Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In the literature on personal taste, it is often assumed that judgments of taste are evaluative. The assumption is very prominent in the expressivist tradition, according to which to say/judge, for example, that the game of Monopoly is fun is analyzed in terms of recommending (approving, speaking in favor of) Monopoly, while to say that it is boring, in terms of rejecting (disapproving of, speaking against) it. Nevertheless, the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (henceforth PPTs) has received relatively little attention from a semantic point of view; which is surprising, given that the notions of evaluativity and (positive and negative) valence have been central in psychology and certain fields philosophy (value-theory and metaethics).

Our aim in this talk is to fill out this lacuna. More precisely, we show that PPTs do not divide into positively and negatively valenced terms. We argue that many PPTs, such as ‘surprising’, are neutral. That is to say, they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give expression to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation (and sometimes perhaps to no evaluation at all). Our primary aim is to investigate how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs, but also, how they differ among themselves, and how they differ from other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as ‘average’. We approach the topic of neutral PPTs using a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we propose two linguistic tests, and foster the applicability of those tests through the availability of corpus examples. On the other, we use information from pre-existing psychological norms of valence. What emerges is a rich and diverse class of PPTs: adjectives with features importantly different from the paradigmatic ones like ‘fun’ and ‘boring’, yet which have gone largely unnoticed in the buoyant research on PPTs.