Emotivism

By Yingcan S

Emotivism claims that our moral utterances are meaningless; they are merely our expressions of emotions that are non-propositional and therefore cannot be true or false. To illustrate, when I say “one ought not to lie,” I am expressing my disapproval, which is no more than me making a certain facial expression or saying “boo! Lying” (168). 

Emotivism originates from verificationism about meanings, which claims that if we do not have any way of telling whether a sentence is true or false, then it does not make any sense. According to verificationism about meaning, a sentence such as that there is a bakery shop at the end of the road is meaningful. Crucially, you can go down the road and empirically testify if that sentence is true or false. Guided by verificationism about meanings, emotivists look into our moral utterances. On the surface, our moral utterances appear to communicate propositions—they seem to make factual claims about what is right and wrong and manifest what we believe that can be true or false. Although moral utterances and factual statements such as “there is a bakery shop at the end of the road” both seemingly express a proposition, it is suggested by emotivists that, moral utterances, different from factual statements, are not verifiable. That is, we cannot prove moral utterances true or false by using empirical evidence. For example, we might be shown the effects of lying on the victims and the emotional damage it causes, but this can only prove that lying causes emotional damages but not that one ought not to lie. Moral utterances, therefore, are neither true sentences nor false sentences but meaningless ones; they are just individuals’ emotional reactions toward certain situations put into words. 

We have seen that by emotivist light, our moral utterances are essentially non-propositional and therefore cannot be true or false. Since beliefs are necessarily propositional, our moral utterances do not express beliefs. If our moral utterances do not express beliefs, then there cannot be any valid reasonings between these utterances. After all, for any valid reasoning, we need to start with some beliefs and derive from them conclusions according to truth-preserving rules. For example, we can prove a mathematical equation to be true that we do not know to be true before, only by the equations that we already believe (169).  

To summarize, emotivism claims that our moral utterances are meaningless; they are just our expressions of emotions that are non-propositional and therefore cannot be true or false. The emotivist view about the meanings of our moral utterances is based on verificationism about meanings, which claims that a sentence is meaningless if we do not have any way of telling whether it is true or false. The upshot of the emotivist view about the meanings of our moral utterances is that moral utterances do not express beliefs and thus there cannot be any valid reasonings between these utterances.

Work Cited

Horwich, Paul. Truth-Meaning-Reality. Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 168-169.