ABSTRACT
Non-cognitivists hold that ascriptions of value should not be conceived as propositions of the sort whose correctness, or acceptability, consists in their being true descriptions of the world. Meanwhile it is clear that the concession would at any rate preclude explaining the relation between value experience and the world as it is independently of value experience. Appeal to grasp of a universal, conceiving this as a mechanism of an analogous sort: one which, like knowledge of an explicitly stateable rule, constitutes a capacity to run along a rail that is independently there. Second, it is anyway a mistake to construe the argument as making a sceptical point: that one does not know that others behaviour will not come adrift. So it seems that, if it disowns the assumption, non-cognitivism must regard the attitude as something which is simply felt; and uses of evaluative language seem appropriately assimilated to certain sorts of exclamation, rather than to the paradigm cases of concept-application.
