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emotivism

Theory that value judgments, including moral judgments, do not state facts (though they appear to), but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. (Also see: Boo Hurrah Theory.)

The theory, a form of speech act theory, arose under the influence of logical positivism (though it had antecedents in the 18th century) because of the difficulties of finding verification conditions for such utterances, and the need to explain how they can affect behavior.

Emotivism is also a form of subjectivism, but must be distinguished from the subjectivist view that while value judgments do describe something, what they describe are not special moral and such-like facts but human attitudes, whether the speaker’s own or other people’s.

One obvious, though not necessarily insuperable, difficulty is that of accounting adequately for moral argument and moral disagreement.

Source:
C L Stevenson, Ethics and Language (1944)

Table of Contents

    • 0.1 Related:
  • 1 Videos
  • 2 Related Products
    • 2.1 Bertrand Russell's Ethics (Continuum Studies in British Philosophy)
    • 2.2 Emotivism
    • 2.3 Does God Define the Good?
    • 2.4 The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (History of Analytic Philosophy)
    • 2.5 Ethical Emotivism (Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library)
    • 2.6 Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization
    • 2.7 Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Ethics: The Good and The Right
    • 2.8 Naturalism and emotivism; some aspects of moral judgments
    • 2.9 Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
    • 2.10 Noncognitivism in Ethics (New Problems of Philosophy)

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  • subjectivist theories of probability

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    logical relation theory of probability

    activism

    historicism

    probabilism

    indeterminism

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