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Aesthetic Adjectives

In James O. Young (ed.), The Semantics of Aesthetic Judgements. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK (2017)

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  1. Aesthetic Adjectives: Experimental Semantics and Context-Sensitivity.Shen-yi Liao & Aaron Meskin - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):371–398.
    One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of (...)
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  • The Many Uses of Predicates of Taste and the Challenge from Disagreement.Dan Zeman - 2016 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 46 (1):79-101.
    In the debate between contextualism and relativism about predicates of taste, the challenge from disagreement (the objection that contextualism cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving such predicates) has played a central role. This paper investigates one way of answering the challenge consisting on appeal to certain, less focused on, uses of predicates of taste. It argues that the said thread is unsatisfactory, in that it downplays certain exchanges that constitute the core disagreement data. Additionally, several arguments to the (...)
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  • The tasty, the bold, and the beautiful.Tim Sundell - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6):793-818.
    I call into question a pair of closely related assumptions that are almost universally shared in the literature on predicates of taste. The assumptions are, first, that predicates of taste – words like ‘tasty’ – are semantically evaluative. In other words, that it is part of the meaning of a word like ‘tasty’ to describe an object as in some sense good, or to say that it is pleasing. And second, that the meaning of predicates of taste is in some (...)
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  • Expressing aesthetic judgments in context.Isidora Stojanovic - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6):663-685.
    Aesthetic judgments are often expressed by means of predicates that, unlike ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’, are not primarily aesthetic, or even evaluative, such as ‘intense’ and ‘harrowing’. This paper aims to explain how such adjectives can convey a value-judgment, and one, moreover, whose positive or negative valence depends on the context.
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  • Disagreements about Taste vs. Disagreements about Moral Issues.Isidora Stojanovic - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1):29-42.
    The aim of this paper is to argue against a growing tendency to assimilate moral disagreements to disagreements about matters of personal taste. The argumentative strategy adopted in the paper appeals to a battery of linguistic criteria that reveal interesting and important differences between predicates of personal taste and moral predicates. The paper further argues that these semantically tractable differences have an impact on the nature of the corresponding disagreements.
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  • Evaluational adjectives.Alex Silk - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1):1-35.
    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 (...)
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  • The Multidimensional Structure of ‘better than’.Erich H. Rast - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (2):291-319.
    According to the mixed lexicographic/additive account of ‘better than’ and similar aggregative value comparatives like ‘healthier than’, values are multidimensional and different aspects of a value are aggregated into an overall assessment in a lexicographic way, based on an ordering of value aspects. It is argued that this theory can account for an acceptable definition of Chang’s notion of parity and that it also offers a solution to Temkin’s and Rachels’s Spectrum Cases without giving up the transitivity of overall betterness. (...)
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  • Metalinguistic Value Disagreement.Erich Rast - 2017 - Studia Semiotyczne 31 (2):139-159.
    In a series of publications Burgess, Plunkett and Sundell have developed a metalinguistic negotiation view that they call ‘Conceptual Ethics.’ I argue that their position adequately captures our intuition that some cases of value disputes are metalinguistic, but that they reverse the direction of justification when they state that speakers ‘negotiate’ the best use of a term or concept on the basis of its prior social role. Borrowing ideas from Putnam, I instead suggest distinguishing two meanings of general terms and (...)
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  • Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior.Shen-yi Liao, Louise McNally & Aaron Meskin - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6):618-631.
    The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent.
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  • The Speaker Authority Problem for Context-Sensitivity.Karen S. Lewis - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1527-1555.
    Context-sensitivity raises a metasemantic question: what determines the value of a context-sensitive expression in context? Taking gradable adjectives as a case study, this paper argues against various forms of intentionalist metasemantics, i.e. that speaker intentions determine values for context-sensitive expressions in context, including the coordination account recently defended by King :219–237, 2014a; in: Burgess, Sherman Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 97–118, 2014b). The paper argues that all intentionalist accounts face the speaker authority (...)
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  • Disunity of personal taste.John Collins - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    The article argues that, linguistically speaking, there is no uniform class of personal taste predicate. There is an F(un)‐type PPT that takes infinitive complements expressing events. In effect, these PPTs are predicates of events involving participants. There is also a T(asty)‐type that cannot take an infinitive complement and does not enter into the alternation pattern of the F‐type predicates. These predicates express dispositions of objects to generate experiences or responses. Some experiencer/judge is involved in the truth of the respective kinds (...)
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  • Interpreting plural predication: homogeneity and non-maximality.Manuel Križ & Benjamin Spector - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (5):1131-1178.
    Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’. Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences, they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation. Building on previous works, we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for (...)
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  • The Presumption of Realism.Nils Franzén - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5).
    Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is (...)
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  • Familiarity inferences, subjective attitudes and counterstance contingency: towards a pragmatic theory of subjective meaning.Christopher Kennedy & Malte Willer - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (6):1395-1445.
    Subjective predicates have two interpretive and distributional characteristics that have resisted a comprehensive analysis. First, the use of a subjective predicate to describe an object is in general felicitous only when the speaker has a particular kind of familiarity with relevant features of the object; characterizing an object as _tasty,_ for example, implies that the speaker has experience of its taste. Second, subjective predicates differ from objective predicates in their distribution under certain types of propositional attitude verbs. The goal of (...)
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  • Assertion, expression, experience.Christopher Kennedy & Malte Willer - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):821-857.
    ABSTRACT It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of plain sentences containing predicates like fun and frightening give rise to an acquaintance inference: they imply that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item under consideration. The goal of this paper is to develop and defend a broadly expressivist explanation of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds of attitudes that differ from beliefs in that they can (...)
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  • Image schemas in the Great Gatsby: A cognitive linguistic analysis of the protagonist’s psychological movement.Hicham Lahlou, Jun Zhou & Yasir Azam - 2023 - Cogent Arts and Humanities 10 (2):1-19.
    Most research on image schema examined the meaning configuration of words connotation. However, previous studies of adjectives are meaningful in cognitive linguistics because they provide insight into how those adjectives are involved with psychological movement. In this sense, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, one’s conceptualization and cognition are closely associated with their bodily experience and surroundings; adjectives are no exception. The varieties of transformations of image schemas lay the foundation for the conception and perception. Accordingly, this study is an (...)
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  • Wyrażenia ocenne – próba klasyfikacji.Natalia Karczewska - 2016 - Studia Semiotyczne 30 (2):129-153.
    W niniejszym artykule proponuję pewną klasyfikację wyrażeń ocennych. Uznaję, że podstawowym kryterium odróżnienia ich od wyrażeń deskryptywnych jest test bezbłędnej niezgody. Następnie omawiam kilka zjawisk, które mogłyby podawać w wątpliwość linię tego podziału: zależność kontekstową, nieostrość i używanie wyrażeń deskryptywnych do wyrażania sądów ocennych. Przytaczam propozycję Christophera Kennedy’ego, zgodnie z którą przymiotniki stopniowalne mogą wyrażać dwa rodzaje subiektywności. Modyfikuję to stanowisko przez postulat wyróżnienia dodatkowego podrodzaju wyrażeń subiektywnych, które nie są ocenne i proponuję test językowy, który pozwala je identyfikować. W (...)
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  • Disagreement about Taste as Disagreement about the Discourse: Problems and Limitations.Natalia Karczewska - 2016 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 46 (1):103-117.
    In the present paper I present the metalinguistic solutions to the ‘lost disagreement’ problem proposed Sundell and Plunkett [2013] and Barker [2012]. I argue that metalinguistic negotiations about taste, even though successful in explaining the intuition of disagreement in a vast number of cases, are not an accurate solution to the disagreement problem in contextualism when it comes to the most paradigmatic case of “tasty”. I also argue against the account of faultless disagreement explained via vagueness of taste predicates [Barker, (...)
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  • Color Comparisons and Interpersonal Variation.Nat Hansen - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4):809-826.
    An important challenge to color objectivists, who hold that statements concerning color are made true or false by objective facts, is the argument from interpersonal variation in where normal observers locate the unique hues. Recently, an attractive objectivist response to the argument has been proposed that draws on the semantics of gradable adjectives and which does not require defending the idea that there is a single correct location for each of the unique hues Noûs 50: 3–40),. In ), I argued (...)
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  • Experiential Content.Nate Charlow - manuscript
    This paper develops and motivates an Expressivist theory of "experiential" talk and thought, focusing on speech acts and thoughts that contain taste predicates. According to this theory, one way for S to think that o tastes a way w is simply for o to taste w to S. When o tastes w to S (and, therefore, S thinks that o tastes w), S can express this thought, by saying that o tastes w. The speech act wherein S expresses the thought (...)
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  • Moral adjectives, judge-dependency and holistic multidimensionality.Federico L. G. Faroldi & Andrés Soria Ruiz - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):887-916.
    ABSTRACT In recent experimental work, the spectrum-like nature of the phenomenon of ordering subjectivity has been accounted for by recourse to the distinction, within the class of subjective adjectives, between multi-dimensional and judge-dependent ones. One way to cash out judge-dependency is in terms of some kind of experiencer-sensitivity. In this paper, we argue that this approach is insufficient. Applying Solt’s experimental paradigm to moral adjectives suggests that, within the class of judge-dependent adjectives, one must draw a further distinction between experiential (...)
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  • Differences of Taste: An Investigation of Phenomenal and Non-Phenomenal Appearance Sentences.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2022 - In Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 260-285.
    In theoretical work about the language of personal taste, the canonical example is the simple predicate of personal taste, 'tasty'. We can also express the same positive gustatory evaluation with the complex expression, 'taste good'. But there is a challenge for an analysis of 'taste good': While it can be used equivalently with 'tasty', it need not be (for instance, imagine it used by someone who can identify good wines by taste but doesn't enjoy them). This kind of two-faced behavior (...)
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  • A norm of aesthetic assertion and its semantic (in)significance.John Collins - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (10):973-1003.
    ABSTRACT The paper proposes that the distinctive features of aesthetic assertion are due to a special norm governing such assertion rather than any semantic features of aesthetic predication. The norm is elaborated as a reading of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. Apart from the proposed norm capturing various features of aesthetic assertion, it is supported by various linguistic considerations that point to the semantic profile of predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates being in fact alike with respect to the (...)
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  • Hybrid Evaluatives: In Defense of a Presuppositional Account.Bianca Cepollaro & Isidora Stojanovic - 2016 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (3):458-488.
    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.
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  • A Linguistic Specification of Aesthetic Judgments.Jochen Briesen - 2019 - British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (4):373-391.
    This paper aims to delineate the class of aesthetic judgments linguistically. The main idea is that aesthetic judgments can be specified by a certain set of assertibility conditions, i.e., by norms that govern appropriate speech-acts. This idea is spelled out in detail and defended against various objections. The suggestion leads to an interesting account of aesthetic judgments that is theoretically fruitful: It provides the basis for a non-circular and satisfying characterization of the whole domain of aesthetic research and it marks (...)
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  • Metalinguistic Negotiations and Two Senses of Taste.David Bordonaba-Plou - 2020 - Diametros 18 (67):1-20.
    This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference and judgments of taste, does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for predicates of personal taste. Secondly, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Hybrid Dispositionalism and the Law.Teresa Marques - 2019 - In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement- based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claims that the theory the author advocates can extend (...)
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  • Ignorance Implicatures and Non-doxastic Attitude Verbs.Kyle H. Blumberg - 2017 - Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium.
    This paper is about conjunctions and disjunctions in the scope of non-doxastic atti- tude verbs. These constructions generate a certain type of ignorance implicature. I argue that the best way to account for these implicatures is by appealing to a notion of contex- tual redundancy (Schlenker, 2008; Fox, 2008; Mayr and Romoli, 2016). This pragmatic approach to ignorance implicatures is contrasted with a semantic account of disjunctions under `wonder' that appeals to exhausti cation (Roelofsen and Uegaki, 2016). I argue that (...)
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  • How to theorize about subjective language: a lesson from ‘de re’.Pranav Anand & Natasha Korotkova - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (3):619-681.
    Subjective language has attracted substantial attention in the recent literature in formal semantics and philosophy of language Subjective meaning: alternatives to relativism, De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–19, 2016; Lasersohn in Subjectivity and perspective in truth-theoretic semantics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017; Vardomskaya in Sources of subjectivity, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, IL, 2018; Zakkou in Faultless disagreement: a defense of contextualism in the realm of personal taste, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M., 2019b). Most current theories argue that Subjective Predicates, which (...)
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  • Asserting as Commitment to Knowing. An Essay on the Normativity of Assertion.Ivan Milić - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Barcelona
    In this thesis, I propose and defend a theory according to which committing oneself to knowing the proposition expressed counts as an assertion of that proposition. A consequence of this view is the knowledge account of assertion, according to which one asserts that p correctly only if one knows that p. In support of this approach, I offer a strategy of identifying an assertion’s “normative consequences”, types of act that normally take place as a result of one’s making an assertion (...)
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  • (1 other version)Contextualism vs. Relativism: More empirical data.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2022 - In Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy. Routledge.
    Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism (...)
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  • Evaluative Adjectives – an Attempt at a Classification.Natalia Karczewska - 2017 - Studia Semiotyczne—English Supplement 29:180-200.
    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 (...)
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  • Ordinary causal attributions, norms, and gradability.Jan Garcia Olier & Markus Kneer -
    There is a large literature exploring the effect of norms on the attribution of causation. Empirical research on this so-called “norm effect” has predominantly focused on two data points: A situation in which an agent violates a salient norm, and one in which there is no violation of a salient norm. Since the phenomenon is understood in bivalent terms (norm infraction vs. no norm infraction), most explanations thereof have the same structure. In this paper, we report several studies (total N=479) (...)
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