By Dr Poppy Mankowitz, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind and Language, Department of Philosophy
Dr Poppy Mankowitz tells us about her new interdisciplinary project which investigates the value of evaluative adjectives—words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘beautiful’—to understand how context affects their interpretation. In doing so, the project seeks to resolve central and long-standing issues in both philosophy and linguistics. The project recently received an ERC Starting Grant and runs until December 2029.
Suppose you describe a knife, a bear or an act of charity as ‘good’. It doesn’t seem as if you are attributing some fixed property of goodness to all of those things. You might mean that the knife is good for cutting fish, good for spreading butter, or good as a gift for your neighbour; you might mean that the bear is good at scaring children or good at dancing. You probably don’t mean that the act of charity is good in any of these ways, but rather that it is morally good. Even after working out the type of goodness that is attributed, the amount of goodness required to count as ‘good’ can still vary. A particular knife might count as ‘good for cutting fish’ if the only alternative is a blunt butterknife, but the same knife might count as ‘not good’ if professional sushi knives are available. Hence the context appears to affect the interpretation of ‘good’.
This is a hallmark of evaluative adjectives, which are words like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘fun’. Evaluative adjectives are closely linked to concepts of central importance in philosophy, such as moral goodness, beauty, and value. Therefore, their apparent context-dependence has troubling consequences for many philosophical debates. For example, if ‘good’ receives different interpretations in different contexts, then an act of charity could count as ‘good’ when we’re talking about it in one context and as ‘not good’ when we’re talking about it in another context. This startling conclusion is difficult to reconcile with most ethical theories.
This leads to my new project, ‘Expressing Value in Language’ (EVIL), funded by the European Research Council for five years. It focuses on two key questions:
- How exactly does context affect the interpretation of evaluative adjectives?
- What is the impact of the analysis of these words on philosophical debates centering on value? For example, how can standard ethical theories be upheld, if the goodness of an act or person depends on the context?
The project aims to answer these questions by developing an account of the meaning of the word ‘good’ and other evaluative adjectives, along with the nature of goodness and other forms of value. To do this, it will integrate work in philosophy, theoretical linguistics and experimental linguistics. This integrative approach is crucial in order to address the key questions.
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 often not subjected to empirical assessment. The integrative approach of the project aims to overcome these obstacles. Outputs will include empirical results, published articles in linguistics and philosophy journals, and a book that develops a unified account of evaluative adjectives and the nature of value.
Dr Poppy Mankowitz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy whose research focuses on the philosophy of language, linguistics and metaphysics. To find out more about the Expressing Value in Language (EVIL) project, please contact poppy.mankowitz@bristol.ac.uk.