Emotive meaning contrasts with descriptive meaning. Terms have
descriptive meaning if they do the job of stating facts: they have
emotive meaning if they do the job of expressing the speaker’s
emotions or attitudes, or exciting emotions or attitudes in
others.
Emotivism, the theory that moral terms have only or primarily
emotive meaning, is an important position in twentieth-century
ethics.
The most important problem for the idea of emotive meaning is
that emotive meaning may not really be a kind of meaning: the jobs
of moral terms supposed to constitute emotive meaning may really be
performed by speakers using moral terms, on only some of the
occasions on which they use them.
Stevenson thinks ethical questions are difficult to answer
because we don’t quite know what we are seeking.In order to help
answer the question "Is X good?" we must substitute a question
which is free from ambiguity and confusion. The substituted
question will not be identical to "Is X good" is all respects but
it will be identical in the way that a boy is identical to himself
as a man.