Abstract
The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century, it is only relatively recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make a contribution of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical – specifically, corpus linguistic – study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjectivity at the linguistic level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigmatically subjective predicates.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
While philosophers in metaethics and philosophy of language are increasingly eager to look at empirical evidence concerning morality and moral language, the main focus has been on collecting data through controlled experiments (e.g. eliciting acceptability judgments), rather than from corpora. A notable exception is the corpus study presented in Reuter et al. (manuscript), who use corpus data to argue that thick and thin evaluative (specifically moral) expressions are distinguishable from other types of expressions in terms of how they combine with intensifiers (“truly”, “really”, “very”).
- 3.
This sort of search is carried out using the collocation search option in the tool at www.english-corpora.org. For technical reasons, it was not possible to use an equivalent and intuitively more natural strategy of searching for the adjective within the same window to the right of the verb lemma.
- 4.
Mutual Information is calculated in COCA as in (i), taken from https://www.english-corpora.org/mutualInformation.asp with minor modifications.
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(i)MI = log((AB*sizeCorpus)/(A*B*span))/log(2), where
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A = frequency of the word of interest (e.g. “moral”)
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B = frequency of collocate (e.g. “find”)
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AB = frequency of collocate near the node word (e.g. “find” near “moral”)
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sizeCorpus = the number of words in the corpus
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span = span of words (in COCA, this is 3 to left and 3 to right of word of interest)
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log(2) is literally the log10 of the number 2: .30103
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- 5.
Note that in “(not) guilty”, “find” often occurs not as a subjective attitude verb but rather acquires a legal sense describing a jury officially deciding on an accused individual’s guilt.
- 6.
Note that this does not extend to predicates that are modified with “morally” (where we see the reverse pattern) and “ethically” (equally likely to occur with either verb). In the corpus data, we often see “find” embed adjectives such as “reprehensible”, “objectionable” and “repugnant” modified by “morally”. We believe that it is these adjectives that are driving the preference for “find” over “consider”, while the adverb “morally” primarily serves to endow the adjectives with a more specific sense.
- 7.
The idea would be, roughly, that if one assumes that judgments of personal taste systematically involve radical counterstance contingency, then speakers should preferably use a verb that triggers this presupposition (to wit, “find”) rather than a verb such as “consider”, which triggers a weaker presupposition.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank David Bordonaba Plou, Christopher Kennedy, Malte Willer and an anonymous reviewer for comments. Isidora Stojanovic acknowledges support from the COST Action CA17132 in the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union, and from the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) under the grant agreement ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog. Louise McNally acknowledges support through an ICREA Academia award.
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Stojanovic, I., McNally, L. (2023). Are Moral Predicates Subjective? A Corpus Study. In: Bordonaba-Plou, D. (eds) Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28908-8_6
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