Reaction Paper: Cognitivism versus Non-Cognitivism

Ethics is generally understood to be a branch of philosophy whose focal point is on the normative

value in human behavior. Meta-ethics seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, attitudes, and

judgments. There are two theories of meta-ethics: cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Cognitivism holds

the evaluative moral sentences express propositions. Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus it

holds that moral statements do express beliefs and that they are up for truth and falsity. On one hand, non-

cognitivism holds that ethical sentences are neither true nor false because they do not express genuine

propositions. The two theories are significant to learn to classify mental states like beliefs and non-beliefs.

Cognitivism needs to foresee what would be like to contain such moral truths and how can we know if

those are true. I strongly believe that the cognitivist theory is indeed right.

Cognitivism entails the claim that people know what moral right from wrong is while non-

cognitivism entails a denial of this claim. Basing on the cognitivism arguments, there is moral truth

objective which is known in a similar manner in which we come to know other truths about the world. A

moral belief statement can be true or false. On the other hand, non-cognitivist argue that it is not possible

to assess the objective of moral belief. Lu and Lin (2014) by summarizing the work of many other claims

that cognitivism maintains that ethical sentence can be either true or false, but they do not express the

feeling of the people. What they express is the proposition, which can be false or true.

It is important to note, from the outset, the difficulty involved in supposing that evaluative

judgments express desires or aversions, rather than beliefs. As we have seen, the psychological states that

we express when we make evaluative judgments are remarkably belief-like. I take this to mean that they

have many of the functional features of belief. The difficulty, to anticipate, is to conceive of desires or

aversions that have exactly these features, given that the main difference between beliefs, desires, and

aversions, on the other, is that they differ in just these functional respects.
 Furthermore, Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus, it holds that moral statements

do express beliefs and that they are apt for truth and falsity. But cognitivism need not be a species of

realism since a cognitivist can be an error theorist and think all moral statements false. Still, moral realists

are cognitivism insofar as they think moral statements are apt for robust truth and falsity and that many of

them are in fact true. Thus, I chose Cognitivism theory, because it is also a learning theory that focuses on

the processes involved in mental learning than non-cognitivism. Cognitivism does not require an outward

of the exhibition, but rather focus on the connections that take place during learning. Furthermore,

cognitivism contends to be the “black box” of mind that should be deeply opened and understood.