work in progress
Valence Asymmetries
The positive, the negative, the good and the bad in language, mind and morality
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An asymmetric behavior between the positive and the negative has been evidenced in psychology, for information processing, attention, recognition and decision making, in philosophy, for judgments about morality and intentionality, and in linguistics, for a range of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena. Negative information grabs our attention, we process it more carefully, we recall it with greater precision. We easily blame others for the negative side-effects of their actions, but do not praise them for the positive ones. It takes many nice words to overthrow one nasty remark. When we say that something is "not good", we usually imply that it is bad, but by saying "not bad" we do not imply that it is good.
Valence asymmetries have arisen on many horizons but have seldom been brought into correspondence, and are at odds with most theories of value. My project VALENCE ASYMMETRIES (ERC advanced grant n° 101142133) is a pioneering attempt to secure the premises for a cross-fertilization between the different accounts of valence asymmetries. It will deploy methods from philosophy (argumentation and conceptual analysis), formal semantic and value-theoretic models, and experimental methodology from psycholinguistics and moral psychology.
It has three main objectives:
- highlight the fundamental role that valence plays beyond emotion, in particular, in value judgments and language;
- examine what the different asymmetries have in common, and whether they call for a unified explanation;
- show that valence asymmetries are not necessarily irrational, but often derive from a fundamental asymmetry between positive and negative value, and, as such, are a key component of our cognitive and linguistic architecture.
Evaluativity
Evaluative and Subjective Predicates
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Over the last decade, I have been studying evaluative discourse, including aesthetic and moral predicates, thick terms, and all-purpose evaluatives. Some of this work is a sequel to my research on predicates of personal taste (Talking About Taste, 2007; On Value-Attributions: Semantics and Beyond, 2012). Recent relevant publications include Aesthetic Predicates (with Louise McNally, 2016), Hybrid Evaluatives (with Bianca Cepollaro, 2016), Expressing Aesthetic Judgments in Context (2016), An Empirical Approach to Aesthetic Adjectives (2018), On Linguistic Evidence for Expressivism (with Andrés Soria Ruiz, 2019), Disagreements over Taste vs. Disagreements over Moral Issues (2019), Are Moral Predicates Subjective? A Corpus Study (with Louise McNally, 2023).
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Two handbook articles on this topic: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Value Judgments, with Bianca Cepollaro and Andrés Soria Ruiz, forthcoming in the Cambridge Handbook of Philosophy of Language, ed. Piotr Stalmaczszyk, CUP 2022 (download draft here), and Evaluativity, in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language, eds. Ernie Lepoe and Una Stojnic (download draft here).
Valence and affect
Valence, affective and evaluative meaning
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In a recent collaboration with Elsi Kaiser (USC), we have been investigating the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (PPTs). We argue that PPTs do not divide neatly into positively and negatively valenced terms. Instead, we suggest that many PPTs, such as ‘surprising’ and 'intense', are neutral: they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give rise to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation. Combining theoretical and empricial methodology, we have investigated how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs, and how they differ from certain other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as ‘average’. The research has resulted in the paper Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste (n Wyatt, Zakkou & Zeman, eds., Perspectives on Taste, Routledge 2022).
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Another direction of research investigates the interplay between affective meaning and truth-conditional meaning, in collaboration with Anouch Bourmayan (Paris-Sorbonne), Brent Strickland (IJN), and Morgan Moyer (post-doc recruited on the project Emergence - Re-evaluate Valence). We start from the observation that philosophy of language as well as formal semantics have always focused almost exclusively on truth-conditional meaning. The affective information carried by words, that is, the positive or negative attitudes or feelings that a word invokes, has not been deemed a suitable object of study. We aim to emphasize the importance of the affective dimension of word meaning. We present several experimental studies that demonstrate that affective meaning is cognitively prior to referential meaning. The first study shows that speakers are much faster in detecting the valence (positive or negative) of a given verb than its referential domain. The second study shows that speakers are generally much more sensitive to valence than to referential domain when asked to assess the semantic similarity of two verbs; domain itself is only taken into account when the two lexical items already have the same valence. We are now running a series of follow up studies to further collaborate the hypothesis of the primacy of affective meaning over referential meaning.