Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/125

may quite well be true. When a man asserts that an action is right or wrong, it may quite well be true, in a sense, that all that he is expressing by this assertion is the fact that he thinks it to be right or wrong. The truth is that there is an important distinction, which is not always observed, between what a man means by a given assertion and what he expresses by it. Whenever we make any assertion whatever (unless we do not mean what we say) we are always expressing one or other of two things—namely, either that we think the thing in question to be so or that we know it to be so. If, for instance, I say “A is B,” and mean what I say, what I mean is always merely that A is B; but those words of mine will always also express either the fact that I think that A is B, or the fact that I know it to be so; and even where I do not mean what I say, my words may be said to imply either that I think that A is B or that I know it, since they will commonly lead people to suppose that one or other of these two things is the case. Whenever, therefore, a man asserts that an action is right or wrong, what he expresses