Abstract

This paper focuses on value as ascribed to what can be desired, enjoyed, cherished, admired, loved, and so on: value that putatively serves as ground for evaluating such attitudes and for justifying conduct. The main question of the paper is whether such value ascriptions are property ascriptions as traditional cognitivism claims. The paper makes the case that although the linguistic evidence favors traditional cognitivism over non-cognitivism about evaluative language, the main tenet of cognitivism is best restated as the thesis that evaluative terms are linguistically encoded classificatory devices. This opens up the theoretical possibility, for even inflationists about properties, to embrace cognitivism without inviting any metaphysical worries about the properties ascribed in evaluative language.