Negotiating Value

Sundell (2016) presents the grounds to undermine the claim that so called evaluative terms are semantically different from other gradable terms—i.e., that they are genuinely evaluative and/or that it is encoded in their semantics the relativization to a standard determined by an experiencer/appraiser. In order to undermine the claim, Sundell argues that the persistence of evaluative disagreements can be explained without assuming that aesthetic terms are indeed evaluative when one takes into account metalinguistic negotiations—disagreements about how one should use a word or expression. By showing that metalinguistic negotiations do all the needed work without requiring that one assumes that aesthetic adjectives are literally evaluative, Sundell’s expanded argument can be stated in the following way: for the sake of parsimony, one should treat evaluative terms as descriptive gradables. In the paper, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations cannot be the whole story by showing that, if one denies that evaluative terms are literally evaluative, metalinguistic negotiations do not account for the important connection between valuewords and social interactions about value.