It is most natural to give an affirmative answer to the first of the two questions we just posed:
yes, when speakers use language to evaluate they use certain expressions. To see this, consider the contrast within each pair of sentences:
(1.1) a. Stealing is common.
b. Stealing is unethical.
(1.2) a. Anna Karenina is Russian.
b. Anna Karenina is brave.
(1.3) a. Sushi is cold.
b. Sushi is tasty.
(1.4) a. It’s possible that she sent that e-mail.
b. It’s great that she sent that e-mail.
(1.5) a. Your suspicions are shared.
b. Your suspicions are unfounded.
(1.6) a. Elena Greco is a Neapolitan.
b. Elena Greco is a hero.
(1.7) a. The third movement was executed slowly.
b. The third movement was executed beautifully.
(1.8) a. Voting costs money.
b. Voting matters.
In most contexts, uttering theb-sentences of each of these pairs would be a way for the speaker to express a judgment of value, while uttering thea-sentences would most naturally be a way for the speaker to express a judgment of fact. The only difference between thea- andb-sentences is the presence of terms likeunethical,brave,greatorbeautifully.
In what follows, we will call sentences like theb-sentences in this list—namely, unembedded declarative sentences containing evaluatives—EVALUATIVE SENTENCES, and the speech acts that those sentences are characteristically used to perform will be called ATTRIBUTIONS OF VALUE. An attribution of value is a type of communicative act whereby a speaker communi-cates evaluative information, that is, information to the effect that something has a ‘positive or negative standing—merit or demerit, worth or un-worth—relative to a certain kind of stan-dard’ (Väyrynen2013, p. 29). In this section, we look at what words these are (§1.3.1), and we survey some issues in connection to their semantics (§1.3.2), namely the different flavors of evaluativity, the variety of arguments that evaluatives admit, their gradability and the distinction between thin and thick evaluatives.
1.3.1 The empirical landscape: evaluatives in natural language
Evaluatives belong to a larger class of NORMATIVEexpressions, those which in some way or another are connected to norms, rules or prescriptions. Besides evaluatives, normative expres-sions include the class ofDEONTICexpressions, which is not our focus in this work.3
The most common type of evaluatives are adjectives. Here is a (partial) list:
great, good, bad, just, justified, credible, beautiful, ugly, virtuous, ethical, important, tasty, clear, advisable, disgusting, delicious, courageous, chaste, evident, charming, lazy, stupid, lucky, smart, brave, sensible, cowardly, fearful, timid, clever, intelligent, brilliant, idiotic, foolish, pretty, gorgeous, elegant, handsome, hideous, doubtfulorprecious.
Of course, one can build adverbs out of all those adjectives. Evaluative nouns (idiot, hero, friend)4 and verbs (to matter, to justify, to blame) are less numerous, but equally quotidian.
Finally, certain modifiers like too or really (as in too / really tall) arguably carry evaluative meaning as well.
That list is not intended to be exhaustive—expressions of other syntactic categories might be considered evaluative as well. Moreover, current research is exploring the possibility that whether a certain adjective is evaluative is not immediately transparent (such is the case of normal, see Bear and Knobe2017). But the most common examples fall under the categories just indicated. Conversely, there are syntactic categories that for the most part do not feature evaluatives, such as determiners or quantifiers.5 This dissertation is focused on adjectives, al-though some of the claims that I make apply to evaluatives of other syntactic categories. For example, gradability is a property most clearly instantiated by (and studied through considera-tions about) adjectives, but there are gradable nouns and verbs as well (Lassiter2017; Sassoon 2013b). In fact, evaluative nouns and verbs are gradable; and most of what is said here about the gradability of evaluative adjectives probably carries over to evaluative nouns and verbs as well. However, nouns and verbs will not be specifically discussed.
1.3.2 Topics in the study of evaluatives: a small tour
In this section, we briefly introduce some important topics in the semantics of evaluatives: the different flavors of evaluativity, the variety of arguments that they can take and their gradability.
3Deontics include modal verbs likeought,mayorhave (to), and verbs likealloworforbid. Deontics express the propositions and inferential patterns characteristic of deontic logic, that is, the logic of obligation and permis-sion. Even though there exist clear conceptual ties between deontic and evaluative terms (e.g., one can define what is morally good in terms of what one is obliged to do, andvice versa), there are reasons to keep the two realms apart. To mention two: many deontic adjectives, such asobligatory, permittedor forbidden, are not gradable.
And claims about what is obligatory, permitted or forbidden do not seem expressions of judgments of value, or at least not as intuitively as claims about what is good, beautiful or advisable (see Carr2017for an introduction to deontic modals and Tappolet2013for a more extensive discussion on the difference between evaluative and deontic concepts). Except tangentially in Chapter3, deontics are not discussed in this dissertation.
4 It has been pointed out recently that some nouns that appear to be descriptive might additionally encode a normative or evaluative dimension in their meaning. These have been called ‘dual-character concepts’. For example: a father is, descriptively speaking, a man who has children. But a father is also someone who satisfies certain stereotypes associated with fatherhood. Many of these are normative, such as caring for one’s children, treating them kindly, etc. See Del Pinal and Reuter2017; Leslie2015. Dual character concepts are not the object of this dissertation.
5Although see Egré and Cova2015for the evaluative implications ofmany.
Flavors of evaluativity
The above list contains evaluatives belonging to what we may call different “flavors” of value (to adopt an expression commonly associated to different kinds of modalities in language, c.f.
Kratzer2012): first and foremost, we find evaluatives of moral praise and blame (ethical, vir-tuous, right, wrong, worthy, brave). These have to do with what is morally good or what is our duty. There are evaluatives of practical commendation and criticism (advisable, sensible), which concern how best to orient action given our goals and interests. There are epistemic evaluatives (credible, evident, doubtfulorclear, as init is clear that, see C. Barker2009), hav-ing to do with knowledge, evidence and the justification of belief. Moreover, there is a large class of evaluatives that can be interpreted either epistemically or morally/practically, depend-ing on whether these predicates are applied to beliefs or actions (justified, rational, reasonable, warranted). One finds aesthetic adjectives (beautiful, ugly, elegant) and predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. tasty, fun, disgusting, boring), the latter of which have received a great deal of attention in recent philosophy of language and linguistics (see Lasersohn2005; MacFarlane 2014; Stephenson2007b; Stojanovic 2007; and McNally and Stojanovic2017for the connec-tion and contrast between aesthetic adjectives and PPTs). And finally, there are what we may call “all-purpose” evaluatives that can express more than one flavor of evaluativity (good, bad, valuable).
Objects of evaluation
Another important issue is: what are the bearers of value? In other words: what type of argu-ments do evaluatives take? The set of examples at the start of this section reveals a surprising variety. Evaluatives can be applied to individuals (including people, things or abstract con-cepts), action types, events or propositions. Some evaluatives are selective about their argu-ments (events cannot be heroines; people cannot advisable), but all-purpose evaluative terms likegoodare very flexible: they can be predicated of people (Mary is good), objects (this knife is good), actions (volunteering is good) and events (the Spanish Confiscation was good). From the viewpoint of semantics, this feature is surprising and challenging, since it is not shared by many other classes of expressions and requires a sophisticated story of how evaluatives com-bine with such different objects.
Gradability
Finally, most (if not all) evaluatives are GRADABLE. This means that in order to give a se-mantics for evaluatives we need to employ scales and orderings. In linguistics, gradability in the adjectival domain is attested by the admissibility of adjectival modification. To see this, contrast the following pair of sentences:
(1.9) a. # Anna Karenina is more married than Elena Greco.
b. Anna Karenina is braver than Elena Greco.
An adjective like married does not admit of modification; people are either married or not.
This is why to say that someone is more married than another sounds odd. By contrast, an adjective likebravedoes admit of degrees: people can be braver than others. This is true of all the evaluative adjectives on the above list: they all admit of degrees and comparisons.
Gradability has been a topic of much interest in semantics, chiefly because gradable expressions challenge a simple view of semantics on which predicates denote sets of objects (see Burnett 2017; Klein1991; Solt2015). Moreover, gradability is connected to traditional topics in philos-ophy, such as vagueness or context-dependency (Kennedy2007; Kennedy and McNally2005).
According to that simple view, predicates are functions from individuals to TRUTH VALUES. For instance, married is a function that takes an individual, e.g. Anna, as its argument and returns the value true if Anna is married, and false if Anna is not married. Alternatively, the denotation of the predicatemarriedcan be thought of as the set of married individuals, that is, the set of individuals for which the functionmarriedgives the value true.
Gradable predicates challenge this picture because many individuals do not fall neatly within (or without) their extension: is a person who is 175cm tall tall? Is a 100,000 C apartment expensive? For this reason, it is often assumed that gradable predicates denote functions from individuals to points or degrees on a scale, rather than to truth values. For example, an adjective liketallis a function that takes an individual, e.g. Anna, as its argument and returns its degree of height as its value, say, 175cm. Calling someone tall however, is more than just naming their height. To call someonetall is to say that its height has a certain property. Tall people are people whose heights stand out in some way. So the idea that gradable predicates pick out degrees of the relevant property has to be complemented with the idea that when we apply those adjectives to individuals, we are predicating a further property of the relevant degree—that it is significant, maximal or something like that.
These observations apply to evaluative adjectives across the board, although these introduce further complications. Standardly, applying what we said about tallto an evaluative adjective likestupidwould work as follows: classifying any individual asstupidinvolves two operations:
first, one needs to figure out an ordering of individuals with respect to their degree of stupidity;
and secondly, a threshold degree of stupidity needs to be determined, such that any individual who is more stupid than the threshold counts asstupid(Kennedy2007). There are two difficul-ties with this picture: the first is that, in contrast to adjectives liketall, it is difficult to imagine precise and measurable degrees of stupidity. This makes it difficult both to establish an order-ing of individuals as well as to determine any threshold degree on that scale. Secondly, the very criteria of stupidity can and do vary from speaker to speaker, thereby resulting in different orderings. In assessing people’s stupidity, you might give great weight to lack of intelligence;
while I may consider lack of politeness and etiquette to be more important. Thus, if we are asked to order a set of individuals by their stupidity, our orderings may not coincide (Bylinina 2017; Solt2018).
Thick and thin evaluative adjectives
An important issue that cuts across the previous debates about evaluatives is the distinction between THICK and THIN evaluative adjectives. Thick evaluative adjectives have evaluative and descriptive (or non-evaluative) meaning. The thin evaluative adjectives, by contrast, are those that have only evaluative meaning. Examples of the first kind are words likecruel, brave, generousorchaste. Thin adjectives include all-purpose evaluative terms likegood, bad.
The intuitive contrast lies in the fact that to call someonecruel, for example, is to convey some-thing negative about that person: it is to communicate that s/he is bad. But not all bad some-things are cruel. To say that someone is cruel is to say something more specific, something along the lines of inflicts unnecessary suffering. That more specific content however, is not evaluative.
So the intuitive idea is that thick terms likecruelhave evaluative and descriptive components of their meaning, whereas thin terms likebadonly have the evaluative component. The evalua-tive component is somewhat general, while the descripevalua-tive component is more specific, thereby
“thickening” the meaning of the term. Arguably, one can distinguish thin and thick evaluatives within some of the flavors of evaluatives that we discussed before. For example: ethicalis a thin moral adjective; whilebraveorgenerousare thick;beautifulis a thin aesthetic adjective, whileelegantis arguably thick. Andadvisableis a thin practical adjective; whereasdangerous could be considered a thick practical adjective.
The descriptive element—which we call (D) below—is usually taken to be a value-neutral de-scription (forcruel, it is something likeinflicts unnecessary suffering; forselfish, it is something likegiving priority to oneself over others; etc.). The evaluative component—(E) below—can be expressed with the aid of thin evaluative terms, as the claim that whatever falls under the descriptive component is good/bad in virtue of it. Thus, the meaning of a sentence like (1.10) can be factored out in the following two components:
(1.10) John is cruel
(D) John inflicts unnecessary suffering.
(E) Anyone that inflicts unnecessary suffering is bad in virtue of doing so.
From the viewpoint of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, the debate sur-rounding thick terms largely assumes that descriptive and evaluative elements are separable, and then goes on to consider how these elements combine with each other in the meaning of a thick term. More precisely, the debate assumes that the descriptive component (D) contributes to the truth-conditions of sentences like (1.10), and then considers the question of how the eval-uative component (E) is communicated. In particular, the debate revolves around the question of whether the evaluative component is part of the truth-conditions as well, or whether it is conveyed through some other semantic or pragmatic mechanism, such as presupposition, im-plicature or something else entirely (see Cepollaro and Stojanovic2016; Kyle2013; Roberts 2013; Väyrynen2013,2017, for some key references).