draft of article for The International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell)
comments on content or style very welcome
matthew.chrisman@ed.ac.uk
EMOTIVISM
2667 words
As a metaethical theory (see METAETHICS) about the meaning of ethical words,
emotivism is typically seen as a form of non-cognitivism (see NON-COGNITIVISM)
because it holds that ethical words and statements have a distinctive kind of emotive
meaning, which distinguishes them from other words and statements, whose meaning
is purely cognitive or descriptive. The theory had its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s,
but traces back at least to Ogden and Richards (1923) and Russell (1935/1961) and
receives its fullest treatment in Ayer (1936/1946) (see AYER, A. J.) and, initially
independently, Stevenson (1937, 1944) (see STEVENSON, C. L.). Few philosophers
today would call themselves emotivists, yet one can find more contemporary
descendants in prescriptivism (see PRESCRIPTIVISM), expressivism, quasi-realism
(see QUASI-REALISM).
Ayer and Stevenson had different theoretical motivations for endorsing emotivism, and
their respective versions of the theory are importantly different.
For Ayer, the question of the meaning of ethical terms was important because it
represented a potentially fatal objection to the version of verificationism he defends in
his seminal 1936 book, Language, Truth and Logic. According to this, any synthetic
statement, i.e. statement where the predicate is not contained in the concepts
expressed by the subject, means what it does in virtue of what would count as verifying
the statement empirically. This view helps Ayer to dismiss many puzzles of traditional
metaphysics as mere “pseudo-problems”. These are puzzles about things like the
existence of an external world, the fundamental nature of substance, or the possibility
of free will. Ayer argued that these puzzles involve synthetic statements that are not
empirically verifiable; and because of this, his verificationism allowed him to hold that
these statements are (perhaps covertly or non-obviously) meaningless.
The potentially fatal objection to this position is that ethical statements also seem to be
synthetic claims that are not empirically verifiable. Yet ethical claims don’t seem to be
meaningless, ethical puzzles don’t seem to be mere pseudo-problems.
Ayer’s emotivist answer to this objection has two stages. At the first stage, he
distinguishes between two uses of what are commonly thought to be ethical words,
such as ‘right, ‘wrong’, etc. He suggests that, on one use of these words, they are
used to make statements about what is acceptable or unacceptable to the moral sense
of a particular community. As such, they are descriptive, and the claims they are used
to make are sociological and so, in principle, empirically verifiable. On another use of
these words, however, he holds that these words are used as “normative ethical
symbols”, and here the objection has some bite, since the statements they are used to
make do not seem to be empirically verifiable but they nonetheless seem to be
synthetic and meaningful. At the second stage of Ayer’s response, he argues that
while it’s quite right that his theory implies that normative ethical symbols have no
factual meaning, that doesn’t preclude their having emotive meaning. According to
him, the emotive meaning of words is a matter of “the different feelings they are
ordinarily taken to express, and also the different responses which they are calculated
to provoke”(1936/1946: 108).
If Ayer is right, this means that the impression we have that synthetic ethical
statements are meaningful can be explained in a way that is consistent with
verificationism. Either these statements are descriptive claims about the moral sense
of a particular community, in which case they have factual meaning even on his version
of verificationism, or they are normative ethical statements, in which case they have no
factual meaning but instead emotive meaning. That is, they are used and understood
to express and provoke certain emotions, feelings, or sentiments, rather than to
describe anything in the world.
Ayer articulates several striking corollaries to his view about the meaning of ethical
words and statements. First (and most famously), Ayer claims that because normative
ethical statements are the expressions of feeling, “they do not come under the category
of truth and falsehood”(108). In contemporary jargon, they are not truth-apt (see noncognitivism). Second, his emotivist view is different from the subjectivist view that
ethical words are used to make factual statements about their authors’ state of mind
(see SUBJECTIVISM, ETHICAL). However, third, it seems to face a similar objection
to subjectivism; it makes moral disagreement look senseless. In response, Ayer
argued that moral disagreement is senseless, unless it proceeds on the assumption of
shared values, in which case it’s really a factual disagreement either about what the
assumed values dictate or about the nonethical facts of a particular case. Fourth (and
perhaps most implausibly), Ayer concludes that ethical philosophy consists in nothing
more than noting that ethical words have no factual meaning, and the further task of
describing the different feelings they are used to express is a matter for psychology.
In contrast to Ayer, Stevenson was not motivated by a need to deflect an objection to
verificationism but rather by commitment to a pragmatist or use-theoretic methodology
in the philosophy of language. That is, he viewed language as first and foremost a set
of instruments or tools that we use for various purposes. To explain the meaning of a
word or statement, on this approach, is to explain how it is properly used or what
purpose it can be properly used to pursue. In light of this, Stevenson suggests three
broad desiderata on an account of the meaning of the word ‘good’ at least in its moral
sense. First, it must make disagreements about whether something is good intelligible.
Second, it must explain why ‘good’ has what he calls “magnetism” (1937: 16), which is
the idea that if one recognizes that something is good one has ipso facto acquired a
stronger tendency to act in its favor (see INTERNALISM, MOTIVATIONAL). Third, it
must not treat goodness as verifiable solely by the scientific method. (Here, he appeals
to Moore’s open-question argument (see MOORE, G. E., OPEN QUESTION
ARGUMENT).
A kind of theory which would go some way towards meeting the second desideratum is
what Stevenson called “interest theories” which hold that statements about what is
good are descriptions of the interests of a particular group or person (see subjectivism,
ethical, RELATIVISM, MORAL). He claims that there is some element of description of
interests in many ethical statements, but he thinks their core use is not to “indicate
facts, but to create influence” (18). It is because of the interest theories failure to
recognize this that they cannot meet Stevenson’s first and third desiderata.
His emotivist strategy for doing better begins, in essence, with a sociological
observation. He notes that a typical ethical statement, such as “Charity is good”, “has
a quasi-imperative force which, operating through suggestion, and intensified by your
tone of voice, readily permits you to begin to influence, to modify, [one’s] interests”
(19). The idea is that, although one probably wouldn’t use this statement unless one
favored charity or was speaking with a group which favored charity, one doesn’t fully
grasp its meaning unless one appreciates that its primary use is to influence and
modify interests not merely (or perhaps even at all) to describe them.
To capture this distinction, Stevenson distinguishes descriptive uses of language from
what he calls “dynamic” uses of language. The descriptive use of language is to
record, clarify, and communicate beliefs. The dynamic use of language is to vent
feelings, create moods, and incite people to action. He recognizes that most uses of
language will involve some of both. For example, the statement “I want you to close
the door” is plausibly thought to describe the speaker’s desire but also to get the
audience to do something. So, the distinction is a theoretical idealization. However, in
Stevenson’s view, a proper pragmatist theory of meaning will need to be sensitive to
both aspects, and in some cases the dynamic aspect will dominate to the extent that
one will not count as understanding the meaning of a claim without appreciating its
dynamic penumbra to some extent.
Stevenson doesn’t define “meaning” in such a way that the meaning of a sentence
varies with dynamic use, since that would imply that, in each new situation where
different dynamic purposes prevail, the sentence changes its meaning. As he
recognizes, the notion of “linguistic meaning” is only useful if it is relatively stable
across different situations of the use of a sentence. Because of this, Stevenson
defines the notion of “emotive meaning” as something like the stable core of the
dynamic meaning of a word. He writes, somewhat vaguely, “The emotive meaning of a
word is a tendency of a word, arising through the history of its usage, to produce (result
from) affective responses in people. It is the immediate aura of feeling which hovers
about a word” (23). For example, the terms “Old Maid” and “Elderly Spinster” refer to
the same kind of person, but, in Stevenson’s view, they differ in meaning and this is
because they differ in their emotive meaning, i.e. their tendency, arising through the
history of usage, to produce (and result from) affective responses in people.
Stevenson uses this notion of emotive meaning to articulate his emotivist theory of the
meaning of ethical terms such as ‘good’. To this end, he suggests, as a first
approximation, that “X is good” means roughly the same as “We like X” when this latter
sentence is used not to record, clarify, and communicate beliefs but to vent feelings,
create moods, and incite people to action. He gives the example of a mother who says
to her children, “We all like to be neat” as part of a campaign to get them to pick up
after themselves. It may be quite clear that the children don’t really like to be neat, but
the emotive statement is nonetheless apt. Indeed it seems to be just as apt as the
statement “Being neat is good.”
Generalizing this idea leads to the view that while ethical statements may have truthconditions, their primary use is not to assert these conditions to be satisfied or to
express a belief that they are satisfied but rather to do something else that involves
expressing feelings in an attempt to incite action. Insofar as one follows a pragmatist
or use-theorist in accounting for the meaning of a statement by appeal to its correct
use, one will take this fact about ethical statements to indicate an important difference
with descriptive statements. This is the essence of Stevenson’s emotivism.
Admittedly, in light of later developments in metaethics (see especially non-cognitivism)
it is initially unclear whether Stevenson means to be asserting a hybrid view according
to which ethical statements have both descriptive and emotive meaning where the
latter is more important or a pure non-cognitivist view according to which ethical
statements do not assert anything but deploy a relativistic content to purely emotive
effect. In later work (1963: 210-214), Stevenson clarifies his position as the latter.
In any case, he argues that his emotivism does better than interest theories at his three
broad desiderata on an account of the meaning of ‘good’. First, it can make sense of
the intelligibility of disagreement in judgments about what is good. Stevenson
conceives of this not as a dispute about who is interested in what, or as a dispute
about any factual matter, but rather as a dispute in interests themselves. Second, it
can make sense of the “magnetism” of statements about what’s good. For, if these
statements are meant to vent feelings, create moods, and incite people to action, then
it should be unsurprising that they bear close connection to motivation to action.
Finally, Stevenson’s emotivism does not treat statements about what is good as
verifiable by the empirical method alone. This is because they are not seen as primarily
expressing beliefs, which could be verified by the empirical method alone, but rather
some admixture of affective states such as feelings, emotions, interests, etc.
Although their motivations for the view are different and the exact articulations of the
view differ in key respects, arguably Ayer’s and Stevenson’s versions of emotivism are
similar enough to view them as versions of one theory. In any case, theirs is the theory
that philosophers typically refer to as “Emotivism.” The fact that they reached their
versions of this theory independently and from different theoretical backgrounds in the
philosophy of language (verificationism and pragmatism) has perhaps led to lasting
sympathy in some quarters, even where these theoretical backgrounds have been
called into question.
However, the view is widely viewed as deeply flawed in at least two respects. First, its
rejection of the truth-aptness of ethical statements is a strong affront to ordinary usage.
It’s quite common to say things like “It’s true that torture is evil” or, in response to an
ethical statement one disagrees with, “No, that’s false.” This is inconsistent with
emotivism. And this inconsistency with aspects of ordinary ethical discourse is only
amplified by the fact that it’s quite common to use other expressions which imply the
truth-aptness of ethical statements. For example, we say things like “I believe that
democracy is good” and “She knows that what she did was wrong”; and believing
implies taking to be true, and knowing implies truth.
Emotivists may escape this problem by distinguishing between loose and strict senses
of ‘true’, ‘believes’, and ‘knows’, but it is doubtful that this is a fully satisfactory
rejoinder. Some expressivist heirs to emotivism (especially quasi-realists) argue that
this problem can be escaped by reexamining the assumptions in the theory of truth
which led emotivists to deny the truth-aptness of ethical statements.
The second problem is more technical and influential in metaethics. This is the
objection reached independently by Geach (1965) and Searle (1962), which is widely
referred to as the “Frege-Geach Problem” (see FREGE-GEACH OBJECTION). There
is some debate about the exact nature of the problem (consult the cross-referenced
entry for more details), but the core issue has to do with the prospects for extending
the emotivist theory of the meaning of ethical words as they appear in logically simple
statements to a fuller account which accommodates their embedding in logically
complex statements.
For example, although the emotivist theory sketched above gives a relatively clear
account of the meaning of “Tormenting the cat is wrong”, it’s far from clear what it
would say about the meaning of the statement “If tormenting the cat is wrong, then
getting your little brother to torment the cat is also wrong.” It’s not implausible to think
that the bare ethical statement expresses a negative emotion or feeling about actions
of tormenting the cat, in at least some sense. However, it’s highly implausible that the
conditionalized statement expresses any particular emotion or feeling about actions of
tormenting the cat or actions of getting one’s little brother to torment the cat. But the
conditionalized statement seems to be an ethical statement, and so, according to
emotivism, its meaning should be a matter of it’s expressing an emotion or feeling of
some sort. Moreover, and more importantly, it’s a requirement of any plausible
semantics that the meaning of the antecedent of the conditional (“Tormenting the cat is
wrong”) have something systematically in common (what’s often called its “semantic
content”) with the meaning of this statement when used to make a bare ethical
statement.
Although emotivism has been largely abandoned in contemporary metaethical debate,
it has inspired a number of similar positions (mentioned above). This is probably
because of the important advance emotivism makes over subjectivist theories. This
comes down to the fact that, as Ayer writes, “…even if the assertion that one has a
certain feeling always involves the expression of that feeling, the expression of a
feeling assuredly does not always involve the assertion that one has it. And this is the
important point to grasp in considering the distinction between our theory [emotivism]
and the ordinary subjectivist theory. For whereas the subjectivist holds that ethical
statements actually assert the existence of certain feelings, we hold that ethical
statements are expressions…of feelings which do not necessarily involve any
assertions.(op. cit: 109-10).
SEE ALSO: Metaethics; Non-Cognitivism; Ayer, A. J.; Stevenson, C. L.; Prescriptivism;
Quasi-Realism; Subjectivism, Ethical; Internalism, Motivational; Moore, G. E.; Open
Question Argument; Relativism, Moral; Frege-Geach Objection
References
Ayer, A. J. 1936/1946. Language, Truth and Logic, first edition 1936, second edition 1946.
London: V. Gollancz ltd.
Geach, P. T. 1965. 'Assertion', The Philosophical Review 74: 449-465.
Ogden, C. K. and Richards, I. A. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of
Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, Inc.
Russell, Bertrand 1935/1961. Religion and Science, first edition 1935, reprinted 1961. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Searle, John 1962. 'Meaning and Speech Acts', The Philosophical Review 71: 423-432.
Stevenson, C. L. 1937. 'Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms', Mind 46: 14-31.
Stevenson, C. L. 1944. Ethics and Language, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Stevenson, C. L. 1963. Facts and Values, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Further Reading
Blackburn, Simon 1984. Spreading the Word, ch. 5-6. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darwall, S, Gibbard, A., & Railton, P. “Towards Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends”, in
Moral Discourse and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finlay, Steve 2005. ‘Emotive Theory of Ethics,’ Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second
edition (Donald M. Borchert, ed.). New York: MacMillan, 2005
Gibbard, Alan 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Smith, Michael 1995. The Moral Problem, ch. 2. Oxford: Blackwell.
van Roojen, Mark, 2009. "Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism", The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/moral-cognitivism/>.