Emotion, Truth and Meaning

The Emotive Theory was theory ahead of its time, and a theory which was, perhaps understandably, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and ridiculed by its critics from the outset. In Emotion, Truth and Meaning, Dr Wilks not only acquaints the reader with what the original emotivists actually claimed (and clarifies what they actually meant when they made some of the more controversial claims), he enriches their claims by psychologically expanding them. Like its predecessor, Dr Wilks's enriched emotive theory distinguishes between moral conflicts which are rationally resolvable and moral conflicts which are not, but, unlike its predecessor, it traces the irresolvability of the latter to the psychological fact that they are merely symptomatic of more fundamental conflict at the level of world view - the level where questions about the meaning of life are answered, and where the truth of the answers arrived at is emotionally-felt rather than empirically-sensed.