Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

This paper o ers a semantic analysis of the gradable predicates of experience (GPEs): is tasty , looks red , sounds like ‘yanny’ , and so on. On this analysis, unrelativized GPEs express a speaker’s graded assessment of their experience (in an intuitive sense, for which the paper will propose a semantic formalization). Though the analysis is built to explain the “acquaintance inference” problematized by Pearson (2013 ); Ninan (2014 ), it also accounts for the behavior of GPEs under questions, modal quantifiers, and attitude verbs. It also accounts for attested readings of attitude ascriptions embedding GPEs—what I call phenomenal readings—which other accounts have ignored. Finally, it suggests an appealing account of the semantic categories of autocentricity and evaluativity, while explaining the divergent behavior of sentences of these categories with respect to linguistic expressions of disagreement.