Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora

Abstract

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.

The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’: Evidence From a Corpus-Linguistic Study

“…The latter is secondary in the sense that it is only used to convey additional information about the former. The set of these target adjectives consists of a pre-selection of evaluative and non-evaluative terms featured in Reuter et al (2022). The authors have annotated the concept class of each target adjective, distinguishing between five classes: 5…”

“…Recently, Reuter et al (2022) have identified another class of terms, so-called valueassociated terms, which are neither fully descriptive nor inherently evaluative. Expressions denoting such concepts are prima facie descriptive, but they are often evaluatively charged because they tend to have common positive or negative associations (for psycholinguistic research, see, e.g., Clore et al, 1987;Rensbergen et al, 2016;Võ et al, 2009).…”

“…Note that this means that we do not look at legal phrases like "beyond reasonable doubt. "5 The categorization of adjectives into descriptive, evaluative, and value-associated terms inReuter et al (2022) was based on claims derived from the literature on thick concepts, the authors' intuitions, and controlled for by the terms' sentiment value in the SentiWords dictionary. This explains why, e.g., 'loud' (sentiment: -0.11) is a descriptive term, whereas 'quiet' (sentiment: 0.41) is value-associated.…”

Evaluative Deflation, Social Expectations, and the Zone of Moral Indifference

“…3 It has recently been suggested that we further need to distinguish value-associated concepts and dual character concepts. Value-associated concepts are descriptive concepts that are positively or negatively charged because people tend to associate positive or negative things with them, for instance, "rainy", "moldy", "rich", or "active" (for a discussion, seeReuter, Baumgartner, & Willemsen, 2023). Dual character concepts are distinct, as they have independent descriptive and normative components that are double-dissociable, such as "father", "scientist", and others(Del Pinal & Reuter, 2017;Knobe, Prasada, & Newman, 2013;Reuter, 2019).…”