Belief, Rational and Justified

It is clear that beliefs can be assessed both as to their justification and their rationality. What is not as clear, however, is how the rationality and justification of belief relate to one another. Stewart Cohen has stumped for the popular proposal that rationality and justification come to the same thing, that rational beliefs just are justified beliefs, supporting his view by arguing that ‘justified belief’ and ‘rational belief’ are synonymous. In this paper, I will give reason to think that Cohen’s argument is spurious. I will show that ‘rational’ and ‘justified’ occupy two distinct semantic categories – ‘rational’ is an absolute gradable adjective and ‘justified’ is a relative gradable adjective – telling against the thought that ‘rational belief’ and ‘justified belief’ are synonymous. I will then argue that the burden of proof is on those who would equate rationality and justification, making the case that those who hold this prominent position face the difficulty of explaining how rationality and justification come to the same thing even though ‘rational’ and ‘justified’ are not synonymous

Stoic Virtue: A Contemporary Interpretation

The Stoic understanding of virtue is often taken to be a non-starter. Many of the Stoic claims about virtue – that a virtue requires moral perfection and that all who are not fully virtuous are vicious – are thought to be completely out of step with our commonsense notion of virtue, making the Stoic account more of an historical oddity than a seriously defended view. Despite many voices to the contrary, I will argue that there is a way of making sense of these Stoic claims. Recent work in linguistics has shown that there is a distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives, with the absolute variety only applying to perfect exemplars. I will argue that taking virtue terms to be absolute gradable adjectives – and thus that they apply only to those who are fully virtuous – is one way to make sense of the Stoic view. I will also show how interpreting virtue theoretic adjectives as absolute gradable adjectives makes it possible to defend Stoicism against its most common objections, demonstrating how the Stoic account of virtue might once again be a player in the contemporary landscape of virtue theorizing

Depictive Secondary Predication and the Correlates of Inner Aspect

In this paper, I argue that depictive secondary predicates are sensitive to the inner aspect of the VP they are integrated into. I demonstrate that for adjectival depictives, adjective type can affect the acceptability of depictives that are predicated of the object of the matrix clause, and that this can be explained by the correlations between durativity and telicity in the verbal domain, and gradability and absoluteness in the adjectival domain. I propose the Depictive Aspectuality Constraint, and show that it makes a number of predictions about depictive behavior that are borne out

Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior

The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent

Comparison classes and the relative/absolute distinction: a degree-based compositional account of the ser/estar alternation in Spanish

The notion of comparison class has figured prominently in recent analyses of the gradability properties of adjectives. We assume that the comparison class is introduced by the degree morphology of the adjective and present a new proposal where comparison classes are crucial to explain the distribution of adjectives in Spanish copular sentences headed by the verbs ser ?beSER? and estar ?beESTAR?. The copula estar ?beESTAR? appears whenever a gradable adjective merges with a within-individual comparison class, a modifier expressing a property of stages. The copular verb ser ?beSER? appears when a gradable adjective merges with a between-individuals comparison class, a modifier expressing a property of individuals. The distinction between relative and absolute adjectives can be reduced to the semantic properties of the modifier expressing the comparison class that is merged in the functional structure of the adjective

Aesthetic Adjectives: Experimental Semantics and Context-Sensitivity

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind

The role of state-kinds in the morphosemantics of Spanish deadjectival nominalizations

353 p.a presente tesis doctoral aborda el estudio de las nominalizaciones deadjetivales (v.g. belleza, altura) en español. Sobre la base del modelo de semántica formal de Heim y Kratzer (1998), combinado con un aparato construccionista de formación de palabras, el objetivo es explicar las principales propiedades semánticas y morfológicas de estas nominalizaciones y proporcionar un análisis que dé cuenta de ellas. La hipótesis principal es que nuestra ontología de objetos semánticos debe incluir clases y ejemplares de estados; dicha hipótesis se enmarca en la tradición clase-ejemplar surgida desde Carlson (1977) y, en particular, se basa en la propuesta de Anderson y Morzycki (2015), según la cual las clases de estados desempeñan un papel fundamental en la explicación del fenómeno de la gradación. En concreto, postulo que las nominalizaciones deadjetivales denotan conjuntos de clases de estados totalmente preordenadas y aquellas pueden expresar ejemplares de estados cuando se predican de un individuo, caso en el cual un nudo aspectual se adjunta a la derivación para asociar una clase de estado a un ejemplar. Esta tesis proporciona una mejor comprensión, tanto en lo empírico como en lo teórico, sobre la gradación, la estatividad y los nombres de masa, y de ella se derivan importantes conclusiones en relación con la ontología de las lenguas naturales, el aspecto léxico y el de punto de vista, la estructura interna de las nominalizaciones en cuestión, su composición morfológica y su distribución sintáctica

Color adjectives, standards, and thresholds: an experimental investigation

Are color adjectives (“red”, “green”, etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal (“armchair”) judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near- midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives (“tall”, “wide”) behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role

Function Words and Context Variability

Natural language expressions fall into two categories: content and function words. While function words are essential to compositional semantics, surprisingly little has been said about their emergence. In this paper, I will show that most extant approaches to the emergence of compositional signaling fail to account for the emergence of functional vocabulary. After providing a result that explains why this is so,, I will present a model and simulation results exhibiting conditions under which such vocabulary can emerge from simple learning dynamics. This model captures the intuition that function words help aid communication with a limited vocabulary in the presence of contextual variability

Event Structure of Resultatives in ASL

The relationship between the duration and telicity of the causing predicate and the gradability and standard of comparison of the resultant predicate in resultative constructions in American Sign Language (ASL) is investigated. Two homomorphic accounts of resultative constructions are considered, the feature-based approach of Beavers (2008), and the compositional approach of Ramchand (2008). The analysis utilizes morpho-phonological and semantics interface properties in ASL in order to discriminate between the two approaches. These properties are expressed by the Visibility Hypothesis (VH) in Wilbur, Malaia, and Shay (2012), which posits that the ends of semantic scales are phonologically marked in ASL in particular, but also in sign languages more generally. It is concluded that the compositional approach of Ramchand (2008) better accounts for the data