The term emotivism refers to a theory about moral judgments, sentences, words, and speech acts; it is sometimes also extended to cover aesthetic and other nonmoral forms of evaluation. Although sometimes used to refer to the entire genus, strictly speaking emotivism is the name of only the earliest version of ethical noncognitivism (also known as expressivism and nondescriptivism).

Classical noncognitivist theories maintain that moral judgments and speech acts function primarily to (a) express and (b) influence states of mind or attitudes rather than to describe, report, or represent facts, which they do only secondarily if at all. For example: To say "Stealing is wrong" is not primarily to report any facts about stealing but to express one's negative attitude toward it. Emotivists also deny, therefore, that there are any moral facts or that moral words like good, bad, right, and wrong predicate...