Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste

Abstract

Judgments of taste are often assumed to be evaluative, in the sense of expressing either a positive or a negative assessment of the object under evaluation. However, the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has received relatively little attention from a semantic point of view. Our aim is to fill out this lacuna. We show that PPTs do not divide neatly into positively and negatively valenced terms. Instead, we suggest that many PPTs, such as 'surprising' and 'intense', are neutral: they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give rise to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation. We investigate how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs, and how they differ from certain other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as 'average'. We use a two-pronged approach. First, we propose two novel linguistic tests that serve as diagnostics to distinguish the class of neutral PPTs from valenced PPTs, and we use corpus examples to corroborate the tests. Second, we use information from pre-existing psychological norms of valence to further explore the class of adjectives that we hypothesize are neutral.

Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora

“…First, the evaluative force of many words is likely to vary with context. In fact, some scholars on evaluative concepts have even argued that both thin and thick concepts can be used nonevaluatively (see, e.g., Stojanovic & Kaiser, 2022; Willemsen et al, n.d.). 17 This raises the immediate question of whether we should soften our conclusions, limiting them to specific uses of thick and thin terms.…”

“… 3 A rare exception is a recently published paper by Stojanovic and Kaiser (2022) in which they empirically investigate the evaluative character of taste predicates. Stojanovic and Kaiser suggest that taste predicates belong to the broader class of subjective terms that only partly overlap with the evaluative terms with which we are concerned in this paper.…”

“…We do not rule out that value-associated concepts can be used evaluatively in specific contexts. In contrast to context-dependent evaluative uses of value-associated terms, however, thick and thin terms standardly communicate approval or disapproval.3 A rare exception is a recently published paper byStojanovic and Kaiser (2022) in which they empirically investigate the evaluative character of taste predicates. Stojanovic and Kaiser suggest that taste predicates belong to the broader class of subjective terms that only partly overlap with the evaluative terms with which we are concerned in this paper.…”

Are Moral Predicates Subjective? A Corpus Study

“…More precisely, for the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in the seman0cs of subjec0ve and evalua0ve predicates, among which the predicates of personal taste (PPTs, for short), such as "tasty", "delicious", "disgus0ng", "fun" and "boring", have been in the center of aYen0on; see e.g. Lasersohn (2005), Stephenson (2007), Stojanovic (2007) for early discussions, and Umbach (2021), Stojanovic and Kaiser (2022: sec0on 2) and Willer (to appear) for recent overviews. One of the things that sparked such a vivid interest in subjec0ve predicates is the idea of faultless disagreement; that is, the idea that it makes sense to disagree over maYers of personal taste.…”