Other bearers of value

Evaluative adjectives often take arguments other than propositions. Action types or properties and individuals are the most common. Here are some examples:

(4.36) Stealing is bad.

(4.37) To just stare without doing anything is just horrible.

(4.38) That white Mercedes is good.

(4.39) The picture that you got was uglier than the one I got.

Roughly, we are going to defend that, when evaluative adjectives take these types of arguments, they behave in pretty much the same way as when they take full clauses as arguments: they express (dis-)preference for a proposition over certain alternatives.

For instance, when an evaluative adjective takes as its argument a nominalized clause—(4.36) or (4.37), it will be argued that those clauses can be mapped onto regular propositions, and then the semantics for those sentences is no different from what we saw in previous sections.

Thus,stealing is badis roughly equivalent tothat [arbitrary individual] steals is bad, which in turn expresses a dis-preference against the proposition that [arbitrary individual] steals over relevant alternatives.

On the other hand, the evaluation of individuals is more complicated. We propose to treat a sentence like (4.38) as the combination of a proposition that attributes certain descriptive properties to an individual, together with an evaluation of such properties that works in the same way as the evaluation of properties. Thus, (4.38) turns out to be equivalent to (i) that white Mercedes has such-and-such propertiesand (ii)having such and such properties is good.

Let’s consider the evaluation of action-types and individuals in turn.

Action types

Sentences like (4.36) are the prime examples of evaluative sentences that metaethicists tend to focus on.

(4.36) Stealing is bad.

Our approach is to treat the subject of those sentence as denoting full propositions, which is relatively uncontroversial, and then give those sentences the same semantics we saw in §4.2.

Arguably, (4.36) contains a covert P RO, so it means something like P RO stealing is bad.

P ROstands for an arbitrary individual, andP ROstealingis equivalent to the propositionthat P ROsteals. Thus, (4.36) turns out to be equivalent to

(4.40) It is bad thatP ROsteals.

One may wonder about the exact reference of P RO. Three very salient options are an ex-istential (= that anyone steals), a generic (= that people steal) and a de se reading (= that I steal) (see Moltmann2006, for discussion). Each of these options have something in their fa-vor, and something against it. The existential reading of (4.40) (it is bad that anyone steals) would be plausible in light of a somewhat strict set of values, but false in light of a more re-laxed set of values that admits of exceptions. Things work exactly the other way around for the generic reading: under that reading (it is bad that people steal), (4.40) would express general dis-preference for acts of stealing, with exceptions. A sentence like (4.36) seems compatible with both interpretations. Finally, ade seinterpretation would better capture a connection to the actual planning state of the speaker (as it would be roughly equivalent toI choose/plan/prefer to not steal), although it might appear too subjective—presumably, moral statements like (4.36) have some kind of universal force.

For our purposes however, it does not matter which of those readings is the right one. They key for the semantics of (4.36) is that its grammatical subject is assigned a regular, descriptive proposition. Once we have that, we can apply our hyperplan semantics in exactly the same way we saw in §4.2:

(4.41) [[it is bad thatP ROsteals]]_⟨w

i,hi,ai⟩=1iff {w^′∶ [[P ROsteals]]_⟨w′,hi,ai⟩=1} ∈

h

⟨h_i, a_i[P ROsteals](w_i)⟩

In words: (4.40) will be true, relative to an index of evaluation, if the hyperplan of the in-dex dis-prefers the (worldly component of the) proposition denoted by the grammatical sub-ject of that sentence relative to the set of alternatives determined by the index (which must include that proposition as an option). Call a_i the set of alternatives at some index, and let ai = {P ROsteals, P RObegs, P ROborrows}. (4.40) be true iff the proposition that P RO stealsis in h

⟨h, a_i⟩.

It is important to note that, even thoughbadtakes a full proposition as its argument, the object of evaluation is still an action-type or property that is evaluated against other action-type or properties. In other words, what a speaker rejects when she utters (4.36) is the act of stealing, not the propositionthatP ROsteals. If it was, then in principle it should be possible to consider a set of alternatives wereP ROis substituted for other individuals. Nonetheless, the right result is predicted by our semantics if alternatives are indeed computed as was suggested in §4.2.1, that is, if they are focus-sensitive: given thatP ROis silent, it cannot be stressed, and thus the relevant set of alternatives can never be computed.

Incidentally, the view just laid out about sentences like (4.36) was arguably already Ayer’s view, who wrote as follows (in what has come to be considered one of the foundational statements of metaethical non-cognitivism):

The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual con-tent. Thus if I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money,’ I am

not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money.’ In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money,’ in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some spe-cial exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings of the speaker. If now I generalize my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a statement which has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false (Ayer1946, p.142, my emphasis).

Ayer says that a sentence like Stealing money is wrong is a “generalization” from you acted wrongly in stealing that money. He does not have anything else to say about the relation be-tween those two sentence types. However, his approach is similar to ours because it connects the two sentence types, and it lets him distinguish, in sentences like (4.36), a regular, fac-tual component (i.e., a descriptive proposition), and an evaluative component. This evaluative component can easily be factored out of the factual component and treated like some kind of prosodicaddendum(like exclamation marks).

Individuals

As we hinted at, accommodating evaluative sentences in which evaluative adjectives are predi-cated of individuals is a little less straightforward. Here are some examples:

(4.38) That white Mercedes is good.

(4.39) The picture that you got was uglier than the one I got.

There are at least two possible strategies: the first is to go for a view in which evaluative adjectives can take individuals as arguments, in addition to propositions. That view respects the surface grammar of sentences like (4.38) and (4.39), but it requires making evaluative adjectives semantically flexible enough to apply to both individuals and propositions. The second strategy is to assign to those sentences a structure such that the argument of the evaluative adjective is a proposition, and not an individual. This involves attributing to these adjectives a more complicated meaning, and one that does not respect the surface grammar of these sentences.

By contrast to the case of nominalized clauses, this is definitely notstandard—the orthodoxy is that nominal phrases denote individuals, or individual concepts, not propositions. However, the second approach lets us defend a single story about how evaluative adjectives work (one in which they are uniformly sentential operators), and one that, as we will see, sits nicely with available views about thick adjectives.

As we have already said (and as the reader can see from Table4.1), we are going for the second kind of view. However, let us say something about how the first type of view could be spelled out. This view would assign a standard semantics to the grammatical subject of sentences like (4.38) and (4.39), and we would let evaluative adjectives take individuals as arguments. In turn, this requires making our hyperplan semantics liberal enough to be compatible with individuals.

Informally, the idea would be the following: we have been describing hyperplans as functions that take you from a set of propositions to the (dis-)preferable proposition(s) in that set. The idea would be to generalize this, and think of hyperplans as functions that take you from a set

of objects of any type to the (dis)-preferable members of that set. The arguments of hyperplans could be propositions, but they could also be individuals, properties, etc. For instance, when we say thatais a good car, we would be avowing a practical commitment such that, when faced with a choice between aand a set of alternative cars, one chooses at least cara. Hyperplans, in this view, would be functions from sets of alternatives of any semantic type to their (dis-)preferred subsets.

In order to represent the fact that evaluative adjectives can take arguments of different semantic types, we would need to assign a variable type to their arguments. In addition to this, we would let the index supply alternative sets of the corresponding type—if one is evaluating individuals, then the alternatives should be a set of individuals; if one is evaluating propositions, the alternatives ought to be a set of propositions, etc. In this view, (4.38) would be true, relative to an index i, just in case the hyperplan h_i of the index selects that White Mercedes over whatever set of alternative cars (including the white Mercedes) is determined byi.

This proposal can be further spelled out, but it has drawbacks. First, adopting such a liberal account of hyperplans commits us to a rather powerful logic, whereby certain predicates (evalu-ative predicates) take both individuals and full propositions as arguments. From a logical point of view, that move is not for free, although that is not my concern here. Moreover, assuming that evaluatives are able to take both individuals and propositions as arguments would make evaluatives—or at least some of them—a class of natural language expressions with a rather unique distribution (besides logical connectives likeand andorit is difficult to come up with other examples).

Secondly, there is an extra wrinkle to the evaluation of individuals which motivates adopting the second view we considered at the start—or so I will argue. In exploring this application of hyperplan semantics to individuals, we have been claiming that the evaluation of individuals is based on the capacity of hyperplans to select sets among sets of individuals. However, it seems more intuitive to think that the evaluation of individuals is guided, in some fundamental way, by the properties that individuals have, and not by the individuals themselves. Consider sentence (4.38) again. In virtue of what is that white Mercedes more preferable than a set of alternative cars? Intuitively, in virtue of the properties it has. That is, in virtue of its motor, speed, color, design, etc. A consequence of this is that,ceteris paribus, one should consistently prefer things with similar properties. And that seems to be the case. To see this, letX be a set {a, b, c}of three cars, and suppose that we judge that carais good relative toX. In addition, letA,B andC stand for the set of properties that each of those cars respectively and uniquely instantiates (A, for instance, may be a combination of different properties, such ashaving low emissions, a large rear spoiler, being Japanese...). Now, suppose that we had been presented with a different setX^′of cars{a^′, b^′, c^′}which also instantiate propertiesA,B andCuniquely and respectively. It is very natural to assume that we would also judge that cara^′is good relative to X^′. Whatever set of properties one appreciates in an individual, those properties ought to make one appreciate to the same extentany otherindividual that has them—ceteris paribus.

If this is correct, then it seems that what we might have taken to be the evaluation of an individ-ual “in itself” is actindivid-ually the evaluation of its properties. And then, it would be more sensible to model hyperplans as functions from sets of descriptionsof individuals, that is, properties, rather than sets of individuals. But if individuals are not, after all, the real objects of evaluation, why not just adopt our model for the evaluation of action types/properties? If sayingthis car is goodis tantamount to sayingthe properties of this car are good, then we might as well model sentences like (4.38) as the evaluation of those very properties.

That will be in fact, our proposal. But note, that in addition to an evaluation of certain proper-ties, it is also part of the meaning of (4.38) to predicate somethingof this particular individual, i.e., that white Mercedes.⁶ If I think that the value of a car is measured by the size of its rear spoiler, then when I utter (4.38) (somehow) I am also getting across that the white Mercedes has a large rear spoiler. And if you think that all that matters with respect to cars is their envi-ronmental friendliness, then when you utter (4.38) you are also getting across that the Mercedes is environmentally friendly. But having a large rear spoiler and being environmentally friendly are descriptive, not evaluative properties. So we propose to assign a double semantic value to (4.38): on the one hand, that sentence conveys something descriptive: that an individual has certain, non-evaluative properties. And on the other hand, it expresses an evaluation of those properties, along the model offered in §4.3.1. We can represent its meaning thus:

(4.42) That white Mercedes is good=

⎧⎪

The first component is a descriptive component, whereby a certain, contextually determined set of descriptive properties is predicated of an individual. What those properties are depends on whatever the speaker perceives the preferable properties of a car to be. It could be having low emissions, or having a large rear spoiler, or being made in Japan, or a combination of some of those things. Importantly, thin evaluatives likegoodleave massively underspecified what those descriptive properties are (we write that ‘[...]’).

The evaluative component, which is an expression of support for those properties, is what is common to all and any uses of good. To account for this, all we need to do is plug our account for sentences like F-ing is good. Assume that F stands for the properties that we just represented as [...]. Then, the evaluative component of (4.42) would be equivalent to a sentence likeit is good thatP RO isF. We can then assign the following truth conditions to the evaluative component of (4.42):

(4.43) [[it is good thatP ROisF]]_⟨w

i,hi,ai⟩=1iff

{w^′∶ [[P ROisF]]_⟨w′,hi,ai⟩=1} ∈h_i(a_i[P ROisF](w_i))

As we said before about evaluation of action-types and properties, it is important to note again that sentences like (4.38) do not express preference or rejection for a full proposition, but for a set of properties. This is predicted by our semantics, insofar as the object of evaluation for a sentence like (4.38) is not the proposition that that white Mercedes isF, but rather the proposition that P RO is F. If the object of evaluation was the proposition that that white Mercedes is F, then alternatives could be generated were other cars are F, but this would misconstrue the meaning of (4.38), as (4.38) cannot be used to express a preference for this particular individual having a certain set of properties F over other individuals having F (in order to express that, one would have to say something like: it is good that THIS WHITE

MERCEDESisF).

To say all of this, of course, is to follow in Hare’s footsteps (Hare 1952). Hare defended that there are two components to the meaning of good, one variable and the other one stable: the variable component was what he calls a varying standard for goodness, which is nothing but a certain set of non-evaluative properties. However, there is something which people with

6I say part of its meaning, but not necessarily part of what is asserted when that sentence is uttered at a context.

radically different standards of goodness have in common when they use the wordgood, and that is its invariant, commendatory component: anyone who uses the word goodis invariably commending whatever they apply the word to (see also Umbach 2016, 146 and ff, who calls the descriptive meaning ofgooda ‘quasi-denotation’).

This view about the evaluation of individuals will be crucial in Chapter 6, for the following reason: if a hyperplan selects properties of individuals, then it should be possible to learn about the properties of individualsvia hyperplans. More specifically, if you do not know the properties of an individual, but you know (i) the standard relative to which it is evaluated and (ii) how it fares according to that standard, then you can use that information to learn about its descriptive properties.

We will see this in detail in Chapter6, but we might as well offer the following preview: evalua-tive language can communicate descripevalua-tive information when speakers use evaluaevalua-tive sentences about individuals in contexts in which an evaluative standard is clearly shared, but descriptive information about the individuals under evaluation is not. In such contexts, a common evalu-ative standard can be used by speakers to share descriptive information about individuals, just as plain descriptive language can. For illustration, let us suppose that we are in such a context:

they are showing three movies, a, band c, and you tell me that moviea was fantastic. I have not seen any of them, but I know that we—you and me—would describe a movie asfantastic only if it had a certain property, for example if it was Korean. Then, for you to tell me that movieawasfantasticis not, or only, for you to convey to me an evaluation ofa. Rather, it is a way for you to convey to me certain descriptive information abouta, namely thatais a Korean movie. This shows that evaluative sentences have descriptive uses, which arise systematically from features of the context in which those sentences are uttered. We will spelled this out more carefully in Chapter6.