Most Famous Ethical Puzzle: The Frege-Geach Problem – Philosophy Tube
One of the most famous and difficult problems in ethics! The issue that killed moral noncognitivism – The Frege-Geach Problem!
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Peter Geach, “Assertion,” in Philosophical Review
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@oscarstenberg2745
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Modus ponens only transmits truth if both antecedent and consequent are truth-apt. If X is purely expressive (no truth-value), then ‘If X then Y’ is not a genuine material implication, so modus ponens doesn’t apply and cannot force X to be descriptive.
You cannot validly apply modus ponens across the descriptive/expressive divide. Frege-Geach a category mistake.
"The sentences X and Y are expressions but do not describe objects or how they interact."
"They describe how objects interact because I can say if X, then Y."
"No, X does not necessitate Y since neither X nor Y can be either true or false."
Frege-Gaech tries to combat logical semantics with lexical semantics and of course normies fall for this simple fallacy.
@gonx9906
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I don't get it, "stealing boo" is the same as "stealing is bad", so whatever conditional logic that applies to "stealing is bad" must also apply to "stealing boo".
@r_se
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
It's difficult for me to see an issue with this translation (save for its convolution)
stealing is bad
If stealing is bad then murder is bad
therefore murder is bad
=
if you're talking to someone who is expressing disapproval toward stealing but not murder:
Boo stealing!
The same hidden mental process that may lead to consistent people's feelings towards stealing also underlies those regarding murder. Boo murder! You've expressed disapproval toward stealing before so expressing approval toward murder is indicative of your mind being unreasonable in some fundamental sense that is inaccesibile to yourself.
otherwise it is nonsense
this doesnt seem to imply to me that, say, "stealing is wrong" could stand as anything but an expression of disapproval
EDIT: nevermind i just found out about blackburn and he sidesteps it more elegantly, with higher order state., I don't think my concept really scales up in the same way his can. To me the crux seems to be the disconnect between one's judgements and one's self, so Gibbard avoiding it via some structure where you're engaging in discourse with a sort of splitting of the subject also seems really compelling.
@petermeyer6873
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
If stealing=boo how could then murder=boo. Would it really be the same amount of "boo" or at least allready one "oink!"?
This replacement idea of Hare is silly. He should have put his efford rather into new logical operations for moral statements.
@john211murphy
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Is "Stealing" ALWAYS bad?
Is "Murder" ALWAYS bad?
Stealing is not the same as murder.
@roseblack3436
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I have nothing to contribute to this other that… 600th comment.
@misterbiscuit2538
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
The argument only fails to be valid when you only paraphrase Premise 2. If you also paraphrased Premise 1 to say "IF BOO STEALING THEN BOO MURDER" the argument goes through
@misterbiscuit2538
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
What if the noncognitivist just says
"if stealing boo then murder boo"
"Stealing boo"
"Therefore murder boo"
@truthterrain3484
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Murder is neither good nor bad… someone actually used logical reasoning and arrived to that conclusion. Imagine my relief. Now I don´t have to read any of their other nonsense.
@slhx8956
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I had to watch the beginning of this like 5 times…
@bassem500
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
…so if the speaker is juggling while saying "killing is bad" or they are performing ten pirouettes in a row, this changes the meaning of the sentence???
@aritzperez1540
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Good and bad are not written in stone anywhere. They're made up values and vary depending on the situation and the persons involved. Yet usually have a lot in common with the values of the people you have grown with. Probably a form of adaptation to live in society, survive and mate, better.
@cartoonhippie6610
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
In response to "how do artists find the Ideas to put them in their art?", they could include them accidentally or subconsciously (especially if the degrees to which various Ideas are lacking vary person to person).
@sammorrison8042
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I was recently looking into metaethics I feel like I have to study the philosophy of language as well as metaphysics at the same time.
@thomasfplm
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
To say "murder is bad", seems to be talking about murder, even if it doesn't describe a characteristic of it.
@SasskiF
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Wouldn’t a more helpful complex sentence be; If life has value, murder is bad. Life has value. Therefore murder is bad.
Why are we using the morality of stealing to prove the morality of murder.
That’s like saying; If grass is green, then the leaf is green. The grass is green. Therefore the leaf is green.
Yeah….. No.
I’m very confused. I don’t think I understand what Abi is trying to say here at all.
@autystycznybudda5012
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
And what about, "If stealing causes a negative emotion in my brain, then murder causes it too"?
@madmaenads
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I'm confused why this would destroy the non-cognitive argument. Surely if the concept is that moral discussions are not based on meaning but instead emotion then it only strengthens it to show that embedded moral arguments are as meaningless as their pieces.
@ComeOutYeIDF
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
This guy freaks me out
@ComeOutYeIDF
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
👁 👁
@werner134897
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
what a heap of bullocks. Says the mathematical logician.
@mishapurser4439
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
One of the problems with "murder?! Boo!" is that an exclamatory statement cannot be a premise because an exclamatory statement has no truth value.
@JustenHarper
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Olly is bad. Not like bad meaning bad but bad meaning good
@lorigulfnoldor2162
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
There may be a middle ground between "is Boo" and "is bad" if we define "bad" in some roundabout way:"1)Every human being has "Boo" reaction to some things 2)this reaction has evolved naturally and is consistent with some properties of situations, acts, objects etc of objective world. 3)as much as it helps survival, there are reasonable "Boo-reactions" and unreasonable "Boo-reactions", just as there are reasonable logical sentences (which are valid or true or both) and unreasonable ones. 4)the quality of "badness" is simply the quality of "eliciting a reasonable Boo-reaction from any neurologically intact person who understood the situation deeply enough" then!"
@lorigulfnoldor2162
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Saying that something "is Boo!" seems to be like saying that this something "is Bad", only with two spelling errors and one exclamation sign.
@simonkalimanus9994
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
This is the most famous question in ethics? The Frege-Geach problem reminds me of the argument that God doesn't exist because of the Babel Fish. Change "Stealing is bad" to "the color orange is good," and the argument becomes someone slinging around semantics.
-"If the color orange is good, then people liking the color orange is good."
-"The color orange is good."
"Good" and "bad" are words the meaning of which are relative to the individual making the pronouncement. Also, you can now use that pronouncement, if it is in fact correct, to oppress people who prefer purple.
@lolzerd3745
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Doesn't this ultimately just amount to a language problem? Couldn't you literally define the term morally wrong as a feeling of disgust relating to human interaction or something along those lines and be done with it?
@simononeill941
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I might have this wrong but this is what I got out of it (possibly just rephrasing the video)
Noncognitivism/Expressionism would say morality is an expression of how you feel about something. For example, when I think about stealing I have a negative emotional reaction. When I think about murder, I also have a negative emotional reaction. Since stealing and murder share the property of producing a negative emotional reaction in me, it should be true to say that If stealing is bad because it produces a negative emotional reaction in me, then murder is bad because it produces a negative emotional reaction in me. But that doesn't make sense as we all intuit when we hear, If stealing is bad then murder is bad. We can agree that they are both bad, but a truth conditional isn't the way to prove it why either is bad.
Really it seems like a massive over simplification of murder and stealing.
Any thoughts are welcome on my reasoning.
@JamesAlexanderMartin
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I'm working my way through your videography again for intellectual kicks because I just love your channel so much. This video though, presents the only philosophical concept you've presented that I just cannot wrap my head around. I feel like I'm scrabbling around the edges of a perfectly smooth impervious ball that I just can't break in to. I fundamentally do not understand non-cognitivism nor how these arguments contradict it. I don't even really understand what I'm not getting here and so don't even know what kind of questions to ask. Like what even is murder to a non-cognitivist? Is it the physical act or an abstract concept? Are they just trying to imply in a Nietzschean moral nihilistic kind of way that the only real thing is the feeling created by the acts of others?
I don't know why this is the one that I just can't get a handle on.
@trickvro
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
"Specifically, it is a problem with the entire bollocks."
@LightD3mon
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
This saved me in my first intro to ethics paper!!
@osphranterrufus
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I just solved Frege-Geach. "Stealing? Boo!" means the same thing as "Stealing is bad." Done. You're welcome.
@agiar2000
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I don't understand. Once you described what non-cognitivism is, it seemed obviously true to me. Once you explained the Frege-Geach problem, I couldn't see any problem at all. It reminds me of doing algebra that seems to violate some mathematical rules because it's dividing by a variable that happens to be equal to 0, and you can't divide by 0, because such an operation is meaningless, but by hiding that 0 inside of a variable, you hide that impossibility.
Here's how it looks to me, from my understanding of what a non-cognitivist perspective is:
1. "Stealing is bad" is not a meaningful statement.
2. "Murder is bad" is not a meaningful statement.
3. "If stealing is bad, then murder is bad" is, therefore, also not a meaningful statement.
The very fact that the syllogism doesn't work with embedding is because the syllogism itself is nonsense! What is someone even trying to say when they say "If stealing is bad, then murder is bad"?
Let's take it another way. Suppose my perspective is that "BLABLABLA" is neither true nor false. Then, suppose you try to invalidate my perspective by saying: "But, if 'BLABLABLA' is neither true nor false, then you have no way to resolve the syllogism 'BLABLABLA. If BLABLABLA, then FHHHHFF. Therefore, FHHHHFF'! Therefore, 'BLABLABLA' MUST be either true or false!" However, I see no problem for my perspective at all. I can simply respond with "Well, of course I can't resolve that syllogism. That syllogism is as meaningless as the original string of letters that is pretending to be a premise! The proper way to view that syllogism is as a poorly-formed string of words and word-like strings that do not translate to any actual meaning, apart from any hidden meaning intended by the speaker and inferred by a particular intended audience. It's like a different language."
I don't mean to come across as arrogant. I figure if intelligent experts who study this kind of thing for their whole lives see some sort of issue here, then there probably is one, and I am just missing something. I'm not sure I can understand what it is that I'm missing, though.
@reidwallace4258
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Holy shit.
Don't take this the wrong way, you look great now and you looked fine before, but you Sir are perhaps the most textbook example of 'growing into their face' I have ever seen.
Good video too, I just can't get over hearing your voice coming out of that face after listening to your newwer stuff for ages.
@RobRidleyLive
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Instead of up and down thumbs this video needs "boo" "hooray" buttons.
@lootsorrow
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
A problem with the ENTIRE BOLLOCKS? Oh no!
@freddiet.rowlet525
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
OMG baby Olly
@0hate9
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I think that the issue is that the noncognitivists think the language we use to describe morality doesn't match what we actually mean when we talk about morality, so while saying something like "if murder is bad, then stealing is bad" sounds like a valid statement, it is, in reality, functionally meaningless, precisely because the rules of logic /don't/ actually apply.
@0hate9
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
"Stealing? Boo!" sounds more like emotivism than noncognitivism.
@RickvanVeldhuizen
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
Il n'y a pas de hors-contexte, in short.
@Pfhorrest
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
You need to distinguish between non-cognitivism and non-descriptivism, and also, relatedly, between descriptive meaning and meaning more generally. Meaning is not restricted to descriptions of reality; describing reality is only one thing you can do with language. "Do not kill!" means something, it just doesn't (even attempt to) describe anything about reality; rather, it's prescribing instead. You can say that ethical sentences are truth-apt and completely get around the entire Frege-Geach problem, without saying that they have to describe things about reality, because sentences can have non-descriptive kinds of meaning, and ethical sentences are exactly those that have prescriptive rather than descriptive meaning. Mathematical sentences, on the third hand, neither describe nor prescribe; a mathematical sentence isn't made true by any observable feature of the world, any more than an ethical sentence, is, but it can nevertheless be true in virtue of something else besides that.
@mw-hc3bt
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
"Hardest script I've ever written", he has no idea what has to come, bet he never guessed he would dress up as the devil with a snake wrapping itself around his hands and then post it on YouTube back when he made this
@Doorisessa
March 23, 2026 at 11:27 pm
I don't think the compositionality constraint holds. There's all sorts of stuff wrt to how people use language and what they mean when they're saying things that doesn't necessarily follow from the meanings of the individual words used. Metaphors and idioms, for example, and joke and sarcasm–a whole bunch of extra-linguistic stuff where you can't derive the meaning of a larger sentence from the embedded sentences.
If you reject the compositionality constraint, the the Frege-Geach problem ceases to be a problem because the premise is based on isn't necessarily true.
But beyond that, I would argue that "If stealing is bad then murder is bad" is just as meaningless as "stealing is bad" and that it has no more truth value to it than either of its components: it only feels like it does due to the ways in which we're used to using language. And that you can't derive the meaning of "if stealing is bad then murder is bad" from it's components, because its components have no meaning. And trying to construct syllogisms out of these meaningless statements is just another way in which something feels like it should be true and possible because it's what we're used to in everyday life, but if you look deeper, actually isn't.
But I also think that there's no such thing as sentience and we're all zombies, so I suspect this might be just another of my unpopular opinions.
Comments are closed.