ABSTRACT
The earliest noncognitivists sometimes described their view as the view that moral sentences are incapable of being true or false. This idea can profitably be thought of as deriving from the analogies which they exploited. If ‘murder is wrong’ has a meaning similar to that of ‘dammit, not murder!’, we would expect that the former sentence, like the latter one, would not be the sort of thing that we would ordinarily call true or false. If your friend says ‘dammit!’, you wouldn’t ordinarily describe her as having said something true or false; so if ‘murder is wrong’ is like ‘dammit!’, we wouldn’t expect it to be the sort of thing to be true or false, either.
