A Study Of The Cognitive Problems Of Hermeneutic Moral Fictionalism

Hermeneutic moral fictionalism is a kind of fictionalism which characterizes moral discourse as fictional object.Hermeneutic moral fictionalism holds the view that moral discourse is a kind of hermeneutic language which describes moral practice accurately.However,this type of hermeneutic discourse,which appears to be a true description of moral practice,is true only on the face of it,when a competent speaker saying a moral sentence,she just “makes believe”.In terms of ontological cognition of moral practice,hermeneutic moral fictionalism denies the existence of objective moral facts and insists on non-cognitivism,holding that the essence of moral acceptance and moral commitment as affect,desire or attitude rather than belief.Because of its association with non-factualism,non-cognitivism is bound to face the Frege-Geach problem.In order to avoid the “fallacy of equivocation” which caused by the Frege-Geach problem,hermeneutic moral fictionalism combines non-cognitivism with factualism and proposes a new theory to solve the semantic implication of “embedded occurrences of a sentences” reasoning.However,the solution would create new cognitive problems,which are discussed in this paper from the perspectives of the intransigence,representation and quasi-assertiveness of moral discourse.The intransigence nature of moral discourse holds that the moral subject does not need to inquire further into the disagreement arising from the moral frameworks,thus refuting the cognitive of moral acceptance.However,the intransigence nature will bring the problem of the identity of the moral frameworks and the lack of moral authority.Hermeneutic moral fictionalism points out the irrationality of these arguments by refuting their natural assumption and reinterpreting the meaning of norms which governing moral commitment and the noncognitive explanations.The representational nature of moral discourse is contradicted by the non-representational claim that denies moral attributes,which makes it necessary to insert common elements between the two premises in order for hypothetical propositional inferences to be valid.But in fact,this common element,which is used as a connection between the two premises of an embedded inference demonstration,does not exist,“desire in the directed attention sense” will also cause differences in the psychological state of linguistic behavior in the argument.The quasi-assertion nature of moral discourse is divided into weak nonassertion and strong nonassertion.The weak nonassertion claim holds that moral discourse has non-truth-involving property or real-world conditions,while the strong nonassertion claim holds that moral discourse does not make any assertions.However,for weak nonassertion,the argument of non-truth-involving property containing attributes are still semantically incoherent,real-world conditions causes infinite advances of possible worlds,and strong nonassertion claim is also invalidated in the sense of “phenomenology of pretense”.