I am going to take the statement: “Value judgements are simply expressions of emotion”, as the kernel of the Emotive Theory and any variant of the Emotive Theory not covered by this statement is left untouched by what I have to say.

Jon Wheatley; VI—‘Like’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 99–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/62.1.99.

Jon Wheatley; VI—‘Like’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 99–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/62.1.99.

Professor J. L. Austin published only reluctantly during his life time so that we are getting much of his major work after his death. I think this an enormous pity as there would be much to be learned from his answers to the criticisms which have already been given to his books by critical reviewers. I differ from many of the reviewers in that I think How To Do Things With Words is one of the most important books, if not (...) the most important, to come out since Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Like the Investigations, to a superficial glance it exists in isolation. That is, in it there is little discussion of current or traditional philosophical problems and the application of what is said to these problems is a matter, in large part, for the reader. The book itself consists in a set of relatively simple sentences, almost all of them about some aspect of the English language; it therefore represents not so much a problem of interpretation as the problem of which way up we shall look at it. The obvious way to look at it, the way Austin explicitly offers us, is as the Pursuit of the Performative. For reasons I shall give later, I do not think this is the best way to look at it but it is the way with which I shall start. (shrink)

Mr. Jon Wheatley declares himself opposed to a very popular contemporary account of the nature of moral virtue, which he describes as holding “that virtue consists in obeying a number of moral precepts all clearly within our power, the virtuous man being he who never slips up in this obedience”. Because I concur with his rejection of this view, I am more than normally distressed, first at his confessed inability as a philosopher to offer more than a report of (...) his own “prejudice” in opposition to the popular account, and second at the somewhat bizarre analysis of moral virtue which he presents as if it were the only alternative. (shrink)