Perhaps hardest to characterize as a species of non-cognitivism are the claims of several recent theorists who suggest that non-cognitivism is best understood as a metasemantic theory. The claim seems to be that non-cognitivism is a theory not about the meaning of moral sentences or about the contents of moral thoughts, but rather a story at a different level about how sentences and thoughts come to have these meanings or contents (Charlow 2015; Chrisman 2012; Pérez Carballo 2014; Ridge 2014; Silk 2015). One motivation for the view seems to be that it allows noncognitivists to take advantage of ordinary semantic theories and hence avoid the embedding problem. There isn’t yet a lot of literature disputing the idea, but Alwood (2016) expresses some skepticism about the advantages of the approach. It is at least worth thinking about which of the standard motivations for non-cognitivism in ethics support the view when it is construed as a metasemantic theory. Chances are the literature will take up such questions in the near future and subsequent versions of this entry will say more about the developments to come.   