ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, we encountered the earlier generations of noncognitivist theories – both the emotivist theories of Ayer and Stevenson and Hare’s prescriptivism. We also saw a little bit of how truth-conditional semantic theories work, and why they are able to satisfy the compositional and communicative constraints – and hence why they do some of the most important things that we should hope that a theory of linguistic meaning would be able to do. We also saw that the views of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare all conflict with the basic ideas of truth-conditional semantics in important ways, and I suggested that this is the most important shared characteristic of their otherwise quite different views.
