Separating the evaluative from the descriptive

Abstract

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity.

Evaluative Deflation, Social Expectations, and the Zone of Moral Indifference

“…While moral cognition has been at the center of moral psychology, empirical research on the language that is used to express moral judgments is still in its infancy. Philosophers and, more specifically, metaethicists distinguish between two types of terms and concepts by which we can communicate moral content, namely, thin and thick ethical terms and concepts (e.g., Eklund, 2011; Roberts, 2013; Väyrynen, 2021; Willemsen & Reuter, 2021). 3 Thin ethical terms are rather abstract ways of expressing a speaker's positive or negative attitude and can, therefore, be used to speak positively or negatively about a person or their actions.…”

“…In a series of papers, both these assumptions have been challenged empirically (Baumgartner et al., 2022; Willemsen & Reuter, 2021). In an attempt to decide whether the evaluation of a thick term is semantically and pragmatically conveyed, Willemsen and Reuter (2020, 2021) employ the cancellability test for conversational implicatures (see, e.g., Grice, 1989, but see Zakkou, 2018 for discussions of the test's limitations).…”

“…In a series of papers, both these assumptions have been challenged empirically (Baumgartner et al., 2022; Willemsen & Reuter, 2021). In an attempt to decide whether the evaluation of a thick term is semantically and pragmatically conveyed, Willemsen and Reuter (2020, 2021) employ the cancellability test for conversational implicatures (see, e.g., Grice, 1989, but see Zakkou, 2018 for discussions of the test's limitations). Here are two examples of the experimental stimuli they used: (1) Negative : Tom is rude, but by that I am not saying something negative about Tom. (2) Positive : Tom is friendly, but by that I am not saying something positive about Tom. …”

“…In Section 2, we provide an overview of the literature indicating that positive and negative moral judgments are asymmetrical—both at the level of psychological processing and the linguistic level. We zoom in on a recently detected effect, namely, the polarity effect of evaluative language (Baumgartner, Willemsen, & Reuter, 2022; Väyrynen, 2021; Willemsen & Reuter, 2021). The polarity effect can be described thus: the evaluation of a negative term, such as rude or cruel, is harder to explicitly cancel than the evaluation of a positive term, for example, friendly or compassionate.…”

“…1111We used the same thick terms as in Willemsen & Reuter (2021). The selection criteria were preregistered (https://osf.io/avbq3).…”