Charles Leslie Stevenson (1908-1979) was an American philosopher primarily concerned with ethics, philosophy of language, and meaning. He was a professor at Yale University from 1939 to 1946 and at the University of Michigan from 1946 to 1977. He studied in England with Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore.

He was a large supporter of Emotivism, along with A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap. In his The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms (1937), Persuasive Definitions (1938), and Ethics and Language (1944), he developed a theory of Emotive meaning which he then used to provide a foundation for his theory of a Persuasive definition. He furthermore advanced emotivism as a meta-ethical theory that sharply delineated between cognitive, scientific uses of language (used to state facts, give reasons, and subject to the laws of science) and non-cognitive (used to state feelings and exercise influence). Similar to the Hobbesian naturalistic approach to subjectivism, Stevenson considered moral judgments (statements about ethics) to be about one's feelings, useful only in influencing others.

His papers are collected in his 1963 book, Facts and Values ISBN 0837182123.

See also

• Philosophy
• List of ethicists
• List of ethics topics
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy

External links & sources

• The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Mautner. Penguin Putnam Inc. ISBN 0-14-051250-0
• Philosophy Pages: C. L. Stevenson
• Philosophy Pages: Emotivism
• Essay by Dr. Doug Portmore about Stevenson's Emotivism