¹ Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, and Thinking how to live (Harvard University Press, 2003); Yalcin, Seth. ‘Epistemic modals’ Mind 116(464) (2007), 983–1026CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Field, Hartry, ‘Apriority as an evaluative notion’, in Peacocke, Christopher and Boghossian, Paul A (Eds.), New Essays on the a Priori, 117–49 (Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibbard, Allan. ‘Two Recent Theories of Conditionals’, in Harper, William L, Stalnaker, Robert, and Pearce, Glenn (Eds.) IFS: Conditionals, Belief, Decision, Chance and Time, 211–47 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1981)Google Scholar; Chrisman, Matthew, ‘From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism’ Philosophical Studies 135 (2007), 225–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Bordonaba Plou, Operadores de orden superior y predicados de gusto: Una aproximación expresivista (PhD thesis, Universidad de Granada, 2017); Gutzmann, Daniel ‘If expressivism is fun, go for it!’ in Meier, Cécile and van Wijnberger-Huitink, Janneke (Eds.), Subjective Meaning: Alternatives to Relativism, 21–46 (De Gruyter, 2016)Google Scholar.

² Charlow, Nate, ‘The problem with the Frege-Geach problem’ Philosophical Studies 167(3) (2014), 635–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵ Field, Hartry, ‘Epistemology without metaphysics’ Philosophical Studies 143(2) (2009), 249–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Epistemology from an Evaluativist Perspective’ Philosopher's Imprint 18(12) (2018), 1–23; Yalcin, Seth ‘Bayesian Expressivism’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback) 112 (2012), 123–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷ Although originating in the philosophical literature, Moore's “Open Question” and “What's at Issue?” arguments might arguably be viewed as linguistic criteria or tests in favor of the specificity of evaluative language. See Moore, George Edward, Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1903/1993)Google Scholar and Gibbard, Allan, Thinking how to live (Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 23 and ff.)Google Scholar.

⁸ Schroeder, Mark, ‘What is the Frege-Geach Problem?’ Philosophy Compass 3(4) (2008), 704CrossRefGoogle Scholar, his emphasis.

⁹ Why speak of expressive and not evaluative terms? Simply put, because there is no consensus in the literature on what ‘evaluative’ means. In the philosophical literature, it is common to speak of evaluative terms as those that carry appraisal or evaluation and that figure in value judgments (see e.g., Väyrynen, Pekka, The Lewd, the Rude, and the Nasty, 29 and ff. (Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar). In the linguistics literature, by contrast, ‘evaluativity’ often refers to the phenomenon by which a gradable adjective makes reference to a contextually determined threshold (Bierwisch, Manfred ‘The semantics of gradation’ In Bierwisch, Manfred and Lang, Ewals (Eds.), Dimensional Adjectives, 71–261 (Springer-Verlag, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rett, Jessica, ‘Antonymy and evaluativity’, in Friedman, T. and Gibson, M. (Eds.) Proceedings of SALT XVII, 210–27, (Cornell University, 2007)Google Scholar). Furthermore, on the one hand ‘evaluative’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘subjective’ (Kennedy, Chris, ‘Two Sources of Subjectivity: Qualitative Assessment and Dimensional Uncertainty’ Inquiry 56(2–3) (2013), 258–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar). But on the other hand, ‘evaluative terms’ are sometimes opposed to predicates of personal taste, only the latter of which are deemed subjective (McNally, Louise and Stojanovic, Isidora, ‘Aesthetic Adjectives’ In Young, James (Ed.), The Semantics of Aesthetic Judgment, (Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Stojanovic, Isidora, ‘Disagreements about Taste vs. Disagreements about Moral Issues’. American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2019): 29–41Google Scholar.

¹⁰ There have been attempts to appeal to linguistic evidence in defense of expressivism, to wit: Seth Yalcin's work on epistemic modals (Yalcin 2007 op.cit) and, more recently, Nils Franzén, Sense and Sensibility: Four Essays on Evaluative Discourse PhD thesis (University of Uppsala, 2018). Our take is very different from these authors', however.

¹¹ Potts, Christopher, The logic of conventional implicatures (Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; McCready, Elin, ‘Emotive Equilibria’, Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (2012): 243–283CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gutzmann, Daniel, The Grammar of Expressivity (Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² To forestall a possible confusion, we are not claiming that an expression has either a factual or an expressive meaning, nor are we claiming that any given use of an expression is either factual or expressive. For instance, thick terms - that is, adjectives such as ‘generous’ or ‘lewd’ - arguably have both a factual (or descriptive) and an expressive (or evaluative) dimension to their meaning, and can used both factually and expressively at the same time. For discussion, see Cepollaro, Bianca and Stojanovic, Isidora, Isidora, , ‘Hybrid Evaluatives: In Defense of a Presuppositional Account’ Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (3) (2016): 458–488CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pekka Väyrynen, ‘Thick Ethical Concepts’, in Edward Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016).

¹³ Hare, Richard M., The language of Morals (Oxford Paperbacks, 1952)Google Scholar; Dreier, James, ‘Internalism and speaker relativism’ Ethics 101 (1) (1990), 6–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Björklund, Fredrik, Björnsson, Gunnar, Eriksson, John, Olinder, Ragnar Francén, and Strandberg, Caj, ‘Recent work on motivational internalism’ Analysis 72 (1) (2011): 124–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Stevenson, Charles L., ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’ Mind 46 (181) (1937), 14–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Of course, one's attitudes towards an object can often be complex, including both positive and negative aspects. For instance, a person might say ‘I don't doubt that football is a great sport, but it has caused so much violence, and I just cannot stand all the corruption and filthiness of that whole football industry. That's why I hate football.’ Hence the claim that saying something positive invites the inference that the speaker will act in favor of the object under evaluation is to be read with an implicit ceteris paribus.

¹⁶ This leaves room for certain exceptions, in which a speaker, however sincere, may fail to express a practical stance that one would normally express. This can happen when one is self-deceived about their own attitudes. Consider a professor who tell a junior colleague: “You are lucky that you paper has been published in such a prestigious journal”. He may sincerely intend to express a positive stance, yet what he express is condescension, which isn't positive at all.

¹⁷ Note that failing to object or reply to your interlocutor doesn't necessarily mean that you accept what they say. They may be reasons - social, political, or personal - that prevent one from publicly rejecting what they don't accept.

¹⁸ A similar point can be found in Chrisman (Chrisman, Matthew, ‘Two nondescriptivist views of normative and evaluative statements’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48(3–4) (2018), 405–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar), who proposes to think of the practical commitments associated with normative language in terms of commitments to reason practically in certain ways, that is, to accept certain considerations as reasons for action.

¹⁹ The idea that aesthetic judgments as well as judgments of taste somehow imply that the judge has had a first-hand experience of the object at stake is not altogether uncontroversial, but some privileged link between such judgments and acquaintance has to be recognised. It would take us astray to go into the details of this issue; for discussion, see Stephenson, Tamina, ‘Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste’, Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (4) (2007): 487–525CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pearson, Hazel, ‘A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste’, Journal of Semantics 30 (2013), 103–154CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ninan, Dilip, ‘Taste Predicates and the Acquaintance Inference’, Proceedings of SALT 24 (2014), 290–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franzén, Nils, ‘Aesthetic Evaluation and First-Hand Experience’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2018), 669–682CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Kölbel, Max, Truth Without Objectivity. Routledge (2002)Google Scholar; Egan, Andy, Hawthorne, John and Weatherson, Brian, ‘Epistemic Modals in Context’, in Preyer, Gerhard and Peter, Georg (Eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy, Oxford University Press (2005), 131–168Google Scholar; Lasersohn, Peter, ‘Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste’, Linguistics and Philosophy 28 (2007), 643–686CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard, Mark, When Truth Gives Out. (Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ For our criticisms of relativist accounts of disagreement, see Stojanovic, Isidora, ‘Talking about Taste: Disagreement, Implicit Arguments, and Relative Truth’, Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (2007): 691–706CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where the focus is on Lasersohn's proposal, and ‘When (True) Disagreement Gives Out’, Croatian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2011): 181–193, where the focus is on Richard's proposal. See also Isidora Stojanovic, ‘Context and Disagreement’, Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos 59 (2017): 7–22, for a discussion of certain complexities of the relevant notion of disagreement that have come to surface over the last two decades.

²² The idea of a disagreement in attitude comes from Stevenson (1937; op. cit.); for more recent discussions, see e.g. Marques, Teresa, ‘Disagreeing in Context’, Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015), 257CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Eriksson, John, ‘Expressivism, Attitudinal Complexity and Two Senses of Disagreement in Attitude’, Erkenntnis 81 (2016), 775–794CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ To forestall a possible confusion, we are not saying that any dialogue of the form ‘This is incredible. - No, it isn't’ is infelicitous or marked. Rather, we claim that in contexts in which the speaker uses ‘incredible’ to express their attitude of amazement, such putative denials sound off. An interlocutor who does not share the speaker's attitude will voice their disagreement by other means; they might use an interjection like ‘phew’, or a face expression that says ‘I am not impressed’. However, we shall return to ‘incredible’ in section 4.2., where we will see that this adjective can also be used factually - and, when so used, pattern along the lines of (15) rather than (16).

²⁴ For discussion, see Barker, Chris, ‘The dynamics of vagueness’, Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (2002), 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Disagreements of the sort are often taken to be instances of so-called ‘metalinguistic negotiation’; see Plunkett, David and Sundell, Timothy ‘Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms’, Philosophers' Imprint 13(23) (2013), 1–37Google Scholar.

²⁵ Stephanie Solt, ‘Multidimensionality, subjectivity and scales: experimental evidence’, in Elena Castroviejo, Louise McNally & Galit Weidman Sassoon (Eds.), The semantics of gradability, vagueness and scale structure: Experimental perspectives. Cham: Springer (2018), 59–91; Faroldi, Federico and Ruiz, Andrés Soria, ‘The Scale Structure of Moral Adjectives’ Studia Semiotyczne 31(2) (2017), 161–78Google Scholar; Elsi Kaiser and Catherine Wang, ‘Fact or opinion?: An experimental investigation on the recognition of evaluative content’, manuscript.

²⁶ Hare, in The Language of Morals (op. cit, 113 and ff) used this test to argue in favor of the view that an evaluative term like ‘good’ could be used in the same way as a descriptive term like ‘red’. See also Umbach, Carla, ‘Evaluative propositions and subjective judgments’ in Meier, Cécile and van Wijnberger-Huitink, Janneke (Eds.), Subjective Meaning: Alternatives to Relativism, 127–68 (De Gruyter, 2016)Google Scholar.

²⁷ One might object, however, that in situations like (19), where interlocutors share a standard, they can still have a faultless disagreement. This might be because their taste is not fully determined, in the sense that it does not apply to all potential objects of evaluation; or because the objects under consideration are borderline cases for the application of the shared taste. To be more precise, then, our claim is that whenever the shared taste is neither underdetermined nor vague, the corresponding disagreements are not faultless.

²⁸ Sibley, Frank, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, The Philosophical Review 68(4) (1959), 421–450CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ To take just the first item in the list, among 50 random hits in a corpus search of the British National Corpus, not a single one corresponded to aesthetic use; for details, see Stojanovic, Isidora, ‘Expressing Aesthetic Judgments in Context’, Inquiry 59 (2016), 663CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Sibley 1959, op. cit., 447. Note that Sibley appears to think that aesthetic uses of factual words such as ‘unified’ or ‘powerful’ are not ‘straightforwardly literal’, hence that such words acquire their aesthetic meaning through some kind of metaphorical use. We think that the aesthetic uses of (most) such factual words are as literal as their factual uses. It would take us astray, however, to properly demonstrate this.

³¹ A more nuanced proposal would be to say that, rather than ambiguous, all such terms are polysemous. We have no qualms with the idea that a term's capacity to shift between factual and expressive uses may involve a certain form of polysemy; to the contrary, this would reinforce our point. What we do deny, though, is that it involves ambiguity.

³² We would like to thank María José Frápolli for putting together this special issue. We are grateful to Nils Franzén and Neftalí Villanueva for comments on an earlier draft, as well as to Carla Umbach, Matthew Chrisman, Mora Maldonado, and Salvador Mascarenhas, for discussion. At the institutional level, we acknowledge support from the grant ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog. Isidora Stojanovic acknowledges support from grant MINECO FFI2016-80636-P.