Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false (they are truth-apt), which noncognitivists deny.
A common belief among philosophers who use this jargon is that propositions, properly speaking, are what are true or false (what bear truth values; they are truthbearers).
Suppose someone minding a convenience store sees a thief pick up a candy bar and run.
The latter view, as put forward by Protagoras, holds that there are as many distinct scales of good and evil as there are subjects in the world.
[3] However, there are also universalist forms of subjectivism such as ideal observer theory (which claims that moral propositions are about what attitudes a hypothetical ideal observer would hold) and divine command theory (which claims that moral propositions are about what attitudes God holds).
Aside from the subjectivist branch of cognitivism, some cognitive irrealist theories accept that ethical sentences can be objectively true or false, even if there exist no natural, physical or in any way real (or "worldly") entities or objects to make them true or false.
There are a number of ways of construing how a proposition can be objectively true without corresponding to the world: Crispin Wright, John Skorupski and some others defend normative cognitivist irrealism.
Wright asserts the extreme implausibility of both J. L. Mackie's error-theory and non-cognitivism (including S. Blackburn's quasi-realism) in view of both everyday and sophisticated moral speech and argument.