In “Value Ascriptions: Rethinking Cognitivism,” Sigrún Svavarsdóttir offers a novel account of the semantic function of evaluative predication, according to which such predicates function as “linguistically encoded classificatory devices.” This short paper raises three questions about Svavarsdóttir’s account: how it relates to familiar sorts of projects in and about semantics, how to understand the nature of “linguistic encoding,” and how to understand the significance of the account’s central use of sets.

While Continental philosophers have had much to say about the nature of politics and about modern political institutions, they do not consider their task to provide the basis for evaluating policies or justifying institutions. Even if analytic philosophers no longer think of themselves as giving conceptual analyses of key political terms, they generally do what Continental philosophers do not: by elaborating systematic principles, their goal is precisely to provide the basis for “evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of political arguments”. If (...) this is not what Continental philosophers do, what is their goal? Continental political theory has usually not been concerned with providing arguments which directly justify or criticize institutions or policies, so much as to expose and criticize the very presuppositions that characterize all peculiarly “modern” politics and social arrangements. The differences here are not so much in methodology, but in substantive, normative concerns. (shrink)

Chapter 7 starts by examining “predicates of personal taste” (PPTs). It is argued that PPTs are an instance of a more interesting category of _evaluational predicates_, including PPTs, aesthetic predicates, moral predicates, and epistemic predicates, among others. What distinguishes evaluational adjectives is that their context-sensitivity persists in comparative constructions. The Discourse Contextualist degree semantics and pragmatics from Chapter 6 is extended to capture this. The two loci of context-sensitivity associated with evaluational adjectives lead to distinct kinds (...) of vagueness phenomena. These phenomena raise challenges for the treatment of the sorites paradox from Chapter 6. It is shown how speakers’ substantive assumptions about “subjectivity/objectivity” lead to certain differences among evaluational adjectives in patterns of use. Considering the broader range of evaluational adjectives poses problems for existing characterizations of felicitous embedding under ‘find’, a common diagnostic for PPTs/“subjectivity.” The discussions in this book of the varieties of context-sensitive uses of language motivate a more adequate characterization. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such (...) terms. (shrink)

In my paper, I propose a certain classification of evaluative expressions. I hypothesize that the basic criterion to distinguish between evaluative and descriptive terms is the faultless disagreement test. Next, I discuss a few kinds of phenomena which seem to render this distinction dubious: context–sensitivity, vagueness and using descriptive terms to express evaluative judgments. Further, I investigate Ch. Kennedy’s proposal according to which gradable adjectives can express two kinds of subjectivity. I modify this account by postulating another (...) sub-class of subjective adjectives which are not subjective due to vagueness and which are not evaluative either as they do not necessarily encode any valence. I propose a linguistic test to identify these expressions. Finally, I check where my classification of adjectives places the predicate of personal taste “tasty”. I suggest that “tasty” is both evaluative and experiential and additionally, it carries a condition of its own use, that is the information that can be used to positively assess the taste of something. This, I argue, makes it similar to thin evaluative terms as it carries no descriptive component at all. (shrink)

Simple sentences containing predicates like "tasty" and "beautiful" typically suggest that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item being evaluated. I consider two explanations of this acquaintance inference: a presuppositional approach and a pragmatic-epistemic approach. The presuppositional approach has a number of virtues, but runs into trouble because the acquaintance inference has a very different projection pattern from that of standard presuppositions. The pragmatic-epistemic approach accounts for the main data discussed in the paper, but faces challenges of its (...) own. (shrink)

According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders “thin” or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Kölbel, Lasersohn and (...) MacFarlane to the “incompleteness worry”. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible. (shrink)

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure (...) functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions. (shrink)

Judgments of personal taste such as “Haggis is delicious” are puzzling. On the one hand they express the speaker’s personal taste. On the other hand it is normal to disagree about the truth of such judgments. Giving semantics for predicates of taste that can accommodate both intuitions has proven challenging. Let us call the phenomenon that the truth of judgments of taste depends on variable tastes 'perspective dependence'. The thesis discusses two most popular semantic accounts for predicates of (...) taste. Contextualists hold that the speaker’s perspective is an element of the content of predicates of taste. However, the view has trouble explaining what disagreements of taste are about, if speakers in fact make compatible judgments. Semantic relativism is a recent framework which is motivated by its alleged ability to explain both perspective dependence and disagreements. Relativists hold that whereas the content of a judgment of taste doesn’t refer to a perspective, it gets a truth value only when evaluated relative to a perspective. I argue that neither account is successful, and their fundamental mistake is to hold that people know that judgments of taste are perspective-dependent. I argue that majority of speakers take judgments of taste to be true or false irrespective of their personal preferences. If such “folk objectivism” is true, perspective-independent semantics for predicates of taste becomes a plausible view. However, a metaphysical presupposition that all the theorists agree on is that taste properties are perspective-dependent. Therefore a perspective-independent semantics will be committed to an error theory. I question the metasemantics behind the error theory and conclude that we should adopt a more externalist metasemantics. That allows us to explain how predicates of taste can be perspective-dependent despite of folk objectivism. The resulting perspectivalist view can thus account both for perspective dependence and for why people disagree about taste. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recently, the hypothesis that purely evaluative disputes are metalinguistic negotiations has gained traction. I resist a strong version of that hypothesis, and argue that some of those disputes are not metalinguistic negotiations. To defend that claim, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations have three linguistic properties that some purely evaluative disputes lack. First, in a metalinguistic negotiation it is felicitous to embed the dispute-initial statement under the subjective attitude verb consider; second, a speaker can reply to that initial (...) statement by using a metalinguistic comparative; and, third, such negotiations address metalinguistic questions under discussion. Some purely evaluative disputes lack these properties, which suggests that they are not metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

In the last decade there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on predicates of personal taste, subjective expressions like fun and tasty that are used to express opinions rather than matters of fact. In each section of this paper I discuss a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in the literature on PPTs. In Section 1, I identify a neglected experiential reading of these adjectives. All other theories of expressions like fun take (...) them to express some standing property, but distributional and compositional considerations suggest that the basic meaning of fun adjectives is experiential. In Section 2, I discuss the relation between fun claims relativized to particular experiencers and their unrelativized counterparts, arguing that previous theories fail to capture the evaluativity unique to the latter. Finally, I argue... (shrink)

ABSTRACTEvaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This paper criticizes this view and argues for (...) an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states. (shrink)

This takes a closer look at the actual semantic behavior of apparent truth predicates in English and re-evaluates the way they could motivate particular philosophical views regarding the formal status of 'truth predicates' and their semantics. The paper distinguishes two types of 'truth predicates' and proposes semantic analyses that better reflect the linguistic facts. These analyses match particular independently motivated philosophical views.

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 : 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings (...) under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, predicates of personal taste (PPT) have been at the centre of a set of lively debates in the philosophy of language and linguistics. These debates have yielded many subtle and inventive analyses of PPT. There is, however, a crucial methodological question about PPT that remains underexplored: what sorts of evidence should be used in evaluating an account of PPT? In line with a fairly large body of recent work, we point out that since hypotheses (...) about PPT are empirical, they need to be evaluated empirically, using clearly articulated tests. The test on which we focus involves ordinary speakers’ judgments about retraction. We identify what we take to be two significant problems with the leading account, due to John MacFarlane, of why retraction data matter in the PPT debates. We then develop an improved framework for thinking about this issue. To close, we use our improved framework to re-evaluate the findings on retraction reported by Markus Kneer, and we discuss a few loose ends that will need to be addressed by future experimental research on PPT. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to achieve a better understanding of the relation between context sensitivity and faultless disagreement. After some preliminaries, the case of predicates of personal taste will be discussed and the problem of lost disagreement will be addressed. It will be asked whether there is (non-factual) disagreement that might nonetheless be worth having; two types of normative disagreement will emerge. The remainder of the paper is devoted to evaluative predicates in general and (...) class='Hi'>predicates of moral and epistemic evaluation in particular. The upshot of the discussion will be that context sensitivity may give rise to disagreement that is faultless yet worth pursuing. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy of treating morality and aesthetics alike when it comes to their metaphysics and philosophy of language. The anti-realist tradition has found both kinds of values problematic, leading to non-cognitivist and error theoretic accounts. This paper investigates whether judgments of taste are evaluative, and if so, what kind of values they attribute. Based on Sibley’s (2001) distinctions between different kinds of evaluative expressions I argue that judgments of taste are inherently evaluative. (...) Nevertheless, the values they attribute are not metaphysically problematic as they are response-dependent, thus reducing to perfectly natural properties and relations. (shrink)

A recent quarrel over faultless disagreements assumes that disputes over evaluative sentences should be understood as regular, factual disagreements. Instead, I propose that evaluative disagreements should be understood in Lewisian terms. Language use works like a rule-governed game. In it, the assertion of an evaluative sentence is an attempt to establish one value as default in the conversation; its rejection, in turn, is in most cases the refusal to accept this move.

According to the simple proposal, a predicate is rigid iff it signifies the same property across the different possible worlds. The simple proposal has been claimed to suffer from an over-generalization problem. Assume that one can make sense of predicates signifying properties, and assume that trivialization concerns, to the effect that the notion would cover any predicate whatsoever, can be overcome. Still, the proposal would over-generalize, the worry has it, by covering predicates for artifactual, social, or evaluative (...) properties, such as 'is a knife,' 'is a bachelor,' or 'is funny.' In defense, it is argued that rigidity for predicates as characterized plays the appropriate theoretical role, and that the contention that "unnatural" properties are not to be rigidly signified is ungrounded. (shrink)

Predicates are "hyper-evaluative" when they depend on more than just the semantic values (be they intensional or more fine-grained) of their individual arguments, but also on the way those arguments are "coordinated" or "wired." I examine motivations and semantic implementations for such predicates, drawing from linguistics and computer science.

What account of evaluative expressions, such as ‘is beautiful’, ‘is generous’ or ‘is good’, should a Fregean adopt? Given Frege’s claim that predicates can have both a sense and a reference in addition to their extension, an interesting range of only partially explored theoretical possibilities opens to Frege and his followers. My intention here is to briefly present these putative possibilities and explore one of them, namely David Wiggins’ claim that evaluative predicates refer to non-natural concepts (...) and have a sense which is sentiment-involving. In order to defend this claim against objections which aim at showing that evaluative concepts do not really exist, I shall suggest that our awareness of evaluative concepts involves affective (or emotive) states. (shrink)

This article is concerned with an analysis of semantics and the normativity of evaluative judgments, in which “aesthetic concepts” and “predicates of personal taste” are used in the context of the evaluation of selected cultural forms. Qualitative data obtained through semi-structured interviews with representatives in four categories of actors in the cultural field are analyzed. In the light of the findings, theories of aesthetic judgment are critically assessed, which on the one hand, postulate the categorical semantic and normative (...) difference between aesthetic concepts and predicates of personal taste and, on the other hand, conceive aesthetic disputes from an epistemological point of view and do not sufficiently take into account their pragmatic context. In conclusion, a functional analysis of the semantics and normativity of evaluative judgments is presented, in which the speakers use terms from the field of aesthetics. (shrink)

The article deals with the interpretation of propositional attitudes in the framework of modal predicate logic. The first part discusses the classical puzzles arising from the interplay between propositional attitudes, quantifiers and the notion of identity. After comparing different reactions to these puzzles it argues in favor of an analysis in which evaluations of de re attitudes may vary relative to the ways of identifying objects used in the context of use. The second part of the article gives this analysis (...) a precise formalization from a model-and proof-theoretic perspective. (shrink)

Mildly positive adjectives (henceforth, MPAs)—e.g., _decent, acceptable, adequate_—are typically used to express a moderately favorable evaluation of an object. In this manuscript, I present an investigation of the semantics and pragmatics of this class of expressions. I outline a proposal of MPAs as predicates whose positive form relies on particular type of functional standard which I refer to as a _necessity standard_: a threshold corresponding to the minimum value that an object must have in order to be pursued in (...) compliance with the norms and requirements in place in the current world. The article provides two core contributions. On an empirical level, it enriches our understanding of the typology of gradable predicates, highlighting MPAs’ profile as strikingly overlapping with that of both relative and absolute predicates, two classes of gradable adjectives that are normally thought of as disjoint. Second, it affords a novel perspective on how gradability and modality, in conjunction with categories of human action such as value and practical commitments, are reflected in the grammatical behavior of these predicates and ultimately work together to enable us to express assessments in communication. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to evaluate the prospects for an aesthetically informed assessment-sensitive semantic account of thick aesthetic predicates (TAPs) such as 'intense', 'sombre', ‘balanced’, ‘harmonious’, etc. We distinguish two meaning dimensions concerning TAPs, truth-conditional and use-conditional or expressive, and provide a dualist semantics that posits assessment sensitivity at both levels. Then we evaluate the extent to which assessment sensitivity is an apt rendition of aesthetic discourse involving TAPs. We distinguish between experiential TAPs (‘intense’, ‘sombre’) and theoretical (...) TAPs (‘balanced’, ‘dynamic’), and argue that there is evidence for a relativistic construal both at the truth-conditional and the expressive level for experiential TAPs, but not for theoretical TAPs. Thus, an upper bound is found on how much assessment sensitivity characterises aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

Declarative sentences perform two distinct kinds of work: they contribute descriptive content about states of affairs, and they fix how that content is to be evaluated. While most verbs contribute primarily to descriptive content, a small class contributes primarily to evaluation itself. This paper argues that English lexicalizes exactly four ultra-general orientational operators—be, have, mean, and cause—which exhaust a minimal grammatical space generated by two independent parameters: (1) whether evaluation targets world-structure or contrast-structure, and (2) whether predication is invariant or (...) instance-selecting. This framework explains persistent philosophical puzzles about causation, meaning, and identity by showing how orientational structure has been systematically mistaken for ontological content. (shrink)

This paper in its contribution argues that there is the need to understand the metaphysical and epistemological issues that undergird human behaviour and ipso facto human nature in formulating development theories. This will enhance appropriate evaluation and application of these theories for the betterment of any society. It establishes the relevance of human nature to social theories. Accordingly, social theories spur the explanation, nature, function, institutions, and prediction of social patterns of development. Since society is primarily an amalgam of people (...) in social intercourse, human nature impinges on human behaveiour. Thus, just as the nature of molecular behaviour enhances the understanding of the behaviour of gases, proper understanding of social theories and those things that spur them enhance the understanding of human societies. Thus the understanding of the coherence and workability of any social theory is therefore predicated on the perspective gained on human nature. The critical, analytical and evaluative methods of philosophy will be dominant in the work. (shrink)

The article provides a linguophilosophical analysis of theoretical approaches to the symbolism of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely using the predicative concept of Lyudmila Gogotishvili. It is shown that the consideration of the category of symbol in the dimensions of the unmanifest and the manifest makes it possible to expand the problematics of symbolism into phenomenological and linguophilosophical perspectives. In this case, symbolization turns out to be associated with reference, determined by the specifics of the “participation” in it of the (...) linguistic subject and predicate and the status of the referent as a phenomenon of consciousness. The antinomy of the unmanifest and the manifest presupposes in symbolic reference the allocation of a special extra-linguistic category of the most real, which is fundamentally outside the field of natural language and is energetically associated with it through verbal myth. It is shown that the ratio of myth, name and the most real in the reference allows using Gogotishvili’s predicative concept to evaluate the linguophilosophical features of this or that approach to the symbol. It is concluded that the symbolism of Vyacheslav Ivanov presupposes the prevailing role of the predicate in the reference to the unmanifest most real and can be designated as mythological, while the symbolism of Andrei Bely presupposes the prevailing role of the subject in the reference to the real, manifested in language, and can be designated as metaphorical. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on the pragmatic presuppositions involved in the use of general terms in inductive practices. The main thesis is that the problem of characterizing the assumptions underlying the projection of predicates in inductive practices and the ones underlying the classification of crtain general terms as «natural kind terms» coincide to a good extent. The reason for this, it is argued, is that both classifications, «projectibility» and «natural kind term», are attempts to answer to the (...) same semantico-epistemological phenomenon, viz. underdertermination. It is proposed a «deflationary» reading of the so-called «theory of direct reference» as to enable an evaluation of its contribution to epistemological problems associated with this kind of phenomena, as well as it is argued that a purely de facto account of projectibility is not viable. The resulting hypothesis is that the conception of «natural kind terms» is only interesting insofar as they are seen as a kind of projectible general terms and thus as parts of classifications used in natural science, more generally, in inductive practices, and that this is a perspective that makes undue metaphysical readings avoidable. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to illuminate some core aspects of Leibniz’s conception of judgement and its place in his conception of the mind. In particular, the paper argues for three claims: First, the act of judgement is at the centre of Leibniz’s conception of the mind in that minds strive at actualising innate knowledge concerning derivative truths, where the actualising involves an act of judgement. Second, Leibniz does not hold a judgement account of predication, but a two-component account (...) that distinguishes between predication and alethic evaluation. Third, Leibniz understands the act of affirmative judgement in terms of establishing active dispositions, i.e. strivings, to make reasons available for future reasoning that aims at answering whether-questions. Correspondingly, he understands the act of negative judgement in terms of establishing dispositions to ban propositions from future reasoning that aims at answering whether-questions. In the final analysis, the acts of affirmative as well as of negative judgement turn out to be acts of changing memory dispositions. (shrink)

Michael-John Turp | : There is little consensus concerning the truth or reference conditions for evaluative terms such as “good” and “bad.” In his paper “Good and Evil,” Geach proposed that we distinguish between attributive and predicative uses of “good.” Foot, Thomson, Kraut, and others have put this distinction to use when discussing basic questions of value theory. In §§1-2, I outline Geach’s proposal and argue that attributive evaluation depends on a prior grasp of the kind of thing that (...) is evaluated, which is another way of saying a prior grasp of a thing’s nature. In §§3-4, I discuss the evaluation of artifacts, which provide the clearest examples of attributive evaluation. This allows me to address a series of problems apparently facing the idea of attributive goodness. In §5, I consider the neo-Aristotelian idea that we can extend attributive accounts of goodness to human lives, and I pay attention to Foot’s account of natural goodness. This leads me to consider the goodness of human life as a whole in §6. At this point. I depart from Geach’s approach and argue that questions of attributive goodness finally give rise to questions of predicative or absolute goodness. | : Il y a peu de consensus sur la vérité ou les conditions de référence pour les termes évaluatifs tels que « bon » et « mauvais ». Dans son article « Good and Evil », Geach a proposé de distinguer les usages attributif et prédicatif du « bon ». Foot, Thomson, Kraut et d’autres considèrent qu’il faut utiliser cette distinction lorsqu’il s’agit des questions fondamentales de la théorie de la valeur. Dans les parties 1-2, je décris ici la proposition de Geach et je prétends que l’évaluation attributive dépend d’une compréhension préalable du genre de chose qui est évaluée, ce qui est une autre façon de dire une compréhension préalable de la nature d’une chose. Dans les parties 3-4, je discute de l’évaluation des artefacts, qui fournissent les exemples les plus clairs d’évaluation attributive. Cela me permet d’illustrer une série de problèmes apparemment liés à l’idée de la bonté attributive. Dans la partie 5, je considère l’idée néo-aristotélicienne voulant que nous puissions étendre notre compréhension de la bonté attributive aux vies humaines, et je me penche sur l’idée de bonté naturelle selon Foot. Cela me conduit à considérer la bonté de la vie humaine comme un tout, dans la partie 6. De là, je m’éloigne de l’approche de Geach pour affirmer que les questions de bonté attributive suscitent finalement des questions de bonté prédicative ou absolue. (shrink)

Ordinary language contains groups of related predicates with different arities. Interpreting utterances that appear to contain an n-place predicate by using an n+m-place predicate to dissolve merely apparent disagreements and other misunderstandings is an established practice in everyday discourse. This paper aims to present hermeneutical maxims to guide and evaluate these interpretations through arity raising. In interpreting utterances by using a higher-place predicate, we should use only expressions that their authors themselves reasonably could have used and which would have (...) been suitable to achieve their supposed purposes. The goal is to achieve a charitable, accurate reading that also maximizes the text's transparency to improve our understanding of it. (shrink)

The recent literature abounds with accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of so-called predicates of personal taste, i.e. predicates whose application is, in some sense or other, a subjective matter. Relativism and contextualism are the major types of theories. One crucial difference between these theories concerns how we should assess previous taste claims. Relativism predicts that we should assess them in the light of the taste standard governing the context of assessment. Contextualism predicts that we should assess them (...) in the light of the taste standard governing the context of use. We show in a range of experiments that neither prediction is correct. People have no clear preferences either way and which taste standard they choose in evaluating a previous taste claim crucially depends on whether they start out with a favorable attitude towards the object in question and then come to have an unfavorable attitude or vice versa. We suggest an account of the data in terms of what we call hybrid relativism. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic (...) adjectives. We show that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Faultless disagreement and faultless retraction have been taken to motivate relativism for predicates of personal taste, like ‘tasty’. Less attention has been devoted to the question of what aspect of their meaning underlies this relativist behavior. This paper illustrates these same phenomena with a new category of expressions: appearance predicates, like ‘tastes vegan’ and ‘looks blue’. Appearance predicates and predicates of personal taste both fall into the broader category of experiential predicates. Approaching predicates of (...) personal taste from this angle suggests that their relativist behavior is due to their experience-sensitivity, rather than their evaluative meaning. Furthermore, appearance predicates hold interest beyond what they can teach us about predicates of personal taste. Examination of a variety of uses of appearance predicates reveals that they give rise to relativist behavior for a variety of reasons—including some that apply also to other types of expressions, such as epistemic modals and comparative terms. This paper thus serves both to probe the source of relativist behavior in discourse about personal taste, as well as to map out this kind of behavior in the rich and under-explored discourse about appearances. (shrink)

It is often said that the ontological argument fails because it wrongly treats existence as a first-level property or predicate. This has proved a controversial claim, and efforts to evaluate it are complicated by the fact that the words ‘existence is not a property/predicate’ have been used by philosophers to make at least three different negative claims: (a) one about a first-level phenomenon possessed by objects like horses, stones, you and me; (b) another about the logical form of assertions of (...) existence; and (c) still another about a second-level phenomenon possessed by concepts when they are instantiated. I argue that only the last of these claims, originally voiced by Kant, is both plausible and relevant to the ontological argument. And I try to show that the relevance of the Kantian version comes from its providing the underlying justification for a different, and far less controversial, criticism of the ontological argument. (shrink)

Ordinary disposition ascriptions appear to form a semantically heterogeneous class of clauses some of which can be straightforwardly analyzed as possibility claims, and some of which resist a simple quantificational treatment. For example, while “The block is breakable” is true if the block breaks at a relevant possible world, for “The block is fragile” to be true it doesn’t suffice that the block breaks at one of the worlds that matter to the evaluation of the ascription, since the block could (...) break accidentally and yet be sturdy. The contrast has been taken to indicate that sentences like “The block is fragile” don’t introduce mere existential quantification over sets of worlds, and should be represented as claims about sufficient ratios or proportions of worlds. However, recent work has suggested that by pairing the recalcitrant DAs with modified manifestation phrases, we can generalize the standard analysis of existential DAs to the problematic examples, and state a uniform characterization of DAs as claims of possibility. The paper discusses some counterexamples to the view that allegedly non-existential DAs are covert claims of fine-grained possibility, and sketches a hybrid account combining proportional quantification with fine-grained manifestations. (shrink)

The study considers development and use of verb/predicate chaining constructions by Hebrew speakers from early childhood to adolescence, based on analysis of authentic conversational and narrative corpora. Three types of such constructions are considered, ordered hierarchically by stage of acquisition: (1) monoclausal extended predicates consisting of a verb (modal, aspectual, or evaluative) marked for tense or mood and followed by one or more complements in the infinitive – e.g., yaxol la-asot ‘can, is able to-do’; (2) coreferential interclausal predicate (...) chaining; and (3) mature discursively-motivated topic-chaining. Relevant typological features of Modern Hebrew are reviewed to explain the lack of canonic clause-chaining construction in the language (e.g. the paucity of non-finite constructions in everyday usage, lack of an uninflected basic form of verbs, lack of auxiliary verbs expressing categories of aspect and voice, and monolexemic verb-internal complexity). Monoclausal verb-chaining emerges early in the speech of toddlers in interaction with their caretakers, whereas predicate chaining by coordination across clauses occurs only later, and chunking of such constructions at the service of discourse connectivity is a late-developing device. Nonfinite subordination is an advanced form of clause-combining, in contrast to straightforward subordination with the multifunctional subordinator še’that’. The conclusion is that, unlike the obligatorily fused monoclausal “extended predicates”, bi- and multi-clausal predicate chaining represents an optional rhetorical choice on the part of a given speaker-writer in a particular communicative context. (shrink)

Abstract:Bipolar or related disorders (BoRD) present unique practical and existential problems for people who live with them. All agents experience changes in the things they care about over time. However people living with BoRD face drastic shifts in what seems valuable to them, which upset their longitudinal values (if, indeed, any stable longitudinal values are available in the first place). Navigating these evaluative high seas presents agents living with BoRD with a distinctive existential question, not shared by those on (...) calmer waters. I draw out two contrasting ways in which someone living with BoRD might seek to support their self-determination in these circumstances, by crafting appropriate self care and support regimes. The first strategy involves managing one’s affective episodes so that they do not interrupt one’s plans and long-term agency over time. The second involves a regimen that allows one the greatest degree of freedom in adapting to changes in one’s experiences of value. What distinguishes these sorts of self-determination is the scope at which they are predicated. Although both sorts of self-determination allow an individual to rule themselves, they alter the overall shape of one’s autonomy in quite different ways. (shrink)

This chapter shows how to expand the ideas of Chapter 5 for a language involving quantifiers, and offers a more rigorous treatment. Since the contents of states of being for are treated as properties, predicates are treated as semantically contributing functions from objects to properties. Lambda-abstractions are introduced to denote properties, and open lambda-abstractions to denote functions from objects to properties. After improved versions of the main developments in Chapter 5, it is observed that both the treatment of inconsistency (...) and the constructive feature of the semantics turn essentially on the assumption that all sentences in this simple language express the same kind of mental state. From this, it is argued that the only way to incorporate descriptive language is if belief is itself analyzed in terms of being for. (shrink)

Bipolar or related disorders (BoRD) present unique practical and existential problems for people who live with them. All agents experience changes in the things they care about over time. However people living with BoRD face drastic shifts in what seems valuable to them, which upset their longitudinal values (if, indeed, any stable longitudinal values are available in the first place). Navigating these evaluative high seas presents agents living with BoRD with a distinctive existential question, not shared by those on (...) calmer waters. I draw out two contrasting ways in which someone living with BoRD might seek to support their self-determination in these circumstances, by crafting appropriate self care and support regimes. The first strategy involves managing one’s affective episodes so that they do not interrupt one’s plans and long-term agency over time. The second involves a regimen that allows one the greatest degree of freedom in adapting to changes in one’s experiences of value. What distinguishes these sorts of self-determination is the scope at which they are predicated. Although both sorts of self-determination allow an individual to rule themselves, they alter the overall shape of one’s autonomy in quite different ways. (shrink)

This paper relocates the "truth judgments" from an external, model‑invoking procedure to an **Internal‑Only Evaluation Principle (IOEP)**, and defends the norm that an evaluator and the evaluated theory must adjudicate using **the Same‑Criteria Axiom (SCA)**. The backing comes from a suite of classical results in formal logic. We fix the background to a recursively axiomatized arithmetic theory $T \supseteq Q$ and use diagonalization, representability, and arithmetization of provability. The result unfolds in seven steps. -/- (1) **Gödel I (internal verdict):** If (...) $T$ is consistent then $T \nvdash G_T$, and if moreover $T$ is $\omega$‑consistent then $T \nvdash \neg G_T$; for Rosser’s improvement $R_T$, plain consistency suffices to obtain both non‑derivabilities (Theorem 1). -/- (2) **Meta truth:** Over PRA‑strength meta‑theory, $Con(T) \Rightarrow \mathbb N \models G_T$; i.e., “$G_T$ is true” is a meta‑level claim dependent on the **standard model** (Theorem 2). -/- (3) **Tarski undefinability:** No total truth predicate exists inside $T$; hence internal adjudication and the “truth” label live at different levels (Theorem 3). -/- (4) **Non‑conservativity of Uniform RFN:** Since $RFN(T) \Rightarrow Con(T)$, importing external soundness into the inside of $T$ is **non‑conservative** (Theorem 4). -/- (5) **Conservativity (definition):** $T \subseteq T'$ is conservative iff for every $L(T)$‑sentence $\psi$ we have $T'\vdash\psi \Leftrightarrow T\vdash\psi$ (Theorem 5). -/- (6) **Canonical non‑conservativity:** $T+RFN(T)\vdash Con(T)$ while $T\nvdash Con(T)$; hence SCA is violated (Theorem 6). -/- (7) **Scope of IOEP/SCA:** The prohibition is not against **all** extensions but against **non‑conservative** ones; conservative (definitional / truth‑eliminating) extensions are admissible (Corollary 7). -/- Thus the body of the paper derives: *inside the theory the only legitimate evaluation is **independence (undecidability)**, whereas “truth” is admissible only as a **meta label***; IOEP/SCA falls out as a corollary of Theorems 3, 4, and 7. Practically, this yields a minimal condition of symmetry of adjudicative authority. In particular, we can formalize this as the **Same‑Tier Principle (STP)**: -/- $$ STP(E,T)\iff \forall \varphi\in L(T):\ (T+E\vdash\varphi \Rightarrow T\vdash\varphi) $$ (Assumptions: $T$ r.e.; meta at EFA/PRA strength; language is $L(T)$.) -/- Translation of: "참은 메타다: 괴델·타르스키·리플렉션으로 본 내부‑전용 평가(IOEP)". PhilArchive ID: CIORUH. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue that assessment relativism entails the assessment-sensitivity of the sentential truth-predicate, but not of the propositional truth-predicate. The central idea of assessment relativism is that a single token claim evaluated within a single world can have different truth-values when considered in different contexts of assessment. John MacFarlane in Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications and also Max Kölbel in the article ‘Global relativism and self-refutation’ have argued that this position leads to relativism (...) about the propositional truth-predicate. I argue that this is not the case—it entails relativism only about the sentential truth-predicate. (shrink)

The concept of structure differs in two main ways from Lewis’s notion of a natural property. First, it is ideological rather than ontic: structure is not a feature of entities. Second, it is more general: expressions of any grammatical category, and not just predicates, may be evaluated for structure. This is important because some metametaphysical questions turn on whether certain logical expressions other than predicates ‐ namely, quantifiers, and modal and tense operators ‐ carve at the joints. One (...) might worry that we cannot make sense of similarity for nonpredicates; but structure is not primarily a matter of similarity. One might worry that it makes no sense to ask about structure for logical expressions; but this worry evaporates once we purge our minds of the remnants of logical conventionalism. (shrink)

Kant famously declared that existence is not a (real) predicate. This famous dictum has been seen as echoed in the doctrine of the founders of modern logic, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, that existence isn’t a first-order property possessed by individuals, but rather a second-order property expressed by the existential quantifier. Russell in 1905 combined this doctrine with his new theory of descriptions and declared the paradox of nonexistence to be resolved without resorting to his earlier distinction between existence and (...) being. In recent years, however, logicians and philosophers like Saul Kripke, David Kaplan, and Nathan Salmon have argued that there is no defensible reason to deny that existence is a property of individuals. Kant’s dictum has also been re-evaluated, the result being that the paradox of nonexistence has not, after all, disappeared. Yet it’s not clear how exactly Kripke et al. propose to resolve the paradox. (shrink)

The thesis concerns itself with the selection constraints governing the basic distributional patterns of five complement constructions in English--the bare clause, the that-clause, the interrogative, the concealed question construction and the exclamative complement--across a wide array of knowledge, belief and communication predicates. The relevant distributional phenomena--which predicates are capable of embedding which complement types--have traditionally been captured by stipulative grammatical markings such as subcategorization frames, semantic selection frames and case-theoretic lexical markings. These theoretical tools, even to the extent (...) that they successfully reduplicate the observed phenomena, are of no explanatory value, as they do not derive the different behavioral patterns from some independently established properties of the embedding predicates or their complements. In the thesis, I present an epistemically-based theory, which attempts to derive the relevant distributional phenomena, including those traditionally assumed to reflect hard-core syntactic idiosyncrasies, from a linguistic-epistemic theory of knowledge, belief and communication. ;The theory is based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the embedding predicates, according to which they denote ternary relations between agents, objects of attitude and objects of representation. Thus, to give an example, the predicate think denotes a ternary relation between a thinker, a thought mentally represented by the thinker, and a proposition expressed by the thought and believed by the thinker to be true. This analysis, developed on linguistic grounds for linguistic purposes, echoes some of the recent insights in the philosophy of mind, especially Crimmins. Coupled with a theory of the meanings of the different complement types--partially based on the formal semantic insights of Karttunen, Groenedijk and Stokhof and Ginzburg --this account derives the distributional patterns from simple considerations of semantic compatibility: those predicates which are capable of embedding a certain complement type are exactly those whose lexical semantics is compatible with the semantics of the complement. ;Some of the distributional patterns discussed in the thesis, especially the one involving concealed questions, have traditionally been taken to provide empirical support for the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntactic representations. The analysis presented in this thesis reveals the dramatic extent to which the semantics and the syntax of lexical selection are transparent to each other, and thus implies, at least with respect to the core domain of lexical selection, that the autonomy hypothesis is empirically unjustified. (shrink)

This paper published in the 1999 volume of the “Logical Analysis” series serves doubles purpose. For the first, it offers a taxonomy of Russian statives (predicates of state) based on language-specific criteria, such as the (in)ability of Russian copular predicates to take animate dative subjects. For the second, it outlines the general idea that true stative predicates with an animate subject project a complex event structure with two animate participants — the Experiencer alias the Subject of State (...) (X), and the Subject of Evaluation (Y), whose role is to fix that the X is affected by the Stimulus (Z) during a time interval. The Stimulus (Z) is conceived as the Outer World or the Locus of State. X and Y can be different persons, if Y evaluates the stative spatiotemporal situation SZ from outside and concludes that some X  Y is cold, angry or disappointed during a time interval. X and Y can also be coindexed (Xi = Yi), in which case the person who experiences an affection or sensation is the primary source of information about her internal state. (shrink)

This chapter has two main aims. First, it reconstructs the ontological arguments of Descartes, Leibniz, and Baumgarten to show that they do, in fact, implicitly presuppose that existence is a real predicate. Kant is correct about the presuppositions of ontological arguments. It then reconstructs and critically evaluates Kant’s arguments in _Only Possible Ground_ that existence is not a real predicate. It argues that these arguments have little force against a sophisticated defender of the ontological argument, like Leibniz. While Kant’s rejection (...) of the view that existence is a real predicate will have decisive consequences for the development of his modal theory, this rejection is not backed up by a strong argument. (shrink)

This study investigates the meanings of the Japanese low-degree modifiers _kasukani_ ‘faintly’ and _honokani_ ‘approx. faintly’ and the English low-degree modifier _faintly_. I argue that, unlike typical low-degree modifiers such as _sukoshi_ ‘a bit’ in Japanese and _a bit_ in English, they are sense-based in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that the judge (typically the speaker) measures the degree of predicates based on their own sense (the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) (...) at the level of conventional implicature (CI) (e.g., Grice (in: Cole, Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics iii: speech acts, Academic Press, New York, 1975), Potts (The logic of conventional implicatures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), McCready (Semant Pragmat 3:1–57, 2010. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.3.8, Sawada (Pragmatic aspects of scalar modifiers. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010), Gutzmann (Empir Issues Syntax Semant 8:123–141, 2011)). I will also show that there are variations among the sense-based low-degree modifiers with regard to (i) the kind of sense, (ii) the presence/absence of positive evaluativity, and (iii) the possibility of direct measurement of emotion and will explain the variations in relation to the CI component. A unique feature of sense-based low-degree modifiers is that they can indirectly measure the degree of non-sense-based predicates (e.g., emotion) through sense (e.g., perception). I show that the proposed analysis can also explain the indirect measurement in a unified way. This paper shows that like predicates of personal taste such as _tasty_ (e.g., Pearson (J Semant 30(1):103–154, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffs001 ), Ninan (Proc Semant Linguist Theory, 24:290–304, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2413 ), Willer & Kennedy (Inquiry, 1–37, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1850338 )), sense-based low-degree modifiers trigger acquaintance inference. The difference between them is that, unlike predicates of personal taste, sense-based low-degree modifiers co-occur with gradable predicates and their experiential components signal the manner/way in which the degree of the predicate in question is measured. (shrink)

This thesis contains a critical discussion of two metaethical theories: expressivism, as developed in the works of Simon Blackburn, and Cornell realism, as presented by Richard Boyd and David Brink. In the introduction, a distinction is made between external and internal accommodation projects for moral discourse and it is argued that the external accommodation project should be guided by acceptance of methodological naturalism. Expressivism and Cornell realism are then subjected to an extended comparative evaluation, and an answer is sought to (...) the question of which of the two should be favoured. The main conclusion of the thesis is that Cornell realism is rationally preferable to expressivism. This conclusion is arrived at by looking at how well the two theories, respectively, explain various deeply embedded features of moral discourse. Explaining such features is what the internal accommodation project for moral discourse consists in. The assertoric surface-form of moral discourse and the supervenience of moral predicates on natural predicates receive special attention in the study. It is argued that expressivism and Cornell realism do equally well on the issue of moral supervenience. But whereas expressivism is still vulnerable to a particular argument from the philosophy of language, Cornell realism can fend off the criticism that most persistently has been directed at it from this area of philosophy. In a comparative evaluation involving the selected issues, Cornell realism therefore fares better than expressivism. (shrink)