(P1)'s descriptive content is scant, conveying only information about the speaker's attitude and, therefore, conveying only somewhat more information than is conveyed by (P1)'s relatively strong emotive element; therefore, (P1) well-models those uses of an ethical sentence at which front and center is a speaker's attitude.
(P4)'s descriptive content conveys more complex, precise information about the qualities of which the speaker approves and merely characterizes 'This is good' as conveying emotive force; therefore, (P4) well-models those uses of an ethical sentence at which front and center are a speaker's moral standards.
Like Wittgenstein, the logical positivists held that ethics is not a domain of knowledge or representation at all though some logical positivists (Ayer included) spared ethical sentences from pure meaninglessness by according them an "emotive" or "expressive" function.
In addition, the exclamative in (P3a) suggests that the disposition of ethical sentences relates ethical terms in part to attitudes directed towards the object or action at issue.
In later works, however, he is undecided: it could be that ethical sentences express judgements; but, alternatively, they may express emotions or commands.
The exclamatives in (P3b) and (P3c), on the other hand, suggest that the dispositions of ethical sentences relates ethical terms in part to attitudes directed towards the characteristics or properties that an object or action might exemplify.
Instantiations of (G2) will model (i), (v), and (vi), and serve as a reminder that the descriptive meaning of ethical language may be merely suggested by the use of ethical sentences, rather than a part of their conventional meanings.
According to cognitivist anti-realism, although ethical sentences express propositions about objectively prescriptive properties ones with "to-be-pursuedness" built in no such properties exist; and due to this presupposition failure, we are systematically in error in our moral judgments.
About ethics, Reichenbach was at least as pragmatic as Dewey, but about metaethics, and in particular about the logical form of ethical sentences, he was in close accord with Charles Leslie Stevenson's imperativism.
Each suggests that the descriptive element in ethical sentences is more complex and perhaps more vague, suggesting as they do a more general description of an action, person, policy, etc. as exemplifying certain characteristics or properties, rather than the narrower and more precise description of a speaker as exemplifying a specific attitude.
In the 1920s and '30s the logical positivists, and later the noncognitivists, declared that metaphysical and theological (as well as ethical and aesthetic) sentences are literally meaningless because they cannot be verified through sense experience.
