Expressing Value in Language

Evaluative adjectives—words like ‘good’, ‘ugly’, ‘tasty’ and ‘elegant’—have interpretations that appear to depend on the context. If you describe a knife, a bear or an act of charity as ‘good’, you do not seem to be saying that it has some fixed property of goodness. Rather, the context in which you are speaking affects the interpretation of ‘good’. Evaluative adjectives are closely linked to concepts of central importance in philosophy, such as moral goodness, beauty, and value. Hence their apparent context-dependence has troubling consequences for many philosophical debates. For example, an act of charity could count as ‘good’ when we are talking about it in one context and as ‘not good’ when we are talking about it in another context, due to different interpretations of ‘good’. This startling conclusion is difficult to reconcile with most ethical theories. While philosophers and linguists have shown increasing interest in evaluative adjectives, a full analysis has remained out of reach for several reasons. First, philosophical and linguistic investigations often proceed in isolation from each other. Second, the scope of analyses can be overly specific, by virtue of focusing on a single case-study, or overly general, by focusing on features that supposedly unify all evaluative adjectives. Third, the predictions that emerge from different analyses are rarely subjected to empirical assessment.The project aims to give an account of the meaning of the word ‘good’ and other evaluative adjectives, along with the nature of goodness and other forms of value. It will be the first fully integrated analysis, by incorporating philosophical and linguistic perspectives, generalisations about evaluative adjectives and particular case-studies, along with empirical results. The novelty of the project lies in this integrative and interdisciplinary aspect. The results will resolve central and long-standing issues in both philosophy and linguistics.