emotivism
emotivism noun: the meta-ethical stance that ethical judgments, such as those containing the words "should" and "ought to", are primarily expressions of one's own attitude and imperatives meant to change the attitudes and actions of another.
Noun
emotivism (countable and uncountable, plural emotivisms)
- The meta-ethical stance that ethical judgments, such as those containing the words "should" and "ought to", are primarily expressions of one's own attitude and imperatives meant to change the attitudes and actions of another.
- Another important meta-ethical theory is known as emotivism or non-cognitivism. Emotivists ... claim that all ethical statements are literally meaningless.1999, Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics
Forms of emotivism
| plural | emotivisms |
|---|
Origin of emotivism
From emotive + -ism.
Questions about emotivism
- What does emotivism mean?
- Emotivism means the meta-ethical stance that ethical judgments, such as those containing the words "should" and "ought to", are primarily expressions of one's own attitude and imperatives meant to change the attitudes and actions of another.
- What part of speech is emotivism?
- Emotivism is a noun.
- What is the plural of emotivism?
- The plural of emotivism is emotivisms.
Words near emotivism in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: emotivism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “emotivism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/emotivism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
