Validity Of Statements

Question 1

What are Hume’s two categories of knowledge and what is meant by “Hume’s fork”?

Answer 1

-Hume’s Fork is the idea that all knowledge must fall into either relations of ideas or matters of fact -His 2 categories are:
1)Relations of Ideas: A priori, analytic, necessary truths (e.g. “3 × 5 = 15”).
2)Matters of Fact: A posteriori, synthetic, known through observation (e.g. “The cat has three legs”)

Question 3

What are analytic statements?

Answer 3

-Statements that are true by definition and knowable a priori, such as “All bachelors are unmarried men
-They cannot be false

Question 4

What are synthetic statements?

Answer 4

-Statements that require empirical evidence and are known a posteriori, such as “The apple is red”
-They could be false

Question 5

What is an ethical statement?

Answer 5

-An ethical statement makes a value claim about right or wrong, such as “Lying is wrong.”
-It raises the question: is this analytically true, based on evidence, or neither?

Question 6

What is the problem with fitting ethical statements into Hume’s Fork?

Answer 6

• Hume argued statements seem to be neither analytic (true by definition) nor synthetic (provable through observation), making their truth status unclear
  -Therefore, Hume concludes that moral statements are not factual claims. They don’t describe the world or state objective truths. Instead, they express our emotions, attitudes, or feelings — like approval or disapproval
  -This leads to emotivism, which sees moral statements as emotional reactions rather than truth-claims

Question 7

What does it mean to say moral language is ‘circular’?

Answer 7

-To say that moral language is circular means that definitions of moral terms like “good” or “right” often rely on repeating similar moral concepts rather than offering a clear, independent explanation. For example, saying “a good action is morally right” or “the right thing to do is what is good” doesn’t explain what makes something good or right
-It simply swaps one moral term for another, which makes the definition empty or uninformative
-This problem suggests that moral language lacks objective grounding, as it can’t be fully explained by appealing to reason or evidence — only to what someone already believes is moral
-As a result, moral claims risk being subjective and meaningless, especially to those who do not already share the speaker’s moral framework