In §2.3, we raised a challenge for non-factualism: In a nutshell, non-factualists claim that evaluative sentences express practical attitudes of support or rejection, but evaluative sentences with evaluative adjectives in comparative form do not express such attitudes. We argued that this was not a problem about comparatives per se—the problem was that the standard non-factualist story was best suited for the positive form of evaluative adjectives. All of this should sound very similar to the Frege-Geach problem, and the aim of this section is in part to argue that the challenge raised by comparatives reveals a new, “sub-sentential” incarnation of the Frege-Geach problem.
2.5.1 Non-factualism and the positive form: POS-ATT
There is a clear correlation between the capacity of an evaluative sentence to express outright support and rejection, on the one hand, and the presence of the positive form of the relevant evaluative adjective, on the other. Put differently, it turns out that there is a connection between themetanormativeand thelinguistic—or more precisely, Rett’s—notion of evaluativity (which probably seemed unrelated at the outset).
The connection is the following: in order for an evaluative sentence to express practical sup-port/rejection, it has to be evaluative (in Rett’s sense); conversely, every linguistically evaluative construction that features evaluative adjectives expresses support/rejection.
Observation 1 (POS-ATT) An utteranceU of an unembedded evaluative sentenceS contain-ing an evaluative adjectiveE expresses practical support/rejection if and only if U invites an inference to the positive form ofE.
It follows that any evaluative sentence that does not invite an inference to the positive form of the relevant adjective—any evaluative sentence that is notlinguisticallyevaluative—poses a counterexample to our definition of non-factualism:
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.
Let us illustrate this with comparatives. The comparativebetteris not linguistically evaluative, as shown by the fact that (2.56) is a perfectly acceptable thing to say:
(2.56) Volunteering is better than donating, and none of them are good.
POS-ATTrightly predicts that bettershould not express practical support or rejection of any relatum(which we observed at the end of §2.3.2):
(2.49) Volunteering is better than donating. » practical attitude for / against ??
This applies to many other constructions as well. For instance, as we saw in §2.2.3, equatives built using the marked or negative member of a pair of gradable antonyms are linguistically evaluative, while the same construction with the unmarked member is not (Rett2007):
(2.57) Ann is as tall as Mary. ↝̸Ann or Mary are tall
(2.58) Ann is as short as Mary. ↝Ann and Mary are short
The same contrast appears with pairs of evaluative antonyms:
(2.59) The first movie was as good as the second. ↝̸Both movies were good (2.60) The first movie was as bad as the second. ↝Both movies were bad While uttering (2.59) does not commit one to either movie being good, uttering (2.60) suggests that both movies were bad. And in accordance withPOS-ATT, while (2.59) does not express any positive or negative attitude towards either movie, (2.60) clearly does.
(2.59) The first movie was as good as the second. » practical attitude for / against ??
(2.60) The first movie was as bad as the second. » practical attitude against both movies Therefore, equatives built with the positive or unmarked member of a pair of evaluative antonyms also cause trouble for Definition4.32
In §2.4, we presented the “supra-sentential” Frege-Geach problem as the problem ofhow eval-uative sentences semantically embed. The challenge was to assign a non-factual semantic value to evaluative sentences that can compose semantically with truth-functional operators in a satis-factory manner. Turning our attention toPOS-ATTreveals an arguably more pressing question, namely the question ofhow evaluative sentences semantically compose. The challenge here is to assign a non-factual meaning to evaluative adjectives in a way that can then compose se-mantically with other constituents in the sentences where those adjectives figure and yield the appropriate meaning of those sentences. This is as a different “incarnation” of the Frege-Geach problem, which we dub the “SUB-SENTENTIAL” Frege-Geach problem.
This problem is already diagnosed in the previous paragraphs in pretty much the same way that the traditional Frege-Geach problem was: non-factualists claim that evaluative sentences express practical attitudes. But by(POS-ATT), this is true only of some evaluative sentences,
32Two classes of potential counterexamples to(POS-ATT)should be mentioned. First, tautological sentences such asevery good action is good entail the positive form goodalthough they don’t seem to convey practical support for anything. There are various ways of tweaking(POS-ATT)to avoid this problem. One could restrict (POS-ATT)to non-tautological sentences. Alternatively, one could bite the bullet and say that sentences like this do express practical support forevery good action. Secondly, sentences such asYour paper is good enough, while they do not invite an inference to the positive form, do seem to convey an outright practical attitude, in particular, a negative one. It’s plausible to think, however, that this is the result of a pragmatic process: calling something good enoughsuggests that its value does not reach the standard forgood(simpliciter), that is, that it’snot good.
It’s natural to think of this as some kind of scalar inference. Still, inferringnot goodis not enough to generate a negative attitude—for this we would need an inference to the positive formbad. Regardless, it is a rather stable convention of our linguistic practices that calling somethingnot goodis a polite way of calling it bad. If that convention is assumed, then the scalar inference generated byYour paper is good enoughcould actually result in the inference that your paper is bad, which would convey a negative attitude, as expected by(POS-ATT).
namely those that arelinguisticallyevaluative. However, regardless of whether a given evalua-tive sentence is linguistically evaluaevalua-tive or not, its meaning has to be derived compositionally from the lexical meaning of the evaluative adjective that it contains. For example, the meaning of the binary predicateas good as is derived from the meaning of good, and the meaning of as bad asis derived from the meaning ofbad—even though only the latter predicate produces sentences that are linguistically evaluative and express rejection. So non-factualists need to say how and why, even though evaluative adjectives semantically contribute the expression of prac-tical support/rejection, such attitudes somehow vanish when those adjectives appear in certain forms.
2.5.2 From degree to delineation semantics
Here is where the difficulties for degree semantics appear. As we saw, degree semantics holds that the meaning of the positive form of any gradable adjective results from the composition of two semantic constituents: the lexical meaning of the adjective and a threshold-contributing silent morphemeP OS. The problem is that neither of those components seems to be the right source of the practical attitudes of support/rejection that non-factualist assign to evaluative adjectives.
Let us look at this more closely. As we saw in §2.2.2, in degree semantics gradable adjective are assigned measure functions as their lexical meaning. Recall our entry fortall:
(2.24) [[tall]]c=λx.µheight(x)
In order to build the predicate is tall, the measure function in (2.24) has to combine with the silent morphemeP OS:33
(2.61) [[P OS]]c=λg.λx.g(x) ≥dct
P OS predicates a property of whatever degree is assigned to the individual in its second argu-ment, namely ofbeing equal or greater to a specific degree on the relevant scale. This degree is called aTHRESHOLDorSTANDARD, and it is determined contextually (dctstands for the con-textually determined threshold degree). The predicateis tall results from applying the lexical meaning oftallas the argument ofP OS:
(2.62) [[is tall]]c= [[P OS]]c([[tall]]c) = λg.λx.g(x) ≥dct(λx.µheight(x)) = λx.µheight(x) ≥dct
When an argument is supplied to the resulting predicate, the result is a sentence with the fol-lowing truth conditions:
(2.63) [[Ann is tall]] =µheight(Ann) ≥dct
Those truth conditions state that Ann’s height surpasses the contextually determined standard of height.
33See n.10in this chapter.
A very similar story should apply to evaluative adjectives, such asgood: the positive form pred-icateis good would attribute to its argument the property of possessing a degree of goodness that surpasses a threshold (the difference with tall lies in the fact that good is also lexically subjective, so in this framework the very measure functionµgoodness should be context-sensitive in addition to the threshold contributed byP OS):
(2.64) [[The movie is good]]c=µcgoodness(the movie) ≥dct
As we have seen, according to non-factualists, an utterance of this sentence expresses a practical attitude of support of the movie. Our question, then, is: where does the practical attitude semantically derive from? In other words, what constituent of this sentence contributes the practical attitude of support? Given that, in degree semantics, the predicate is good results from the combination of two semantic pieces—and assuming that the practical attitude does not magically appear when you put the pieces together—we have two options: the first is to locate the source of the practical attitudes in the adjective’s lexical meaning, and the other one to locate it in the silent morphemeP OS.
Prima facie, each option has something going for it: the first option is attractive in virtue of the fact that only evaluative adjectives express practical attitudes. And the second option is attractive in light of POS-ATT, that is, in light of the observation that the expression of support/rejection correlates with the presence of the positive form. But neither is satisfactory, (partly) for the reason that makes the other option attractive. If the expression of a practical attitude is contributed to the sentence’s meaning by the adjective’s lexical meaning, then why does it go away in the comparative, for example? After all (according to standard degree semantics), measure functions figure in the comparative’s meaning just as they figure in the positive form. On the other hand, if the outright positive attitude expressed by an utterance of The movie is goodis contributed byP OS, then why does not an utterance ofThe movie is long express that positive attitude too, given thatP OS plays the same role in both sentences?
Let us try to refine each possibility: in favor of the lexical option, we could say the following:
just as an adjective like tallrefers to a scale of height, an adjective likegood refers to a scale of goodness. And the higher one goes on that scale, the more support receives any object that sits up there. This does not mean that ascribing any degree of goodness to an object is tantamount to expressing an outright positive attitude towards it—it depends on how good the object is! The higher you go on the scale of goodness, the stronger the expression of support.
Expressing support is not a matter of surpassing a certain threshold degree on a scale, that in turn licenses the positive form—it is a matter of having a sufficiently high degree of goodness that the positive form is licensed. The reason why the positive form expresses outright practical support is because the positive form signals that the object is high up in the goodness scale; the reason why the comparative does not express outright support is because the comparative tells us how two objects are related to each other on the goodness scale, but not where they sit on that scale.
This line of argument can capture, I think, part of the contrast between the positive and the comparative form: the comparative relates two things but does not tell us where they stand on the goodness scale; while the positive form tells us that an objects sits relatively high up on that scale. Nonetheless, this story it still leaves the correlation POS-ATT somewhat mysterious.
To see this, suppose that the scale of goodness goes from 0 (total practical indifference) to 1 (absolute unconditional support). And suppose that the positive form is predicated of any object that gets more than 0.7. The idea would be that the positive form signals that an object sits on
the 0.7-1 portion of that scale, and this is why an outright attitude of support gets expressed.
But why do only objects that sit on the 0.7-1 portion of the scale get actual practical support?
In other words, why does the location of the threshold also mark a qualitative “jump” in the practical attitude that gets expressed, from neutral to endorsing? At best, it remains to be explained why the location of the threshold degree somehow determines the location of the support-expressing degrees. In absence of some further story relatingP OS to the expression of outright support, this story is not satisfactory.
On the other hand, a defender of the “P OS approach” could argue that the reason why the predicateis good comes with the expression of practical support whileis tall does not really is due to P OS... because there are different P OS-morphemes for different adjectives. For evaluative adjectives, the P OS-morpheme marks, not just the degree on the goodness scale from which you can start using the positive form good, but also the degree from which you start expressing outright support. By contrast, theP OS morpheme for a dimensional adjective liketallonly does the first of those two jobs, namely telling you where on the height scale to start calling individualstall. TheP OS-morpheme for evaluatives is special.
To this argument there can be three lines of rebuttal: the first is that one of the virtues of positing P OS is precisely that it is meant to be the same semantic component regardless of the adjec-tive with which it is combined. Hence, it is expected that it always produces the same semantic effect. So it remains a mystery why a certainP OS morpheme is capable of carrying the ex-pression of practical support or endorsement, and anotherP OS morpheme is not. The second line of rebuttal is simply that this proposal is ad hoc. Positing another P OS-morpheme that does what we need it to do but is otherwise unmotivated is not explanatory. Finally, positing a specificP OS-morpheme for evaluatives seems more like “lexical camp” solution—the special function that this newP OS-morpheme serves (contributing the expression of outright support) can only be due to its combination with evaluative adjectives, as there is no other lexical item with which it combines to produce such an effect.
In sum: non-factualism clashes with degree semantics. Evaluative adjectives in their positive form have a property, namely the capacity to express practical support/rejection, which, as we have argued, cannot be traced back to any of the ingredients that, according to degree semantics, conspire in their semantic composition—it cannot be attributed to the measure function, nor to the silent morpheme P OS. The culprit, as I see it, is the fact that in degree semantics the positive form of a gradable adjective is decomposed into two semantic constituents.
Fortunately for non-factualism, degree semantics is not the only available view about grad-able adjectives: inDELINEATION SEMANTICS(C. Barker2002; Benthem1982; Burnett2017;
Klein1980, a.m.o.), the positive form of a gradable adjective is a simple predicate, and com-paratives and other constructions are semantically derived from it. By adopting this approach, our problem disappears, for the simple reason that the positive form of an evaluative adjec-tive is not factored out into further semantic components. Hence, we are free to assign the expression of practical support/rejection as the very meaning of the positive form of evaluative adjectives (which are simple predicates). The question, then, becomes how to build a scalar system starting from such simple predicates. This will be our task in the coming chapters.