ABSTRACT
In the last nine chapters we’ve seen that noncognitivist theories both promise a significant philosophical payoff and also face daunting problems. Both the payoff and the problems derive from noncognitivism’s differences from truth-conditional theories of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning explain what words mean by saying what they are about, and explain what sentences mean by saying what it takes for them to be true. Noncognitivist theories hold, on the contrary, that knowing what a moral term is about is either unnecessary or insufficient to understand what it means, and that knowing what would make a moral sentence true is either unnecessary or insufficient to understand what it means. On the plus side, this allows noncognitivist theories to finesse or evade the ‘core questions’ of metaethics, and to explain why moral thoughts have a special, more intimate, connection to motivation than ordinary non-moral thoughts. But on the minus side, the departure from truth-conditional semantics also means a departure from all of the great successes of truth-conditional semantics at accommodating the compositional constraint and at explaining the semantic properties of complex sentences.
