ABSTRACT
Cognitivists believe that claims made with ethical language, and the states of mind called ethical convictions or beliefs, have propositional or cognitive content, that these contents admit of literal truth or falsity, and that ethical claims or convictions are correct or incorrect if, and only if, the propositions they assert are true or false, respectively. Noncognitivism denies cognitivism and, thus, that ethical claims and convictions have genuine propositional (cognitive) content and admit of truth or falsity. It agrees with the error theory that no ethical facts exist of the sort that could make ethical claims true, but it denies that any ethical claims are strictly false either. One form of noncognitivism, emotivism, holds that ethical judgments express the feelings or attitudes of the person who makes the judgments. Noncognitivism results from applying certain lines of thought in the philosophies of language and mind to the case of ethical discourse and psychology.
