Charles Stevenson

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For the Scottish engineer, see Charles Alexander Stevenson(1855-1950)

Charles Leslie Stevenson (1908–1979) was an American philosopher best known for his work in ethics and aesthetics.

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 gave the most sophisticated defense of emotivism in the post-war period. 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 and to give reasons, and subject to the laws of science) and non-cognitive uses (used to state feelings and exercise influence).

His papers are collected in his 1963 book, Facts and Values ISBN 0-8371-8212-3.