Evaluative Statements When you judge an action or behavior to be good or bad, moral or immoral, right or wrong.

Your judgment about the positive or negative worth or value of an act, behavior, object, or event. When you prescribe what should or ought to be done or when you state what actions are obligatory or prohibited

Pursuing excellence in everything you do is good. Sex outside of marriage is a sin. Cheating on your partner is bad. --- You ought to practice what you preach. Thou shall not kill. Abortion should be legalized in the Philippines.

The Logical Positivist’s View Evaluative statements are meaningless because they are neither true or false Simply because these statements cannot be guaranteed by the two sources of knowledge therefore cannot be verified under either Correspondence or Coherence Theory of Truth No cognitive content thus cognitively meaningless

The Logical Positivists (Logical Empiricism) Based their beliefs/tenets on the early Wittgenstein Members: the Vienna Circle by Moritz Schlick including Rudolf Carnap, A. J. Ayer (Britain); Sympathizers: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr

Acc. to Rudolf Carnap "the elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language." The idea was that, once people were no longer plagued by metaphysical nonsense (strictu sensu), they would confine themselves to verifiable, scientific statements on the one hand, and poetry on the other, and cease to act like mad beasts.

Emotive Theory of Meaning by A.J. Ayer You acted wrongly in stealing money. Is the same thing as saying: You stole the money. In adding the term wrongly, one is merely evincing your moral disapproval of stealing and as such, have not added any factual content to the statement.

Ethical Statements are pure expressions of feelings & as such do not come under the category of truth & falsehood. They are utterances that are unverifiable for the same reason that a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable—because they do not express genuine propositions. Alfred Jules Ayer in Language, Truth & Logic

P.H Nowell-Smith Ethical terms as well as ethical judgments have different roles. “They are used to express tastes and preferences, to express decisions & choices, to grade & evaluate, to advice, to admonish, warn, persuade & dissuade, to praise, encourage & reprove, to prolong & draw attention to rules….”

Evaluative Statements The statements may be shared by the public, a group of individuals, the society in general and not just mere personal sentiment. They derive their meaning from various language games in which they are accepted as norms of behavior. Part of the intra & inter subjective consensus of players in a language game.

Pragmatic Criterion of Truth States that a proposition is true if it leads to good and practical consequences. And false, if not. Workability, satisfaction, consequences, and results are the key terms.

Problems with the Pragmatic Criterion of Truth Relativism The “good” can vary from one individual to another. This means that the criterion doesn’t pass the inter subjectivity test.