Non-factualism about evaluative language

Non-factualism names a broad family of views originally about the meaning of moral vocab-ulary, but that has been extended to other parcels of natural language, notably perspectival expressions. Non-factualism can be stated as a thesis about thesemantic value of declarative sentences that belong to a certain fragment of natural language, namely the thesis that those sentences do not describe reality. Thus, non-factualism is first and foremost a negative thesis:

Definition 1 (Negativenon-factualism aboutF) Unembedded declarative sentences of a fragmentF of natural language do not describe the way the world is.

18For accounts of action-guidance as implicature, see S. J. Barker2000; Copp2001,2009; Finlay2004,2005;

Strandberg2011; and see Bar-On and Chrisman2009for criticism.

19I thank Carla Umbach and James Brown for useful discussion and suggestions in relation to these issues.

There are non-factualists about various domains, such as normative claims (Gibbard 1990, 2003), epistemic (inc. probability) modals (Yalcin2007,2011,2012), thea priori(Field2000), higher-order concepts in general (Frápolli and Villanueva2012), conditionals (Gibbard 1981), knowledge attributions (Chrisman2007; Field2009,2018), or taste predicates (Bordonaba Plou 2017; Gutzmann2016).

Non-factualists say that the function of the characteristic type of vocabulary in each of those fragments is ‘non-representational’ (Charlow2014,2015), that is, its function is not to describe

‘ways the world is’ (Frápolli and Villanueva 2012, p. 471), or ‘how things stand’ (Rosen 1998, p. 388). Sometimes these views are presented as committed to the idea that the relevant sentences are ‘not straightforwardly factual’ (Field2009,2018; Yalcin2012).^20,21We can apply this view to evaluative sentences (sentences containing evaluative adjectives) more generally:

Definition 2 (Negativenon-factualism about value) Unembedded evaluative sentences do not describe the way the world is.

To take an example, consider sentences (2.45) and (2.46):

(2.45) Eating animals is widespread.

(2.46) Eating animals is bad.

Non-factualists about evaluatives hold that the presence of the evaluative adjectiveunethicalin (2.46) marks a profound semantic contrast between those two sentences. In most contexts, an utterance of (2.45) aims at informing an audience of a fact, namely that the practice of eating animals has a certain property (being widespread). In contrast to this, non-factualists claim, by uttering a sentence like (2.46), a speaker does not aim at informing her audience of a similar fact, namely that eating animals has the property ofbeing bad. Rather, an utterance of (2.46) serves a different communicative function.

Different authors differ widely in theirpositivecharacterization of non-factualism, so it is diffi-cult to give a positive thesis that everyone would agree with. Most of them, however, emphasize that the meaning of evaluative terms is somehow connected to action and practice. In order to keep our characterization maximally open, we are going to define non-factualism about evalu-ative sentences as the view that evaluevalu-ative sentences express practical attitudes of support and rejection.

Definition 3 (Non-factualism about value) Unembedded evaluative sentences express prac-tical attitudes of support & rejection.

20See the opening paragraphs of e.g. Bedke2017; Blackburn2006; Boghossian1990; Camp2017a; Frápolli and Villanueva2012; Gibbard1986; Jackson and Pettit1998; Pérez Carballo and Santorio2016; Rothschild2012;

Schroeder2008a,dfor different statements of this negative thesis.

21Treating non-factualism as a semantic view, that is, as a view about the semantic meaning of certain sentences, is one option among others. Non-factualism has been defended as ametasemanticview (a view about ‘what it is in virtue of which particular kinds of words have the semantic contents that they do’, Chrisman2012, p. 325, also Pérez Carballo2014; Ridge2014) and as apragmaticview (Yalcin2012). It is not extremely clear to me what Yalcin means by calling non-factualism/expressivism apragmaticthesis, although in Yalcin2012, pp. 140–2 the basic thought seems to be the following: by refusing to call non-factualism a semantic thesis, one can remain agnostic about two things: (i) what the correct compositional implementation of these ideas might turn out to be, and (ii) whether the characteristic type of update on the conversational common ground that Yalcin attributes to modals (which are his focus) is identifiable with the semantic value of those lexical items.

Non-factualists tend to say that evaluative vocabulary serves to communicate things like de-sires, plans, states of (dis-)approval, PRO- and CON-attitudes, intentions or emotional or affec-tive states. For example, a sentence like (2.46) may expresses a plan to avoid eating animals, or a desire to not eat animals, or a state of disapproval towards eating animals, or a negative or displeasing emotion or affective state produced by the thought of eating animals, etc. These are all action-oriented attitudes against eating animals.²²

In fact, we can be more specific and say that attitudes of support are expressed by evaluative sentences that contain evaluative adjectives of positive polarity (good, generous, beautiful...) while attitudes of rejection are expressed by evaluative sentences containing evaluative adjec-tives of negative polarity (bad, cruel, ugly...).

Definition 4 (Non-factualism about positive/negative value) Unembedded evaluative sen-tences containing positive evaluative adjectives express practical attitudes of support; evalua-tive sentences containing negaevalua-tive evaluaevalua-tive adjecevalua-tives express practical attitudes of rejection.

Furthermore, it is standard in the literature on non-factualism and expressivism to construe those attitudes as mental states (Schroeder2008c,a.o.), but we can remain neutral about that—

you can think of having an attitude as being in a particular type of mental state, or you can think of it as adopting some kind of public commitment to think and/or behave in certain ways. To have a practical attitude of support of football, for instance, can be thought of as being disposed or committed to display certain types of behavior with respect to football. It is a further question whether this attitude is cashed out in terms of being in certain types of mental states, such as desiring to watch a game tonight, or planning to play football with one’s friends next week, or crying joyful tears when one’s team wins, etc. We do not wish to take a stand on what is the right way to construe the mental state counterpart of such practical attitudes.

It is an important part of these views to rely on a relation of EXPRESSIONthat holds between a speaker, a sentence type and an attitude type that can be attributed to the speaker of that sentence, as a result of using it in paradigmatic occasions of use (Schroeder 2008b). Let » denote that relation (although we omit mention to the speaker). Then, we can represent the different attitudes expressed by sentences (2.45) and (2.46) as follows:

(2.45) Eating animals is widespread.

» non-practical/representational attitude about eating animals (2.46) Eating animals is bad.

» practical/non-representational attitude against eating animals

As we stressed at the start of this section, often it has seen more important for non-factualists to stress the contrast between representational or doxastic attitudes associated with descriptive vocabulary and the practical or non-doxastic attitudes associated with evaluative vocabulary than to specify what those practical attitudes really are. According to this statement of non-factualism about evaluatives, the contrast between non-evaluative and evaluative sentences lies in the fact that the former express attitudes that represent the world as being a certain way; while the latter express attitudes that aim at making the world a certain way, rather than representing it as such. Waxing Marxist, one might say that representational, or doxastic attitudes (like belief and knowledge) aim at interpreting the world; while the practical attitudes associated

22 See e.g. Ayer1946, p. 110; Blackburn1984, 190 and ff; Blackburn1993, p. 113; Blackburn1998, p. 70;

Camp2017a, p. 87; Finlay2004, p. 206; Gibbard1986, p. 473; Gibbard1990, p. 33; Schroeder2008a, p. 574;

Jackson and Pettit1998, p. 245, as well as references in n.20.

with evaluative vocabulary aim atchanging it. Again, we need not be more precise than this about what exactly is the attitude in question, or how it may map onto different psychological states.

Another illuminating aspect of non-factualism arises in contrast to so-called metaethicalSUB

-JECTIVISM (see n.2). Note that, if one accepts that evaluative terms are semantically related to practical attitudes, the non-factualist view that evaluative terms express those attitudes is not the only possible way of cashing out that relation. An alternative view is subjectivism, according to which evaluative terms express regular beliefs about those attitudes. According to this view, a sentence like (2.46) self-ascribes certain practical attitude towards eating ani-mals; it is equivalent to saying something likeI have certain practical attitude towards eating animals.²³ Early proponents of non-factualism insisted on distinguishing their view from sub-jectivism²⁴, essentially because subjectivism was prey to Moore’s open question argument as well as to the obvious charge that speakers engaging in moral disagreement could hardly be represented as describing their respective moral responses (the problem of lost disagreement).

By stressing that, in making a moral claim, one does notsaythat one has a practical attitude but ratherexpressesthe attitude itself appeared to overcome the difficulties of subjectivism raised by Moore.

Non-factualism and action-guidance

This simple characterization of non-factualism should already make it clear that this approach is well equipped to account for the action-guiding feature of evaluatives (§2.3.1): simply put, non-factualists hardwire the action-guiding inference that we observed into the semantic meaning of evaluatives through the aforementioned relation ofexpression: they claim that that the content of that inferencejust iswhat evaluative sentences semantically express.

According to non-factualists about evaluatives, to call somethinggoodis to express a—perhaps underspecified—positive practical attitude towards that thing; it is to express one’s intention of orienting one’s actions towards that thing. Thus, for non-factualists, the connection between evaluative language and action-guidance is no mystery; to make an evaluative claim just isto express how one intends to direct one’s action.

With respect to the although-test, a non-factualist would say that the reason why (2.37a) and (2.38a) sound natural is because in those sentences we are ascribing to someone a relatively irrational, or conflictive state of mind: when we describe Matheus as someone who thinks that volunteering is a virtuous thing to do and at the same time lacks any intention of doing it, it is as though we are saying that he takes himself to have certain practical attitudes when he actually does not have them (2.37a), or displays intentions or dispositions to act that are markedly incoherent with the former (2.38a). Marking that contrast with a connective like althoughsounds like a perfectly natural thing to say.

(2.37a) Matheus thinks volunteering is virtuous, although he doesn’t have any intention or plan whatsoever of supporting, promoting or doing it.

23A forceful defense of this view can be found in Dreier1990.

24‘[W]e reject utilitarianism and subjectivism, not as proposals to replace our existing ethical notions by new ones, but as analyses of our existing ethical notions. Our contention is simply that, in our language, sentences which contain normative ethical symbols are not equivalent to sentences which express psychological propositions, or indeed empirical propositions of any kind’ (Ayer1946, pp. 107–8)

≈Matheus thinks he has practical attitudeP although he does not haveP. (2.38a) Matheus thinks donating is unethical although he belongs to a charity.

≈Matheus thinks he has practical attitudeP although he behaves incoherently with P.

Similarly, for a non-factualist it is no surprise either that evaluative sentences and practical propositional attitude ascriptions can be substituted salva validitate in practical reasoning, given that the former semantically express the same kind of attitudes that the latter, in a stan-dard semantic sense, describe or represent. So a non-factualist would say that the reason why the third premise in (2.40) and (2.41) (repeated here) can either be an evaluative sentence or the attribution of a desire is that evaluative sentence express practical, or action-oriented, attitudes (such as desires).

(2.40) a. It’s raining.

b. You are going out.

c. You don’t want to get wet.

∴ Take an umbrella.

(2.41) a. It’s raining.

b. You are going out.

c. It’s a bad idea to get wet.

∴ Take an umbrella.

Non-factualism and gradability

Things start to get more difficult when we consider the question of whether non-factualists can secure the fact that evaluative adjectives are lexically subjective, as we saw in §2.2. At the outset, non-factualism looks promising: given that practical attitudes can vary from speaker to speaker, different speakers can use evaluative adjectives to express different practical attitudes in different contexts of use. And it is sensible to think that those different attitudes give rise both to variable thresholds for the application of the positive form of gradable adjectives (allowing for positive form subjectivity), as well as to variable orderings of individuals along the relevant evaluative dimensions (allowing for ordering- or lexical subjectivity). This subjective element in non-factualism could, in principle, account for the intuition that speakers in disagreement dialogues like (2.22) (repeated here) can have different opinions.

Nonetheless, things are not so straightforward. As we have seen, evaluative sentences con-taining positive evaluative adjectives like (2.47) express support; while evaluative sentences containing negative evaluative adjectives like (2.48) express rejection. This approach, however, faces a fundamental shortcoming when faced with comparative constructions like (2.49):

(2.47) Volunteering is good. » practical attitude for volunteering (2.48) Donating is bad. » practical attitude against donating (2.49) Volunteering is better than donating. » practical attitude for / against ??

When a speaker utters (2.49), she need not endorse nor reject either relata. She is merely comparing the two actions; and her uttering (2.49) is compatible with adopting almost any combination of positive and negative attitudes towards either of them (with the exception of being for donating money while being against volunteering). This is a clear counterexample to Definition4:

Definition 4 (Non-factualism about positive/negative value) Unembedded evaluative sen-tences containing positive evaluative adjectives express practical attitudes of support; evalua-tive sentences containing negaevalua-tive evaluaevalua-tive adjecevalua-tives express practical attitudes of rejection.

The reason why comparatives cannot be easily accommodated by non-factualism, at least the way we have formulated it, is because we have defined the practical attitudes associated with evaluative vocabulary as non-gradable, that is, as outright positive or negative practical atti-tudes. But evaluative adjectives are gradable, and therefore, if non-factualists are right, the practical attitudes that evaluatives express should be gradable as well. Non-factualists need to enrich their favored semantics if they want to accommodate comparative uses of evaluative adjectives.

More specifically, what one is inclined to say about a sentence like (2.49) is not that it expresses outright support/rejection for eitherrelata, but that it expressessupport, or preference, or pri-ority of volunteering over donating. But simply assigning the expression of such a relational attitude as the meaning ofbetter, while assigning the simpler, outright attitude togood is not enough—for the simple reason thatgoodandbetterare semantically related in an obvious way.

So non-factualists about evaluatives need to say something about how these more sophisticated relational attitudes that one would be inclined to assign to comparatives are semantically built from the simpler attitudes that non-factualists assign to the positive form of the same adjectives.

Importantly, comparatives are just a case study, but the issue goes well beyond: basically, the type of practical attitudes that non-factualists associate with evaluative adjectives are most appropriate for capturing the meaning of those adjectivesin their positive form. But as we saw in §2.2, gradable adjectives are extremely flexible. They appear in comparative, equative or superlative form, they admit certain adjectival modifiers and not others, etc. Therefore, non-factualism needs to be refined in order to be able to account for the meaning of the great variety of forms that evaluative adjectives appear in.

Before moving on, it bears pointing out that some proposals in the non-factualist camp are better equipped to meet this challenge than others. Comparatives (and relational constructions involving evaluatives more generally) are a particularly pressing problem for versions of non-factualism that hold that evaluative sentences express attitudestowardsa single object of eval-uation. Comparatives are problematic because it does not make sense to say that the speaker is expressing the relevant practical attitude towards any of the tworelata. This is true of most non-factualist proposals, but not all of them. In particular, Gibbard’s earlyNORM-EXPRESSIVISM

(Gibbard1986,1990) was built upon the idea that ascriptions of rationality (φ-ing makes sense;

φ-ing is rational, etc.) express a non-cognitive attitude ofACCEPTANCE of a set of norms that stands behind such evaluation. For instance, to say that eating vegetables is the rational thing to do is to express one’s acceptance of one’s system of norms. This is a system of norms that so happens to sanction eating vegetables. But one does not thereby express any positive or negative attitudetowardseating vegetables; one expresses an attitude that has one’s system of norms as its object.

This feature of Gibbard’s early view makes it better equipped to deal with (2.49). For Gibbard can also say that to judge that volunteering is better than donating is to express one’s acceptance of a system of norms, a system of norms that gives priority to volunteering over donating.

Nonetheless, that would not be enough: he would still need to say what it is for something to give priority to something over something else. Gibbard’s examples—outright judgments of rationality, sensibleness and the like, were treated in his earlier work as expressing acceptance

of systems of norms such that the objects of evaluation either met, failed to meet or were indifferent to them. The problem remains that neither of those cases applies in a straightforward manner to comparatives.²⁵

To sum up these two last sections, we have arrived at a sort of unexpected crossroads. Walking in the linguist’s shoes (§2.2), we arrived at a necessary property of evaluative adjectives, namely ordering subjectivity (§2.2.1), and we saw how a standard degree semantics can accommodate those properties (§2.2.2). But we also argued that this approach has certain shortcomings: it requires thinking of evaluative adjectives in a way that is similar to the way in which we think about dimensional adjectives, which is awkward in light of the fact that evaluative adjectives eschew measurement. More importantly however, degree semantics offers no clear way of making a distinction, among the lexically subjective adjectives, between those that are action-guiding and those that are not. Then, putting on the metanormative theorist’s shoes (§2.3), we argued that a sufficient property of evaluatives is precisely their action-guidance (§2.3.1), and we saw how non-factualism, by assigning a specific semantics that connects evaluatives to practical attitudes, can in principle account for the action-guiding properties of evaluatives (§2.3.2). But non-factualism has its own shortcoming, which is that it offers an account best suited to capture the use of evaluative adjectives in their positive form, and it is not obvious how to incorporate gradability into the picture.

The outcome of all this is that the scalar properties of evaluatives need to inform non-factualism, and conversely that the action-guiding properties of evaluatives need to inform the standard de-gree semantics for evaluatives. Unfortunately however, this is not simply a matter of theories complementing each other: in the following two sections (§2.4-§2.5), I aim to argue that cap-turing the action-guiding properties of evaluatives in light of their scalar properties causes a problem for degree semantics, and that this should push us to move to a different framework for scalar semantics, namely delineation semantics, as the proper semantic framework in which to couch non-factualism. But in order to see this problem clearly, it is best to first present the

The outcome of all this is that the scalar properties of evaluatives need to inform non-factualism, and conversely that the action-guiding properties of evaluatives need to inform the standard de-gree semantics for evaluatives. Unfortunately however, this is not simply a matter of theories complementing each other: in the following two sections (§2.4-§2.5), I aim to argue that cap-turing the action-guiding properties of evaluatives in light of their scalar properties causes a problem for degree semantics, and that this should push us to move to a different framework for scalar semantics, namely delineation semantics, as the proper semantic framework in which to couch non-factualism. But in order to see this problem clearly, it is best to first present the