Most people also assume that you aren’t making trivial statements. For example if I say that we can never know for sure that the Holocaust was bad, that would be true. It would also be reasonable to assume that I am a nazi, because few people bother making statements that are only trivially true on a narrow technicality. That would be a waste of time that could instead be used to read Substack blogs.
I don’t think that any of this whacky undercurrents stuff is necessary to understand that’s relatively simple fact.
You might find pragmatics interesting as it studies the way that words, sentences, speech acts, etc. can have meaning apart from just their ability to communicate descriptive content. These also function to express and mold various non-cognitive attitudes in subtle and often subconscious ways.
The "undercurrents" that you speak of are part of why I'm drawn towards non-cognitivism to interpret many (if not most) utterances with moral terms. Terms like "right", "wrong", "good", "bad", etc. have such powerful "undercurrents" (or connotations, dynamic meaning, etc.) associated with them that these undercurrents completely determine when people judge it appropriate to ascribe these terms to things. But, of course, this is not happening at a conscious level. Somehow, our subconscious is able to determine the undercurrents of various sentences and this guides our feelings towards the sentence, just like what is plausibly happening with the examples you have in your post. Thus, in the same way that some of the political slogans you mentioned seem to be devoid of any propositional content when used in various contexts, it seems equally plausible to me that utterances with moral or evaluative terms are also devoid of any propositional content when used in most contexts.
Someone coined a phrase for the way certain statements are often parsed; implication hypervigilance. AKA jumping straight to the most morally objectionable reason for saying it. Mimetic groupishness and moral calibration are a hell of a barrier to advancing understanding.
Most people also assume that you aren’t making trivial statements. For example if I say that we can never know for sure that the Holocaust was bad, that would be true. It would also be reasonable to assume that I am a nazi, because few people bother making statements that are only trivially true on a narrow technicality. That would be a waste of time that could instead be used to read Substack blogs.
I don’t think that any of this whacky undercurrents stuff is necessary to understand that’s relatively simple fact.
You might find pragmatics interesting as it studies the way that words, sentences, speech acts, etc. can have meaning apart from just their ability to communicate descriptive content. These also function to express and mold various non-cognitive attitudes in subtle and often subconscious ways.
The "undercurrents" that you speak of are part of why I'm drawn towards non-cognitivism to interpret many (if not most) utterances with moral terms. Terms like "right", "wrong", "good", "bad", etc. have such powerful "undercurrents" (or connotations, dynamic meaning, etc.) associated with them that these undercurrents completely determine when people judge it appropriate to ascribe these terms to things. But, of course, this is not happening at a conscious level. Somehow, our subconscious is able to determine the undercurrents of various sentences and this guides our feelings towards the sentence, just like what is plausibly happening with the examples you have in your post. Thus, in the same way that some of the political slogans you mentioned seem to be devoid of any propositional content when used in various contexts, it seems equally plausible to me that utterances with moral or evaluative terms are also devoid of any propositional content when used in most contexts.
Someone coined a phrase for the way certain statements are often parsed; implication hypervigilance. AKA jumping straight to the most morally objectionable reason for saying it. Mimetic groupishness and moral calibration are a hell of a barrier to advancing understanding.