In Defence of Thick Concepts

This paper focuses on the way in which thick concepts manage to combine the descriptive and the evaluative. It accepts Blackburn’s suggestion that thick terms have variable relevance, but disputes his conclusion that there are no thick concepts. The views of Wiggins and McDowell on these topics play an important role in the discussion. In the process a richer picture of the thick begins to emerge. The paper ends by considering the question whether the doctrine of the supervenience of the evaluative on the natural can still be sustained as a result.

The Metaethics of Gender

This chapter argues that some of the traditional arguments for expressivism in metaethics carry over to the case of gender ascriptions. Descriptivist views about the semantics of gender ascriptions fall short in explaining certain kinds of disagreement in ways that are similar to the ways in which descriptivist views about normative terms fall short. This suggests an argument for expressivism about gender ascriptions. to The chapter explores the idea that if gender ascriptions are normative, we might understand gender terms on the model of ethically thick terms. One way of avoiding the conclusion that gender ascriptions are expressive and/or normative is to argue that the relevant kinds of disagreement are instances of metalinguistic negotiation. After presenting some concerns associated with this explanation, the chapter closes with a discussion of some of the reasons for thinking that the realist might get back in the game.

Thickness and Evaluation

This is a review essay devoted to Pekka Väyrynen’s The Rude, the Lewd and the Nasty. Väyrynen’s book, concerned with thick terms and thick concepts, argues for a pragmatic view on the evaluativeness associated with these terms and concepts. The essay raises a number of critical questions regarding what Väyrynen’s arguments for his view actually show. It deals with, for example, thick properties, the fact-value distinction, what it is for terms and concepts to be (semantically) evaluative, and whether Väyrynen’s arguments generalize to thin evaluative concepts.

Hybrid Evaluatives: In Defense of a Presuppositional Account

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.