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Is it tautological to call an action “wrongful discrimination?” Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term “discrimination” is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that “discrimination” usually conveys the action's moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of “discriminatory” is a thing of the past.

In this paper, we confront two prevailing views of rationality—reason- and coherence-based theories—with empirical facts. While the experimental resolution of the debate between both theories is challenging, we examine two cases in which these theories make distinct predictions regarding whether an agent is deemed rational or not. By directly pitting reason-based against coherence-based theories, our findings indicate that reasons play a more influential role in shaping people's attributions of rationality than coherence.

AbstractIn much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.

Generic statements ('Tigers have stripes') are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements ('most', 'some', 'typically', 'usually'), and variations in types of predicated properties (striking vs. neutral). We discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and whether and in which ways these effects might introduce biased beliefs into social networks.

The last ten years have seen a steady increase in vignette-based research investigating the folk concept of pain. That research challenges the standard view of pain, according to which pains are unpleasant feelings. However, the results of these studies also suggest that the concept of pain is ambiguous and difficult to pin down. This paper approaches the topic from a new angle, using linguistic tests to decipher what people communicate when making statements such as ‘I have a pain in my arm’. The results suggest that first-person pain reports semantically entail information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. This speaks in favor of a pluralist view on the semantic meaning of pain.

Recent research on thick terms like ‘rude’ and ‘friendly’ has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like ‘friendly’ and ‘courageous’ can be more easily cancelled than the evaluative content of negative terms like ‘rude’ and ‘selfish’. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick terms but also for thin terms such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect is indicative of a pervasive asymmetry that holds between positive and negative evaluative terms.

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are atthe heart of a variety of debates in linguistics, philosophy oflanguage, and metaethics. Central to these debates is thequestion of how the descriptive and evaluative components ofthick concepts are related and whether they can be separatedfrom each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick termsare used in ordinary language has been collected to informthese debates. In this paper, we present the first empiricalstudy, designed to investigate whether the evaluativecomponent of thick concepts can be separated. Our study mightbe considered to falsify the view that evaluation isconversationally implicated. However, our study also revealsan effect of valence, indicating that people reason differentlyabout positive and negative thick terms. While evaluationscannot be cancelled for negative thick terms, they can be forpositive ones. Three follow-up studies were conducted toexplain this effect. We conclude that the effect of valence isbest accounted for by a difference in the social norms guidingevaluative language.

University of Bern, Bern, SwitzerlandRodrigo DazUniversity of Bern, Bern, SwitzerlandAbstractThe two dominant theories on the nature of emotions are feeling theories (e.g., Prinz 2004) and cognitive theories (e.g.,Lazarus 1991). The former take feelings to be the essential core aspect of emotions. The latter argue that emotions arebased on judgements or some other conceptual states in order to account for the datum that emotions always seem to bedirected towards events or objects. In this paper we argue that the controversy between feeling theories and cognitivetheories rests on the false assumption that people do not distinguish emotional feelings from emotional judgements, i.e.,that expressions of the form I feel x and I am x are largely intersubstitutable (Bennett & Hacker 2003). We present newempirical evidence from both corpus studies and a vignette study showing that feeling happy (sad/angry) and being happy(sad/angry) are two separate states that people are able to conceptually and linguistically distinguish.

Recent research on thick terms like "rude" and "friendly" has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like "friendly" and "courageous" can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like "rude" and "selfish". In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick terms but also for thin terms such as "good" or "bad" (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like 'courageous' and 'awful' from descriptive adjectives like 'narrow,' and from value-associated adjectives like 'sunny.' Our study suggests that the modifiers 'truly' and 'really' frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity andthe cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluatedthe pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, andsubsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. Theresults demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on theirself-report) associate words more strongly with pain than lesssensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe,wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more painrelatedfor those who are more pain-sensitive. We discuss ourresults in the light of three theoretical frameworks – cognitivebias, prototype theory, embodied account. We argue that thelatter is best suited to explain the results of this study in thesense in which it implies the principle of body specificity,according to which different bodily characteristics lead tocorresponding differences in the way in which peopleconstruct concepts and word meanings

The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique. In a series of experiments, Knobe, Prasada, and Newman (2013) show that these terms allow two independent criteria for categorisation, one of which is inherently normative. This paper presents and tests a novel account of the content of these ‘dual character concepts’. We argue that the normative dimension of dual character concepts represents commitments to fulfill certain idealized functions. We then present evidence that the normative dimension is a central dimension in the conceptual structure of dual character concepts. Finally, we show that our account is both descriptively and explanatorily adequate.

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]