with which each sentence
5 is mated in a ^-equivalence, and who employs the equivalence
to interpret utterances of s, is in the best position he can be to
make the best possible overall sense there is to be made of L-
speakers. This goal sets a real constraint—witness the fact that
the theorist may test his theory, try it out as a way of making
sense of his subjects, even as he constructs it. By ‘making sense
of them’ would be meant ascribing to the speakers of L, on the
strength of their linguistic and other actions, an intelligible
collection of beliefs, needs, and concerns. That is a collection
that diminishes to the bare minimum the need for the interpreter
23 See p. 187 of A. Tarski, ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized languages’, in Logic,

Semantics, and Metamathematics (Oxford University Press, 1956). For my present
doubts that there is anything to be gained, except an expository point, by the
fabrication of a predicate of semantic assessment that is independent of ‘true’ in the
fashion that ‘assertible’ might seem to promise to be, see Essay IV, §18 following.
24 See D. Davidson, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Dialectica vol. 27, 1973. The original
problem is of course Quine’s. See W.V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1960). Davidson’s own conception has been progressively refined by many
philosophers, notably by Richard Grandy, Donald Davidson, Christopher Peacocke,
Gareth Evans, and John McDowell. See also pp. 141-7 below.
112 ESSAY III
to ascribe inexplicable error or inexplicable irrationality to

them.25 By ‘interpreting an utterance of s’ is intended here:
saying what it is that s is used to say.
This general description is intended to pass muster for the
interpretation of a totally alien language. But now suppose that
we envisage the object-language and meta-language both being
English. Then we can turn radical interpretation to advantage
in order to envisage ourselves as occupying simultaneously the
roles of theorist or interpreter and subject or participant. That
will be to envisage ourselves as engaged in an attempt to
understand ourselves.
Whether we think of things in this way or not, it is very
important to note how essentially similar are the positions of
the linguistic theorist and his subjects. The role of the theorist is
only to supplement, for theoretical purposes, the existing
understanding of L-speakers. It is true that, subject to the
constraint upon which the whole exercise of interpretation
itself rests—namely sufficient agreement in beliefs, concerns,
and conceptions of what is rational and what is not—the
theorist need not have exactly the same beliefs as his subjects.
But the descriptions of the world that are available to him are
essentially the same sorts of description as those available to
his subjects. He uses the very same sort of sentence to describe
the conditions under which s is assertible as the sentence s itself:
25 See Richard Grandy, ‘Reference, Meaning, and Belief, Journal of Philosophy vol. 70,
1973: John McDowell, op. cit. The requirement that we diminish to the minimum the
theoretical need to postulate inexplicable error or irrationality is a precondition of
trying to project any interpretation at all upon alien speakers. It was phrased by
Davidson in another way, and called by him the requirement of charity. The
replacement given here is closer to what has been dubbed by Richard Grandy the
requirement of humanity. The further alterations reflect the belief that philosophy
must desist from the systematic destruction of the sense of the word ‘want’, and that
what Davidson calls ‘primary reasons’ must be diversified to embrace a wider and
more diverse class of affective states than desire. (For a little more on these points, see
now my Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), Longer Note 6.36.)
Note that, even though we must for purposes of radical interpretation project upon
L-speakers our own notions of rationality (and there is no proof they are the sole
possible), and even though we take all the advantage we can of the fact that the
speakers of the object-language are like us in being men, there is no guarantee that
there must be a unique best theory of the assertibility conditions of their utterances. It
has not been excluded that there might be significant disagreement between
interpreters who have made equally good overall sense of the shared life of speakers of
L, but at some points rejected one another’s interpretations of L.
and the meta-language is at no descriptive distance from the
object-language. If the theorist believes his own semantic
theory, then he is committed to be ready to put his mind where
his mouth is at least once for each sentence s of the object-
language, in a statement of assertion conditions for s in which
he himself uses either s or a faithful translation of s. It follows
that the possibility simply does not exist for the theorist to
stand off entirely from the language of his subjects or from the
viewpoint that gives this its sense. He has to begin at least
by embracing—or by making as if to embrace—the very
same commitments and world-view as the ordinary speakers
of the object language. (This is not to say that having
understood them, he cannot then back off from that world¬
view. What requires careful statement is how he is to do
so.)
8. Even if this will be a disappointment to those who have

supposed that, by means of meta-ethics, the theorist of value
could move straight to a position of complete neutrality, it
faces us in the right direction for the reconstitution of the non-
cognitive theory. In fact the framework I have been proposing
precisely enables him to register his own distinctive point. He
can do so in at least two distinctive ways. The first accepts and
the second actually requires that framework.
First, using the language of his subjects but thinking (as a
moralist like a Swift or an Aristophanes should, or as any
moral theorist may) a bit harder than the generality of his
subjects, he may try to make them look at themselves; and he
may prompt them to see their own pursuits and concerns in
unaccustomed ways. There is an optical metaphor that is much
more useful here than that of perspective. Staying within the
participant perspective, what the theorist may do is lower the
level of optical resolution. Suppressing irrelevancies and
trivialities, he may perceive, and then persuade others to
perceive, the capriciousness of some of the discriminations we
unthinkingly engage in; or the obtuseness of some of the
assimilations that we are content with. Again, rather differently
but placing the non-cognitivist closer within reach of his own
hobby-horse, he may direct the attention of his audience to
what Aurel Kolnai called ‘the incongruities of ordinary
114 ESSAY III
practice’.26 Here Kolnai alluded to the irremovable disproportion

between how heroic is the effort that it is biologically instinct in
us to put into the pursuit of certain of our concerns, and how
‘finite, limited, transient, perishable, tiny, tenuous’ we ourselves
and our goods and satisfactions all are. To lower the level of
resolution, not down to the point where human concerns
themselves are invisible—we shall come to that—but to the
point where both the disproportion and its terms are manifest,
is a precondition of human (as opposed to merely animal)
resilience, of humour, of sense of proportion, of sanity even. It
is the traditional function of the moralist who is a participant
and of the satirist (who may want not to be). But this way of
seeing is not the seeing of the total meaninglessness that Taylor
spoke of. Nor, in the existentialist philosopher’s highly
technical sense, is it the perception of absurdity. For the
participant perspective can contain together both the perception
of incongruity and a nice appreciation of the limited but not
necessarily infinitesimal importance of this or that particular
object or concern. (It is not perfectly plain what Kolnai
thought about the affinity of existentialist absurdity and
incongruity—the manuscript is a fragment—but, if Kolnai had
doubted the compatibility of the perceptions of incongruity
and importance, I think I could have convinced him by a very
Kolnaistic point. The disproportion between our effort and
our transience is a fugitive quantity. It begins to disappear as
soon as one is properly impressed by it. For it is only to us or our
kind that our own past or future efforts can seem heroic.)
So much then for the non-cognitivist’s first way of making
his chief point. It will lead to nothing radical enough for him.
The second way to make his point is to abstract it from the long
sequence of preposterous attempts at traditional philosophical
analysis of good, ought, right, etc. in terms of pleasure or feeling
or approval . . ., and to transform it into an informal
observation concerning the similarity or difference between the
status of assertibility enjoyed by evaluative judgments and
practical judgments, on the one hand, and the status of plain,
paradigmatic, or canonical truth enjoyed by (for example)
historical or geographical judgments on the other hand.27
26‘The Utopian Mind’ (unpublished typescript), p. 77.
27 See in this connexion Essay IV.
What then is plain truth? Well, for purposes of the
comparison, perhaps it will be good enough to characterize it
by what may be called the truisms of plain truth. These truisms
I take to be (1) the primacy of truth as a dimension for the
assessment of judgements: (2) the answerability of truth to
evidenced argument that will under favourable conditions
converge upon agreement whose proper explanation involves
that very truth; and (3) the independence of truth both from
our will and from our own limited means of recognizing the
presence or absence of the property in a statement. (2) and (3)
together suggest the truism (4) that every truth is true in virtue
of something. We shall expect further (5) that every plain truth
is compatible with every other plain truth. Finally, a putative
further truism (6*) requires the complete determinacy of truth
and of all questions whose answers can aspire to that status.28
Does the assertibility of evaluative judgments and/or
deliberative judgments come up to this standard? If we press
this question within the framework just proposed, the non-
cognitivist’s distinctive doctrine becomes the contention that
the answer is no. The question can be pressed from a point that
is well within reach. We do not need to pretend to be outside
our own conceptual scheme, or at a point that ought to have
been both inaccessible and unthinkable.29 The question is one
we can pursue by working with informal elucidations of truth
and assertibility that can be fruitfully constrained by the
project of radical interpretation.30 And as regards the apparent
incoherence of Taylor’s non-cognitivism, we can supersede the
separate outer and inner perspectives by a common perspective
that is accessible to both theorist and participant. Suppose it is
asserted that this, that, or the other thing is worth doing, and
that the assertion is made on the best sort of grounds known to
participant or theorist. Or suppose that a man dies declaring
that his life has been marvellously worth while. The non-
28 These formulations are superseded by the statement of the marks of truth given in
§5 of Essay IV. (6*) does not survive there, for reasons that emerge in §10 below.
29 Compare the manner in which we could ascertain from within the space that we
occupy certain of the geometrical properties of that very space: e.g., discover whether
all equilateral triangles we encounter, of whatever size, are in fact similar triangles. If
not, then the space is non-Euclidean.
30 Cp. Essay IV, §4.
116 ESSAY III
cognitive theory is first and foremost a theory not about the

meaning but about the status of those remarks: that their
assertibility is not plain truth and reflects no fact of the matter.
What is more, this is precisely the suspicion that sometimes
troubles and perplexes the untheoretical participant who is
moved to ask the questions from which we began this inquiry.
Finally, let it be noticed, and put down to the credit of the
framework being commended, that within this it was entirely
predictable that the question would be there to be asked.
9. The non-cognitivisf s answer to the question can now be

considered under two separate heads, value judgments (strict
valuations) in general (this §) and deliberative judgments in
general (§11).
For the non-cognitive critique of the assertibility predicate
as it applies to value judgments I propose to employ a
formulation given by Bernard Williams in The Truth in
Relativism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1974/5).
Relativism will be true, Williams says, just in case there are
or can be systems of beliefs S, and Sj such that:
(1) Sj and S2 are distinct and to some extent self-contained;
(2) Adherents of S, can understand adherents of S2;
(3) S, and S2 exclude one another—by (a) being comparable
and (b) returning divergent yes/no answers to at least one
question identifying some action or object type which is the
locus of disagreement under some agreed description;
(4) S, and S2 do not (for us here now, say) stand in real
confrontation because, whichever of S, and S2 is ours, the
question of whether the other one is right lacks the relation to
our concerns ‘which alone gives any point or substance to
appraisal: the only real questions of appraisal [being 1 about
real options’ (p. 255). ‘For we recognize that there can be many
systems S which have insufficient relation to our concerns for
our [own] judgments to have any grip on them.’
If this is right then the non-cognitivist critique of valuations

comes to this. Their mere assertibility as such lacks one of the
truistic properties of plain truth: for an assertible valuation may
fail even under favourable conditions to command agreement
(cf truism (2) §8). Again, there is nothing in the assertibility

property itself to guarantee that all one by one assertible
evaluations are jointly assertible (cf. truism (5)). Nor is it clear
that where there is disagreement there is always something or
other at issue (cf truism (4)). For truth on the other hand we
expect and demand all of this.
The participant will find this disturbing, even discouraging.
But is Williams right about the compatibility of his four
conditions?31 He mentions among other things undifferentiated
judgments of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’.
Here, where the point of agreement or disagreement or opting
one way or another lies close to action, and radical interpretation
is correspondingly less problematical, I think he is on strong
ground. We can make good sense of conditions (2) and (3)
being satisfied together. We can easily imagine condition (4)
being satisfied. But for valuations in the strict and delimited
sense, such as ‘brave’, ‘dishonest’, ‘ignoble’, ‘just’, ‘malicious’,
‘priggish’, there is a real difficulty. The comparability condition
(3) requires that radical interpretation be possible. But radical
interpretation requires the projection by one person upon
another of a collection of beliefs, desires, and concerns that
differ from the interpreter’s own only in a fashion that the
interpreter can describe and, to some extent, explain: and the
remoter the link between the word to be interpreted and action,
and (which is different) the more special the flavour of the
word, the more detailed and delicate the projection that has to
be possible to anchor interpretation. Evaluations raise both of
these problems at once. (And one of the several factors that
make the link between strict valuations and action so remote is
something that Williams himself has prominently insisted
upon in other connections—the plurality, mutual irreducibility,
and incommensurability of goods.) The more feasible interpret-
31 Both for Williams’s purposes and for ours—which is the status of the assertibility
concept as it applies to value judgments, and then as it applies (§11) to deliberative or
practical judgments—we have to be able to convert a relativism such as this,
concerning as it does overall systems S, and S2, into a relativism concerning this or that
particular judgment or class of judgments identifiable and reidentifiable across S,
and S2. Williams requires this in order that disagreement shall be focused. I require it in
order to see whether it is possible to distinguish judgments in S, or S2 whose
assertibility conditions coincide with plain truth from other judgments where this is
dubious.
118 ESSAY III
ation is here, the smaller must be the distance between the

concerns of interpreter and subject.32 But then the harder
condition (4) is to satisfy.
In the theoretical framework of radical interpretation we
shall suddenly see the point of Wittgenstein’s dictum {Philo¬
sophical Investigations, §242) ‘If language is to be a means of
communication there must be agreement not only in definitions
but, queer as this may sound, agreement in judgments also.’33
10. The difficulty the non-cognitivist is having in pressing his

claim at this point is scarcely a straightforward vindication of
cognitivism. If the case for the coincidence of truth and
assertibility in evaluative judgments is made in the terms of §9,
then truth itself is in danger of coming in the process to seem a
fairly parochial thing. It is strange to be driven to the
conclusion that the more idiosyncratic the customs of a people,
the more inscrutable their form of life, and the more special
and difficult their language to interpret, the smaller the
problem of the truth status of their evaluations.
It would be natural for someone perplexed by the question
of the meaning of life to insist at this point that we shall not
have found what it takes for individual lives to have the
meaning we attribute to them unless we link meaning with
rationality. He will say that the threat of relativism does not
depend on Williams’s condition (3) in Section VIII being
satisfied. The threat is rather that, contrary to the tenor of §5,
the reasons that impress us as good reasons have no foundation
in reason at all. Or as Hume states the point in a famous
passage of the First Appendix to the Inquiry concerning the
Principles of Morals:
It appears evident that the ultimate ends of human actions can
never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, but recommend
themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind,
without any dependence on the intellectual faculties. Ask a man
32 There are valuations which are so specific, and so special in their point, that
interpretation requires interpreter and subject to have in some area of concern the very
same interests and the same precise focus. But specificity is only one part of the
problem.
33 Cf §241 and the rest of §242. Cf. also p. 223 (passim): ‘If a lion could talk, we
couldn’t understand him.’
why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep
his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will
readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your
enquiries farther, and desire a reason why he hates pain, it is
impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is
never referred to any other object.
Perhaps to your second question, why he desires health, he
may also reply, that it is necessary for the exercise of his calling.
If you ask, why he is anxious on that head, he will answer,
because he desires to get money. If you demand Why? It is the
instrument of pleasure, says he. And beyond this it is an
absurdity to ask for a reason. It is impossible there can be a
progress in infinitum', and that one thing can always be a reason
why another is desired. Something must be desirable on its own
account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement
with human sentiment and affection.
Not only is it pointless to hope to discover a rational foundation
in human sentiment and affection. It is not even as if
human sentiment and affection will effectively determine the
difference between the worth while and the not worth while.
Each culture, and each generation in each culture, confronts
the world in a different way and reacts to it in a different
way.
This scepticism pointedly ignores all the claims I made earlier,
in §5. Rallying to their support, I ask: What does this scepticism
show about our own judgments of significance or importance?
After all there is no such thing as a rational creature of no
particular neuro-physiological formation or a rational man of
no particular historical formation. And even if, inconceivably,
there were such, why should we care about what this creature
would find compelling? It is not in this make-believe context
that we are called upon to mount a critique of our own
conceptions of the objective, the true, and the worth while.
So much seems to hang on this, but the reply comes so close
to simply repeating the words of the relativist whom it is meant
to challenge, that there is no alternative but to illustrate what
happens when we do try to think of rationality in the absolute
impersonal or cosmic fashion that it seems our interlocutor
requires.
It is interesting that, so far as rationality in theoretical beliefs
is concerned, it is by no means impossible for us to conceive of
120 ESSAY III
thinking in the impersonal way. Suppose we take a Peircean

view of Science as discovering that which is destined, the world
being what it is, to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate.34
Let ‘all’ mean ‘all actual or possible intelligent beings
competent, whatever their conceptual scheme, to look for the
fundamental explanatory principles of the world’. Then think
of all these theories gradually converging through isomorphism
towards identity. Cosmic rationality in belief will then consist
in conforming one’s beliefs so far as possible to the truths that
are destined to survive in this process of convergence.35
Perhaps this is all make-believe. (Actually I think it isn’t.) But
the important thing is that, if we identify properties across all
theories that converge upon what are destined to be agreed
upon (by us or any other determined natural researchers) as the
fundamental principles of nature, then the only non-logical,
non-mathematical predicates we shall not discard from the
language of rational belief are those which, in one guise or
another, will always pull their weight in all explanatorily
adequate theories of the world. As a result, and corresponding
to predicates fit and not fit so to survive, we shall have a
wonderful contrast between the primary qualities of nature
and all other qualities. We can then make for ourselves a fact-
value distinction that has a real and definite point. We can say
that no value predicate stands for any real primary quality, and
that the real properties of the world, the properties which
34 Cf C.S. Peirce: ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Popular Science Monthly vol. 12,
1878, pp. 286-302.
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of
investigations carries them by a force outside themselves to one and the same conclusion.
This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish but to a foreordained
goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no
selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape
the predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality.
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean
by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would
explain reality.
35 Inasmuch as there is a reality which dictates the way a scientific theory has to be in
order that what happens in the world be explained by the theory, the difficulties of
radical interpretation, attempted against the background of the truth about the world
and the unwaveringly constant desire of speakers of the language to understand the
material world, are at their slightest. Or so the upholder of a modest realism might
maintain.
inhere in the world however it is viewed, are the primary

qualities.36
This is a very stark view. It expresses what was an important
element of truth in the ‘external’ perspective. Seeing the world
in this way, one sees no meaning in anything.37 But it is
evidently absurd to try to reduce the sharpness of the viewpoint
by saying that meaning can be introduced into the world thus
seen by the addition of human commitment. Commitment to
what? This Peircean conceptual scheme articulates nothing
that it is humanly possible to care about. It does not even
have the expressive resources to pick out the extensions
of predicates like ‘red’, ‘chair’, ‘person’, ‘famine’. . . . For
none of these has a strong claim to be factual by the scientific
criterion. The distinction of fact and value we reach here, at the
very limit of our understanding of scientific understanding,
cannot be congruent with what the non-cognitivists intended
as their distinction. It is as dubious as ever that there is
anything for them to have intended. Starting out with the idea
that value properties are mental projections, they have
discovered that, if value properties are mental projections,
then, except for the primary qualities, all properties are mental
projections.
We come now to practical rationality for all conceivable
rational agents. (Cosmically valid practical rationality.) The
idea here would be, I suppose, that to be serious about
objective reasons, or why anything matters, one must try to
36 One should talk here also of the fundamental physical constants. Cf. B.A.W.
Russell, Human Knowledge (London, 1948), p. 41:
These constants appear in the fundamental equations of physics ... it should be observed
that we are much more certain of the importance of these constants than we are of this or
that interpretation of them. Planck’s constant, in its brief history since 1900, has been
represented in various ways, but its numerical value has not been affected . . . Electrons
may disappear completely from modern physics but e [charge] and m [mass] are pretty
certain to survive. In a sense it may be said that the discovery and measurement of these
constants is what is most solid in modern physics.
37 Cf. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Penguin, p. 820: ‘[Levin was] stricken with horror, not
so much at death, as at life, without the least conception of its origin, its purpose, its
reason, its nature. The organism, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of
the conservation of energy, evolution, were the terms that had superseded those of his
early faith.’ This is a description of what might pass as one stage in the transition we
have envisaged as completed.
122 ESSAY III
ascend closer to the viewpoint of an impersonal intelligence;38

and that the properties of such an intelligence should be
determinable a priori. A great deal of time and effort has been
channelled into this effort. It might have been expected that the
outcome would be the transformation of the bareness of our
conception of an impersonal intelligence into the conception of
an impersonal intelligence of great bareness. What was not so
plainly to be expected was that the most elementary part of the
subject should immediately collide—as it has—with a simple
and (within the discipline thus a priori conceived) unanswerable
paradox—the so-called ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’.39 What underlies
the paradox (or the idea that there is here some paradox) is the
supposition that it is simply obvious that an a priori theory of
rational action ought to be possible—that some cosmic peg
must exist on which we can fasten a set of concerns clearly and
unproblematically identified independently of all ideals of agency
and rationality themselves. First you have a set of projects;
then you think of a way that they might be best brought about.
That was the picture. But, in a new guise, it was nothing other
than the absurd idea that all deliberation is really of means.40
11. I conclude that there is no such thing as a pure a priori

theory of rationality conceived in isolation from what it is for
us as we are to have a reason: and that even if there were such a
38 Compare Thomas Nagel ‘The Absurd’, note 8, op. cit., pp. 720 and 722, ‘the
philosophical judgment [of absurdity] contrasts the pretensions of life with a larger
context in which no standards can be discovered, rather than with a context from which
alternative overriding standards may be applied’.
391 take this as a ‘paradox’ in the following sense: a general principle of decision-
theoretic prudence, generalizable to any agent whatever caught in the relevant
circumstances, will lead in a wide variety of applications to what must be agreed by
everybody to be a situation which is worse than it might have been for each participant
if he had not acted on the generalizable principle.
To say this is not to ‘solve’ the paradox. It cannot be solved. But it could only be
accounted a real paradox if there were some antecedent grounds to suppose that it
shouldhave been possible to construct an a priori theory of rationality or prudence such
that ‘rational (A)’ is incompatible with ‘rational (not-A)’, and such that that rationality
is definable both independently of morality and ideals of agency and in such a way as to
have independent leverage in these ancient disputes. (Cf. Plato, Republic, 445a.)
For an illuminating account of some of the asymmetries it is rational to expect
between an a priori theory of belief and an a priori theory of practical reasonableness,
see Ronald de Sousa, ‘The Good and the True’, Mind vol. 83, 1974.
40 That practically all interesting deliberation relates to ends and their practical
specification in the light of actually or potentially available constituents, and that the
place of means-ends reasoning is subordinate in practical reason, is argued by A.T.
thing, it would always have been irrelevant to finding a
meaning in life, or seeing anything as worth while. What we
need is to define non-cognitivist relativism in a way that is
innocent of all dependence on a contrast between our
rationality and some purer rationality, yet restates the point we
found in Taylor.
It now says: Perhaps all strict valuations of the more specific
and interesting kind have the interesting property that the
interpretation of the value predicate itself presupposes a shared
viewpoint, and a set of concerns common between interpreter
and subject. Let it be admitted that the exclusive fact-value
distinction then fails. If a cognitivist insists, nothing need
prevent him from exploiting the collapse of that distinction in
order to redescribe in terms of a shift or wandering of the
‘value-focus’ all the profound changes in valuation that have
occurred in history, when the Greek world became the
Christian world, or the Christian world the Renaissance world.
The relativist will not forbid the cognitivist to say with Nicolai
Hartmann, as John Findlay reports him, that these changes
were all by-products of an intense consciousness of new values,
whose swimming into focus pushed out the old: that such
newly apprehended values were not really new, only hitherto
ignored.41
All this the non-cognitivist may let pass as harmless,
however eccentrically expressed; and may in less colourful
language himself assert. He may even allow totidem verbis that,
just as the world cannot be prised by us away from our manner
of conceiving it, so our manner of conceiving it cannot be
Kolnai, ‘Deliberation is of Ends’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1962), and in

Essay VI, a divergent interpretation of Aristotle’s thought on this point, but an
account similar to Kolnai’s of the problem itself.
41 See J.N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1970). Cf William
James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on some of Life’s Ideals
(Longman, Green & Co., 1899), p. 299.
In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those philosophers are right who
contend that the world is a standing thing with no progress, no real history. The changing
conditions of history touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us for new ideals. But,
with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal will
vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say
that the total sum of significance is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than
at any other of the world.
124 ESSAY III
prised apart from our concerns themselves.42 Again, it is open to

him to assert the compatibility of anthropocentricity with the
only thing that there is for us to mean by objectivity, and to
concede that the differences between higher and lower forms of
life are not fictitious. They are even objective, he will say, if you
use the word ‘objective’ like that. But here he will stick. Where
he will not back down from Taylor’s original position is in
respect of Taylor’s denial that these differences are decisive.
Such differences may be important to us. But they depend for
their significance upon a framework that is a free construct, not
upon something fashioned in a manner that is answerable to
how anything really is.
Here at last we approach the distinctive nucleus of non¬
cognitivism (married, without the consent of either, to
Williams’s relativism). What the new position will say is that,
in so far as anything matters, and in so far as human life has the
meaning we think it has, that possibility is rooted in something
that is arbitrary, contingent, unreasoned, objectively non-
defensible—and not one whit the less arbitrary, contingent and
indefensible by virtue of the fact that the unconstrained
inventive processes underlying it have been gradual, unconscious,
and communal. Our form of life—or that in our form of life
which gives individual lives a meaning—is not something that
we as a species ever (as we say) found or discovered. It is
not something that we can criticize or regulate or adjust
with an eye to what is true or correct or reasonable. Even
within the going enterprise of existing concerns and deliberations,
it would be a sad illusion to suppose that the judgment that this
or that is worthwhile, or that life is worth living (or worth
leaving), would be simply and plainly true. That sort of terra
firma is simply not to be had.
The doctrine thus reconstructed from the assets of bankrupted
or naive non-cognitivism I shall call the doctrine of cognitive
underdetermination. Unlike the positions it descends from,
this position does not contradict itself. It is consistent with its
own rationale. It can be explained without entering at all into
the difficulties and ineffabilities of cultural relativism. It can
42 Cf. A.J. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1974),
p. 235: ‘we have seen that the world cannot be prised away from our manner of
conceiving it’.
even be stated in a manner innocent of the commoner
confusions between the idea that morality and culture are
constructs and a more questionable idea, that the references
(content/truth-value) of the judgements that these things make
possible are constructs. (A sort of sense reference confusion.)
Suppose someone says: ‘For me it is neither here nor there
that I cannot prise my way of seeing the world apart from my
concerns. This does nothing to answer my complaint that there
is not enough meaning in the world. My life doesn’t add up.
Nothing matters sufficiently to me. My concerns themselves
are too unimportant, too scattered, and too disparate.’ Equally
devastatingly to the naive cognitivism that the doctrine of
cognitive underdetermination bids us abandon, another one
may say he finds that the objects of his concern beckon to him
too insistently, too cruelly beguilingly, from too many different
directions. ‘I have learned that I cannot strive after all of these
objects, or minister even to most of the concerns that stand
behind them. To follow more than a minute subset is to
be doomed to be frustrated in all. The mere validity—if it
were valid—of the total set from which I am to choose one
subset would provide no guarantee at all that any subset I can
actually have will add up to anything that means anything to
me.’
It is the undetermination theorist’s role to comment here
that things can never add up for the complainant who finds too
frustratingly much, or for the complainant who finds too
inanely little, unless each of us supplies something extra, some
conception of his own, to make sense of things for himself.
The problem of living a life, he may say, is to realize or
respect a long and incomplete or open-ended list of concerns
which are always at the limit conflicting. The claims of all true
beliefs (about how the world is) are reconcilable. Everything
true must be consistent with everything else that is true (cf
truism (5) of §8). But not all the claims of all rational concerns
or even of all moral concerns (that the world be thus or so) need
be actually reconcilable. When we judge that this is what we
must do now,43 or that that is what we’d better do, or that our
life must now take one direction rather than another direction,
431 have put ‘must’, because must and must not, unlike ought and ought not, are
genuine contraries.
126 ESSAY III
we are not fitting truths (or even probabilities) into a pattern

where a discrepancy proves that we have mistaken a falsehood
for a truth.44 Often we have to make a practical choice that
another rational agent might understand through and through,
not fault or even disagree with, but (as Winch has stressed)45
make differently himself; whereas, if there is disagreement over
what is factually true and two rational men have come to
different conclusions, then we think it has to be theoretically
possible to uncover some discrepancy in their respective views
of the evidence. In matters of fact, we suppose that, if two
opposing answers to a yes/no question are equally good, then
they might as well have been equally bad. But in matters of
practice, we are grateful for the existence of alternative
answers. The choice between them is then up to us. Here is our
freedom. But here too is the bareness of the world we inhabit. If
there were practical truth it would have to violate the third and
fifth truisms of truth ((3) and (5) of §8 above). In living a life
there is no truth, and there is nothing like plain truth, for us
to aim at. Anybody who supposes that the assertibility of ‘I
must do this’ or the assertibility of ‘This is the way for me to
live, not that’ consists in their plain truth is simply deluded.
Aristotle wrote (NE 1094a23): ‘Will not knowledge of the
good have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers
who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon the right
thing?’ But in reality there is no such thing as The Good, no such
thing as knowledge of it, and nothing fixed independently of
ourselves to aim at. Or that is what is implied by the thesis of
cognitive underdetermination.
12. If there is any common ground to be discovered in
44 See B.A.O. Williams, ‘Consistency and Realism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society Supplementary Volume, 1966 and cf. J.N. Findlay, op. cit., pp. 74-5:
What is good [Hartmann tells us] necessarily lies in a large number of incompatible
directions, and it is intrinsically impossible that all of these should be followed out into
realisation. One cannot, for example, achieve pure simplicity and variegated richness in the
same thing or occasion, and yet both incontestably make claims upon us... in practice we
sacrifice one good to another, or we make compromises and accommodations . . . such
practical accommodations necessarily override the claims of certain values and everywhere
consummate something that in some respect [ideally] ought not to be ... a man [ideally
should] be as wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove, but that does not mean that... it is
possible for him to be both of them.
45 Peter Winch, ‘The Universalizability of Moral Judgements’, Monist vol. 49,1965.

modem literature and one broad stream of modern philosophy
it is here. What philosophers, even philosophers of objectivist
formation, have constantly stressed is the absence of the
unique solutions and unique determinations of the practical
that naive cognitivism would have predicted.46 They have thus
supplied the theoretical basis for what modern writers (not
excluding modem writers who have believed in God) have felt
rather as a void in our experience of the apprehension of value,
and have expressed not so much in terms of the plurality and
mutual irreducibility of goods as in terms of the need for an
organizing focus or meaning or purpose that we ourselves bring
to life. The mind is not only a receptor: it is a projector.47
At the end of Anna Karenina Levin says to himself: ‘I shall
still lose my temper with Ivan the coachman, I shall still
embark on useless discussions and . . . express my opinions
inopportunely; there will still be the same wall between the
sanctuary of my inmost soul and other people, even my wife
. . . but my life now, my whole life, independently of anything
that can happen to me, every minute of it is no longer
meaningless as it was before, but has a positive meaning of
goodness with which I have the power to invest it.’
However remote such declarations may appear from the
language of the non-cognitivist philosopher, this need for
autonomous making or investing of which Levin speaks is one
part of what, in my presentation of him, the non-cognitive
philosopher means by cognitive underdetermination. The
familiar idea is that we do not discover a meaning for life or
strictly find one: we have to make do with an artifact or
46 The plurality and mutual irreducibility of things good has been stressed by F.
Brentano (Origins of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, see especially para. 32); by N.
Hartmann (see J. Findlay, op. cit.); by Isaiah Berlin, see, for instance, Four Essays on
Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969), Introduction p. xlix; by A.T. Kolnai and
B.A.O. Williams {op. cit.). See also Leszek Kolakowski, ‘In Praise of Inconsistency’ in
Marxism and Beyond (London, 1969); Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Pessimism
(Cambridge University Press, 1972); and Essay VII below.
47 For the seed of this idea in Plotinus’ theory of cognition and for its transplantation
and subsequent growth, see M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University
Press, 1953), Plotinus, Ennead, IV. 6.2-3: ‘The mind affirms something not contained
within impression: this is the characteristic of a power—within its allotted sphere to
act.’ ‘The mind gives radiance to the objects of sense out of its own store.’
128 ESSAY III
construct or projection—something as it were invented.48 And,

whereas discovery is answerable to truth, invention and
construction are not. From this he concludes that a limited and
low-grade objectivity is the very best one could hope for in
predications of meaning or significance.
The non-cognitivist takes two steps here and the assessment
of the second step concerning objectivity depends markedly on
the notion of truth that is employed at the first. What is this
notion, we need to know, and to what extent does the
cognitivist’s position depend upon a naive and precritical
understanding of it? Give or take a little—subtract perhaps the
more indeterminate among subjunctive conditionals—the
precritical notion of truth covers empirical judgments fairly
well. But it consorts less well with conceptions of truth or
assertibility defended in mathematics by mathematical in-
tuitionists or mathematical constructivists. It is well worth
remarking that, for someone who wanted to combine objectivity
with a doctrine of qualified cognitivism or of underdetermi¬
nation, there might be no better model than Wittgenstein’s
normative conception of the objectivity of mathematics; and
no better exemplar than Wittgenstein’s extended description of
how a continuing cumulative process of making or constructing
can amount to the creation of a shared form of life that is
constitutive of rationality itself, furnishing proofs that are not
compulsions but procedures to guide our conceptions, ex¬
plaining, without explaining away, our sense that sometimes we
have no alternative but to infer this from that.49
48 For a remarkable expression of the non-cognitivist’s principal point and some

others, see Aldous Huxley, Do As You Will (London, 1929), p. 101:
The purpose of life, outside the mere continuance of living (already a most noble and
beautiful end), is the purpose we put into it. Its meaning is whatever we may choose to call
the meaning. Life is not a crossword puzzle, with an answer settled in advance and a prize
for the ingenious person who noses it out. The riddle of the universe has as many answers as
the universe has living inhabitants. Each answer is a working hypothesis, in terms of which
the answerer experiments with reality. The best answers are those which permit the
answerer to live most fully, the worst are those which condemn him to partial or complete
death . . . Every man has an inalienable right to the major premiss of his philosophy of life.
If anything need be added to this, presumably it is only that, concerning what ‘living
most fully’ is for each man, the final authority must be the man himself. There is
something right with this; but there is something wrong with it too.
49 Cf. L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics (Oxford-
Blackwell, 1956), III-30.
Perhaps this is a million miles from ethics. Or perhaps
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics is completely un¬
successful. But if the subject-matter of moral philosophy had
any of the features that Wittgenstein attributed to the sort of
subject-matter he thought he was treating, then the issue
whether the assertibility of practical judgments was truth, and
did or did not sufficiently approximate to the truth of
statements universally agreed to be factual, might become
relatively unimportant.50 We could measure the distance,
assess its importance, and think how to live with it. (Is there an
independent case for tampering in certain ways with the
received truisms of truth? Or should we leave them to define an
ideal that practical judgment must fall far short of? How
important really is the shortfall?)
Of course, if practical judgments were candidates to be
accounted simply true, then what made them true, unlike
valuations,51 could not be the world itself, whatever that is.52
But, saying what they say, the world is not really what they
purport to characterize. (Compare what Wittgenstein, whether
rightly or wrongly, wanted to say about statements of
50 There is a cheap victory to be won even here of course. For it has proved much
easier to achieve convergence or reflective equilibrium within our culture about the
value of, say, civil liberty than about how exactly printing extra bank-notes will act
upon conditions of economic recession. But this is not the point I am making.
51 Note that the distinction proposed at §4 between evaluation and practical
judgment is observed both here and throughout this essay.
“Everything would be the wrong way round. Cf. B.A.O. Williams, ‘Consistency
and Realism’ (op. cit., n. 44), p. 19:
the line on one side of which consistency plays its peculiarly significant role is the line
between the theoretical and the practical, the line between discourse which (to use a now
familiar formula) has to fit the world, and discourse which the world must fit. With
discourse that is practical in these terms, we can see why . . . consistency. . . should admit
of exception and should be connected with coherence notions of a less logical character.
This whole passage suggests something important, not only about statements of
what ideally should be, but also about deliberative judgments,—namely that the
exigencies of having to decide what to believe are markedly dissimilar from the
exigencies of having to decide how to act. What the argument does not show is that the
only truth there could be in a practical judgment is a peculiar truth which transposes
the onus of match on to the world. (Still less that, if one rejects that idea, then the onus
of match would be from the sentence or its annexed action to an ideal world.) Williams
has illuminatingly glossed (1) precisely why truth in a practical judgement would not be
like that; (2) the reasons why ‘Ought (A)’ and ‘Ought (not-A)’ are actually consistent;
and (3) why ‘must (A)’ (which is inconsistent with ‘must (not-A)’) is only strictly
assertible or true if A is the unique thing you must here do.
130 ESSAY III
arithmetic.) In the assertibility (or truth) of mathematical

statements we see what perhaps we can never see in the
assertibility of empirical (such as geographical or historical)
statements: the compossibility of objectivity, discovery, and
invention. (See further p. 350 below.)
If we combine Wittgenstein’s conception of mathematics
with the constructivist or intuitionist views that are its cousins,
then we find an illuminating similarity. One cannot get more
out of the enterprise of making than one has in one way
or another put there. (‘What if someone were to reply to a
question: “So far there is no such thing as an answer to this
question”?’ Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, IV. 9.)
And at any given moment one will have put less than
everything into it. So however many determinations have been
made, we never have a reason to think we have reached a
point where no more decisions or determinations will be
needed. No general or unrestricted affirmation is possible of
the law of excluded middle. But then anyone who wishes to
defend the truth status for practical judgments is released from
claiming that every practical question already has an answer.
For reasons both independent of the practical and helpful to its
pretensions, we may doubt how mandatory it ever was to enter
into the system of ideas and preconceptions that issues in such
declarations as truism (6*) of §8 above.
I shall break off from these large questions with two points
of comparison and contrast.
(i) It seems that in the sphere of the practical we may know for
certain that there exist absolutely undecidable questions—e.g.,
cases where the situation is so calamitous or the choices so
insupportable that nothing could count as the morally
reasonable answer. In mathematics, on the other hand, it
appears to be an undecidable question even how much sense
attaches to the idea of an absolutely undecidable question. This
is a potentially important discrepancy between the two subject
matters. If we insist upon the actuality of some absolute
undecidability in the practical sphere, then we shall burst the
bounds of ordinary, plain truth. To negate the law of excluded
middle is to import a contradiction into the intuitionist logic
which our comparison makes the natural choice for practical
judgments. The denial of ‘((A would be right) or not (A would
be right))’ contradicts the intuitionist theorem ‘(not (not (p or
not p))).
(ii) If a man makes an arithmetical mistake he may collide with

a brick wall or miss a train. He may bankrupt himself. For each
calculation there is some risk, and for each risk a clear mark of
the worst’s having befallen us. There is nothing so definite with
practical judgments. But surely it is begging the question to
require it. Equally, it is begging the question to shrug this off
without another word.
13. Let us review what has been found, before trying to

advance further.
However rarely or often practical judgments attain truth, and

whatever is the extent and importance of cognitive underdeter¬
mination, we have found no overwhelming reason to deny all
objectivity to practical judgments. That practical questions
might have more than one answer, and that there is not always
an ordering of better or worse answers, is no reason to
conclude that good and bad answers cannot be argumentatively
distinguished.
It is either false or senseless to deny that what valuational

predicates stand for are properties in a world. It is neither here
nor there that these value properties are not primary qualities,
provided that they be objectively discriminable and can
impinge upon practical appreciation and judgment. No extant
argument shows that they cannot.
Individual human lives can have more or less point in

a manner partially dependent upon the disposition in the world
of these value properties. The naive non-cognitivist has
sometimes given the impression that the way we give point to
our lives is as if by blindfolding ourselves and attaching to
something—anything—some free-floating commitment, a
commitment that is itself sustained by the mere fact of our
animal life. But that was a mistake. There is no question
here of blindfolding. And that is not what is said or implied by
the reconstructed doctrine of cognitive underdetermination.
132 ESSAY III
In as much as invention and discovery are distinguishable,

and in so far as either of these ideas properly belongs here, life’s
having a point may depend as much upon something
contributed by the person whose life it is as it depends upon
something discovered. Or it may depend upon what the owner
of the life brings to the world in order to see the world in such a
way as to discover meaning. This cannot happen unless world
and person are to some great extent reciprocally suited. And
unluckily, all claims of human adaptability notwithstanding,
those things are often not well suited to one another.
14. To get beyond here, something now needs to be said

about the connection of meaning and happiness. In most moral
philosophy, the requirement to treat meaning is commuted
into the requirement to specify the end; and the end is usually
identified with happiness. One thing that has seemed to make
this identification plausible is the apparent correctness of the
claim that happiness is the state of one’s life having a point or
meaning. But on any natural account of the relation of point
and end, this claim is actually inconsistent with the equation
‘Happiness = The End’. (Unless happiness can consist in
simply having happiness as one’s end.) It is also worth
observing that, in the very special cases where it is straightforward
to say what the point of someone’s life is, we may say what he
stands for, or may describe his life’s work. (I choose these cases
not because I think they are specially central but because they
are specially clear.) The remarkable thing is that these
specifications are not even categorially of a piece with
happiness. That does not prove that happiness is never the
point. The works of practical moralists are replete, however,
with warnings of the difficulty or futility of making happiness
the aim. If they are right then, by the same token, it would be
futile to make it the point.
The misidentification—if misidentification it is—of happiness
and end has had a long history. The first fully systematic
equation of the end, the good for man, and happiness is
Aristotle’s. The lamentable and occasionally comical effects of
this are much palliated by the close observation and good sense
that Aristotle carried to the specification of happiness. And it
may be said in Aristotle’s defence that the charge of
misidentification of happiness and the good for man is
captious, because his detailed specification of eudaimonia can
perfectly well stand in—if this be what is required—as a
description of the point of human existence: also that Aristotle
meant by eudaimonia not exactly happiness but a certain kind
of success. But that is too quick. Unless we want to walk the
primrose path to the trite and solemn conclusion that a
meaningful life is just a sum (cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b 17)
of activities worth while in themselves, or self-complete (in the
sense of Metaphysics, 1048b 17), the question is worth taking
some trouble over. Not only is this proposition trite and
solemn. Read in the way Aristotle intended it is absurd.
Out of good nature a man helps his neighbour dig a drainage
ditch. The soil is hard but not impossibly intractable, and
together the two of them succeed in digging the ditch. The man
who offers to help sees what he is doing in helping dig the ditch
as worth while. In so far as meaning is an issue for him, he may
see the episode as all of a piece with a life that has meaning. He
would not see it so, and he would not have taken on the task, if
it were impossible. In the case as we imagine it, the progress of
the project is integral to his pleasure in it. But so equally is the
fact that he likes his neighbour and enjoys working with him
(provided it be on projects that it is within their joint powers to
complete).
Shall we say here that the man’s helping dig the ditch is
instrumental and has the meaning or importance it has for the
helper only derivatively? Derivatively from what, on the non-
cognitivist view? Or shall we say that the ditch-digging is worth
while in itself? But it isn’t. It is end-directed. If we cannot say
either of these things, can we cut the Gordian knot by saying
both? In truth, the embracing of the end depends on the man’s
feeling for the task of helping someone he likes. But his feeling
for the project of helping equally depends on the existence and
attainability of the end of digging the ditch.
This is not to deny that Aristotle’s doctrine can be restored
to plausibility if we allow the meaning of the particular life
that accommodates the activity to confer intrinsic worth upon
the activity. But this is to reverse Aristotle’s procedure (which
is the only procedure available to a pure cognitivist). And I
doubt we have to choose (cf. §6). At its modest and most
134 ESSAY III
plausible best the doctrine of cognitive underdetermination

can say that we need to be able to think in both directions,
down from point to the human activities that answer to it, and
up from activities whose intrinsic worth can be demonstrated
by Aristotle’s consensual method to forms of life in which we
are capable by nature of finding point.53
15. It might be interesting and fruitful to pick over the

wreckage of defunct and discredited ethical theories and see
what their negligence of the problem of life’s having a meaning
contributed to their ruin. I have little to report under this head.
But it does seem plain that the failure of naturalistic theories,
theories reductively identifying the Good or the End with some
natural reality, has been bound up with the question of
meaning. Surely the failure of all the reductive naturalisms of
the nineteenth century—Pleasure and Pain Utilitarianism,
Marxism, Evolutionary Ethics—was precisely the failure to
discover in brute nature itself (either in the totality of future
pleasures or in the supposedly inevitable advance of various
social or biological cum evolutionary processes), anything that
the generality of untheoretical men could find reason to invest
with overwhelming importance. These theories offered nothing
that could engage in the right way with human concerns or give
point or focus to anyone’s life. (This is the cognitivist version of
a point that ought to be attributed to David Hume.)
Naturalistic theories have been replaced in our own time by
53 Surely neither the consensual method nor the argued discussion of such forms
would be possible in the absence of the shared neurophysiology that makes possible
such community of concepts and such agreement as exists in evaluative and
deliberative judgments. Nor would there be such faint prospects as there are of
attaining reflective equilibrium or finding a shared mode of criticism. But nature plays
only a causal and enabling role here, not the unconvincing speaking part assigned to it
by Ethical Naturalism and by Aristotelian Eudaemonism. Aristotle qualified by the
addition ‘in a complete life’ (1098al6) the equation eudaimonia = activity of soul in
accordance with virtue. And, tempering somewhat the sum of goods conception, he
could agree with my strictures on the idea that the philosopher describes a meaning for
life by building upwards from the special condition of its meaninglessness. But, as J.L.
Austin used to complain, ‘If life comes in at all, it should not come into Aristotle’s
argument as an afterthought’. And no help is to be had here from Aristotle’s idea that,
just as an eye has a function f such that the eye’s goodness in respect of f=the good for
the eye, so a man has his function. Eye:body::man:what? Cf. 1194b 12. What is it for a
man to find some function f that he can embrace as his, as giving his life meaning?
Nature does not declare.
Prescriptivism, Emotivism, Existentialism, and Neutral (satis-
faction-based) Utilitarianism. It is misleading to speak of them
together. The second and third have had important affinities
with moral Pyrrhonism. The first and fourth are very careful
and, in the promotion of formal or second-order goods such as
equality, tolerance, or consistency, rather earnest. But it is
also misleading not to see these positions together.
Suppose that, when pleasure and absence of pain give place
in an ethical theory to unspecified merely determinable
satisfaction (and when the last drop of mentality is squeezed
from the revealed preference theory which is the economic
parallel of philosophical Utilitarianism), someone looks to
modern Utilitarianism for meaning or happiness. The theory
points him towards the greatest satisfaction of human beings’
desires. He might embrace that end, if he could understand
what that satisfaction consisted in. He might if he could see
from his own case what satisfaction consisted in. But that is
very likely where he started—unless, more wisely, he started
closer to the real issue and was asking himself where he should
look to find a point for his life. But, so far as either question is
concerned, the theory has crossed out the infantile proposal
‘pleasure and lack of pain’,54 and distorted and degraded (in
description if not in fact) the complexity of the structure within
which a man might have improved upon the childish answer
for himself. For all questions of ends, all problems about what
constitutes the attainment of given human ends, and all
perplexities of meaning, have been studiously but fallaciously
transposed by this theory into questions of instrumental
means. But means to what? The theory is appreciably further
than the nineteenth-century theory was from a conceptual
appreciation of the structure of values and focused unfrustrated
concerns presupposed to a man’s finding a point in his life; and
of the need to locate correctly happiness, pleasure, and a man’s
conception of his own unfolding life within that structure.
If we look to existentialism, we find something curiously
similar. Going back to the formation of some of these ideas, I
found Andre Maurois’s description in Call No Man Happy
54 For the thought that this might be literally infantile, I am indebted indirectly to
Bradley and directly to Richard Wollheim, ‘The Good Self and the Bad Self,
Proceedings of the British Academy, 1975.
136 ESSAY III
(trans. Lindley: Cape; London, 1943, p. 43) of his teacher Alain

(Emile-Auguste Chartier):
what I cannot convey by words is the enthusiasm inspired in us
by this search, boldly pursued with such a guide; the excitement
of those classes which are entered with the persistent hope of
discovering, that very morning, the secret of life, and from
which one departed with the joy of having understood that
perhaps there was no such secret but that nevertheless it was
possible to be a human being and to be so with dignity and
nobility. When I read in Kim the story of the Lama who sought
so piously for the River of the Arrow, I thought of our search.
What goes wrong here—and remember that Alain was teacher
not only of Maurois but also of Sartre—goes wrong even in the
question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ We bewitch ourselves to
think that we are looking for some one thing like the Garden of
the Hesperides, the Holy Grail . . . Then finding nothing like
that in the world, no one thing from which all values can be
derived and no one focus by which all other concerns can be
organized, we console ourselves by looking inwards, but again
for some one substitute thing, one thing in us now instead of
the world. Of course if the search is conducted in this way it is
more or less inevitable that the one consolation will be dignity
or nobility or commitment: or more spectatorially irony,
resignation, scorn . . . But, warm though its proper place is for
each of these—important though each of them is in its
own non-substitutive capacity—it would be better to go
back to the ‘the’ in the original question; and to interest
ourselves afresh in what everybody knows about—the set of
concerns he actually has, their objects, and the focus he has
formed or seeks to bring to bear upon these: also the prospects
of purifying, redeploying or extending this set.55
Having brought the matter back to this place, how can a
theorist go on? I think he must continue from the point where I
55 Cf. Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’ (pp. 208ff.), in Amelie Rorty
(ed.), The Identities of Persons (University of California Press, 1976):
The categorical desires which propel one forward do not have to be even very evident to
consciousness, let alone grand or large; one good testimony to one’s existence having a
point is that the question of its point does not arise, and the propelling concerns may be of a
relatively everyday kind such as certainly provide the ground of many sorts of happiness
(cf p. 209).
myself ought to have begun if the products of philosophy itself

had not obstructed the line of sight: labouring within an
intuitionism or moral phenomenology as tolerant of low-grade
non-behavioural evidence as is literature (but more obsessively
elaborative of the commonplace, and more theoretical, in the
interpretive sense, than literature), he has to appreciate and
describe the working day complexity of what is experientially
involved in seeing a point in living. It is no use to take a
going moral theory—Utilitarianism or whatever it is—and
paste on to it such postscripta as the Millian insight ‘It really is
of importance not only what men do, but what manner of men
they are that do it’: or the insight that to see a point in living a
man has to be such that he can like himself: or to try to super¬
impose upon the theory the structure that we have complained
that Utilitarianism degrades. If life’s having a point is at all
central to moral theory then room must be made for these
things right from the very beginning. The phenomenological
account I advocate would accommodate all these things in
conjunction with (1) ordinary anthropocentric objectivity, (2)
the elements of value-focus and discovery, and (3) the element
of invention that it is the non-cognitivist’s conspicuous
distinction to have imported into the argument.
Let us not underestimate what would have been done if this
work were realized. But ought the theorist to be able to do
more? Reluctant though I am to draw any limits to the
potentiality or enterprise of discursive reason, I see no reason
why he should. Having tamed non-cognitivism and made of it a
doctrine of cognitive underdetermination, which allows the world
to impinge upon but not to determine the point possessed by
individual lives, and which sees value properties not as created
but as lit up by the focus that the one who lives the life brings to
the world; and, having described what finding meaning is, it
will not be for the theorist as such to insist on intruding himself
further. As Bradley says in Appearance and Reality (450):
If to show theoretical interest in morality and religion is taken
as setting oneself up as a teacher or preacher, I would rather
leave these subjects to whoever feels that such a character suits
him.

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Ill

Truth, Invention, and the Meaning

Nul n’est besoin d’esperer pour entreprendre,

Eternal survival after death completely fails to

1. Even now, in an age not much given to mysticism, there are

* A lecture delivered on November 24th, 1976. First published in Proceedings of the

same class as ‘What is the greatest good of the greatest

2. I have spoken in favour of the direct approach, but it is

We live in this world to compel ourselves industriously to

What we envy here is the specificity, and the certainty of

2 Compare the composer’s choice of expression on the occasion of his father’s

If we envy the certainty of the 1776 answer, then most likely

3. The account I have taken is that given in Chapter 18 of

Two ways are then mentioned in which this meaninglessness

... if we supposed that these stones . . . were assembled [by

Suppose that the gods, as an afterthought, waxed perversely

swept pyramids, soon become mere curiosities, while around

Here is a point that obsesses the author. Paragraph upon

The final reckoning would appear to be this: (a) a lasting end or

4. Connoisseurs of twentieth-century ethical theory in its

is true that between these there is an important no-man’s-land

For some purposes, judgments that philosophers describe as judgments of prima

theory the inner perspective that it commends as the only

5. Where the non-cognitive account essentially depends on

(a) I shall show in due course how activities that can be

perspective. It cannot adopt the inner perspective because,

11 For an independent account of the subjective, see Essay V.

an argument to prove rigorously the mutual coincidence of

description of the point we can attach to our form of life must

6. Leaving many questions still dangling, I shall conclude

14 On permanence, cf. Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4312 quoted

in human appetitive states.16 They are contrasted (as we also

One has only to put the matter like this, however, to be

18 This feature of experience is of course lamented by thinkers who seek to make

I promised to conclude the critique of non-cognitivism with

20 Without of course wishing to deny the difference that good is ‘attributive’ to a

way in which the quality by which a thing counts as funny and

s is assertible if and only if p.

we are assuming is only that the informal remarks the moral

2 See M.A.E. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973)

language.23 So if the ethical theorist is to erect a theory of

23 See p. 187 of A. Tarski, ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized languages’, in Logic,

to ascribe inexplicable error or inexplicable irrationality to

8. Even if this will be a disappointment to those who have

practice’.26 Here Kolnai alluded to the irremovable disproportion

cognitive theory is first and foremost a theory not about the

9. The non-cognitivisf s answer to the question can now be

If this is right then the non-cognitivist critique of valuations

(cf truism (2) §8). Again, there is nothing in the assertibility

ation is here, the smaller must be the distance between the

10. The difficulty the non-cognitivist is having in pressing his

thinking in the impersonal way. Suppose we take a Peircean

inhere in the world however it is viewed, are the primary

ascend closer to the viewpoint of an impersonal intelligence;38

11. I conclude that there is no such thing as a pure a priori

Kolnai, ‘Deliberation is of Ends’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1962), and in

prised apart from our concerns themselves.42 Again, it is open to

we are not fitting truths (or even probabilities) into a pattern

44 See B.A.O. Williams, ‘Consistency and Realism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian