VI—Emotivism and the Verification Principle

Abstract

In chapter VI of «Language, truth and logic», A. J. Ayer argues tht ethical statements are not litterally significant. Unlike metaphysical statements, however, ethical statements are not nonsensical: even though they are not literally significant, Ayer thinks that they possess some other sort of signifiance. This raises the question: by what principle or criterion can we distinguish, among the class of statements that are not literally significant, between those which are genuinely meaningless and those which possess some other, non-literal form of signifiance. I suggest that Ayer needs a generalised version of the verification principle in order to answer this question. However, when we formulate the generalised version, it turns out that ethical statements do not satisfay it, so that the emotivist is committed to viewing ethics, like metaphysics, as meaningless verbiage