 Consider the first of these explananda: moral language. Here it seems reasonable to claim that the noncognitivist shoulders a burden of proof. Moral predicates appear to function linguistically like any other predicate: Just as the sentence “The cat is brown” may be used as an antecedent of a conditional, as a premise of an argument, as the basis of a question (“Is the cat brown?”), have its predicate nominalized (“Brownness is had by the cat”), be embedded in a propositional attitude claim (“Mary believes that the cat is brown”), and have the truth predicate applied to it (“‘The cat is brown’ is true”)—so too can all these things be done, without obvious incoherence, with a moral sentence like “Stealing is morally wrong.” This is entirely as the cognitivist would predict. By contrast, for a noncognitivist who maintains (as Ayer did) that this moral judgment amounts to nothing more than “Stealing!” uttered in a special disapproval-expressing tone, all of this linguistic evidence represents a major (and perhaps insurmountable) challenge.