Background
Stevenson, Charles Leslie was born in 1908 in Cincinnati.
Stevenson, Charles Leslie was born in 1908 in Cincinnati.
Yale University and University of Cambridge.
1937-1944. Assistant Professor, Yale University. 1946-1977, Associate Professor and Professor, University of Michigan. 1977-1979, Professor, Bennington College.
Stevenson held that ethical judgements do not primarily state facts. Instead they have two other functions: they express the speaker's emotions or attitudes; and they seek to influence the attitudes of those addressed. This theory, the ‘emotive theory of ethics’ was extremely influential from the 1940s to the 1960s, especially in Britain. The theory of ethical judgements was backed by a more general theory of signs. Stevenson held that the meaning of a sign was a dispositional property to cause certain psychological reactions in the hearer. The descriptive meaning of a sign was its disposition to cause cognitive psychological states, such as beliefs. But many signs also had emotive meaning: the disposition to cause affective states, such as desires and emotions. It is, according to Stevenson, this emotive meaning that is central to ethical utterances. According to what Stevenson called his first pattern of analysis, ‘This is wrong’ means, roughly, ‘I disapprove of this; do so as well'. Ethical terms may also have descriptive meaning. This descriptive meaning, however, is rarely firmly fixed, and this is one of the things that makes ethical argument possible. The word ‘justice’, for instance, evokes positive emotions in nearly everyone, but there is considerable disagreement as to what counts as, say, a just distribution of wealth. This makes possible Stevenson's more complicated ‘second pattern of analysis'. Ethical disputants typically agree about the emotive meaning of an ethical term, but disagree about its descriptive meaning: and ethical argument often consists, according to Stevenson, in ‘persuasively redefining’ ethical terms. Stevenson’s theory is a form of non-naturalism. He did not agree with Moore’s view that ethical judgements must always be synthetic, since he accepted that the descriptive meaning of an ethical term could be exhaustively defined in naturalistic terms. But such a definition would, obviously, leave untouched the emotive meaning of the term, and no definition of the descriptive meaning of the term could rationally require one to take any particular attitude towards it. Many objected to Stevenson’s theory on the ground that it could not give an adequate account of the place of reason in ethics. It was also objected that it placed too much emphasis on what was merely one function of ethical language, and was unable to give an adequate account of others. More fundamentally, it has been objected that Stevenson never gave any clear account of the distinction between emotive meaning and descriptive meaning. Sources: New York Times, 19 Mar 1979.