ABSTRACT
So far we have been looking at a serious set of problems that confront noncognitivist theories, most of which have arisen in the philosophy of language, though some arose in the philosophy of mind. As we’ve seen, the Frege–Geach problem is a very central issue that has faced noncognitivist theories, and it has occupied most of our attention, as well as much of the attention of the literature. But noncognitivist theories also face significant challenges from other areas of philosophy, and in this chapter we’ll turn our attention to explore one important problem that arises for noncognitivist theories in the area of epistemology, the study of when and how we know or are justified in believing things. In particular, we’ll focus on a particular problem identified by Cian Dorr (2002) known as the wishful thinking problem. Fortunately, in contrast to the Frege–Geach problem, about which thousands of pages have been written over at least seventy years, the wishful thinking problem is a relatively new problem, and very little has been written about it, so it is possible to very quickly get up to speed.
