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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.

What is the difference between language that describes the world and language that evaluates it? It has been suggested that an essential, distinguishing feature of evaluative language is its potential to guide actions by providing us with reasons to act. Calling an action “cruel” not only evaluates it negatively, its cruelty also provides us with a reason to refrain from it. Descriptive language, in and by itself, is relatively inert in this respect. In this paper, we examine whether this undisputed assumption is empirically adequate. We present three preregistered studies that demonstrate that evaluative language provides reasons for action when an agent contemplates how she should act, and also in conversational contexts. However, we also demonstrate that the speaker can easily deny the intention to provide such reasons to act.

Forgiveness plays a significant role in our everyday social life, and, because of that, it has received an increasing amount of attention in academic research. However, philosophers and psychologists are equally worried by the fact that we still lack an empirically adequate characterization of forgiveness. In this paper, we present two preregistered studies in which we explore what ordinary people believe a speaker does when he or she performs the speech act of forgiving by uttering the phrase, “I forgive you”. Study 1 uses a vignette-based stimulus to examine what participants believe to change after the victim granted forgiveness to their wrong-doer. In Study 2, we apply a linguistic test, the cancellability test, to determine whether participants consider forgiving the wrong-doer but still blaming them compatible.

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.

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]

Consider the following causal explanation: The ball wentthrough the goal because the defender didn’t block it. Thereare at least two problems with citing omissions as causal ex-planations. First, how do we choose the relevant candidateomission (e.g. why the defender and not the goalkeeper). Sec-ond, how do we determine what would have happened in therelevant counterfactual situation (i.e. maybe the shot wouldstill have gone through the goal even if it had been blocked).In this paper, we extend the counterfactual simulation model(CSM) of causal judgment (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado,& Tenenbaum, 2014) to handle the second problem. In two ex-periments, we show how people’s causal model of the situationaffects their causal judgments via influencing what counterfac-tuals they consider. Omissions are considered causes to theextent that the outcome in the relevant counterfactual situationwould have been different from what it actually was.

Is it possible to lie despite not saying anyhing false? While thespontaneous answer seems to be ‘no’, there is some evidencefrom ordinary language that a lie does not require what is saidto be believed-false. In this paper, we will argue for a pragmaticextension of the standard definition of lying. More specifically,we will present three experiments which show that people’sconcept of lying is not about what is said, but about what isimplied by saying it that way. We test three Griceanconversational maxims. For each one of them we demonstratethat if a speaker implies something misleading, even by sayingsomething semantically true, it is still considered lying.

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]

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]