A Non-Cognitive Study Of Value Language-A Review On The Value Theory Of Stevenson's Emotivism

Emotivism includes two branches,i.e.Classical Emotivism and Modern Emotivism.At the beginning,the Modern Emotivism was generated from logical positivism,defined by Ayer with basic points of Emotivism and developed by Stevenson fully.Before Stevenson developed the Emotivism,the researchers of Emotionalist Ethics believed that the differences in value judgment were due to various emotions,while they failed to figure out why human had different emotions.On the contrary,Stevenson focused his study on this part and formed a unique theoretical system of ethics by learning ethical theories of Hume,Moore,Ayer,Dewey,etc.He started with analyzing the meaning of ethical words,the most elementary unit.Different from the others,Stevenson studied the emotive meaning and agreed with the descriptive meaning of ethical words and discussed the relations between these two aspects.Meanwhile,He also found that moral judgment involved emotion and fact and was affected by both.Moreover,not only did he propose two modes of ethical words and definition of what was kindness and how to make good use of it,but also suggested two methods accordingly and gave a full introduction to the usage of ethical words,which made the Emitivsm more exquisite and systematic.For that the Emotivism of Stevenson provides solutions to the problems of other researchers,like Ayer,Moore,Dewey,etc.,his theory has been called as "Moderate Emotivism".It is worth for us learning Emotivism from Stevenson because of his analysis of ethical words,special ideas about emotive meaning and descriptive meaning,great contribution to Western Meta-Ethics development in the aspects of moral judgment and moral value.