We often make evaluative claims. We say things like that the treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar is deplorable, that it’s good that the weather is turning colder, and that Ocean’s 8 was a surprisingly good movie. The nature of values like goodness, beauty and deplorableness has always occupied philosophers.

Some philosophers have maintained that such values are objective qualities, whereas others have argued that they are somehow subjective in nature. To the latter group belong those who believe that evaluative discourse does not aim at describing a mind-independent reality at all but that it instead serves some other purpose, such as describing or expressing affective attitudes held by the speaker.

The latter kind of theory is at bottom a linguistic one, since it is about the meaning of a specific class of terms and statements. Nevertheless, very little effort has been made to investigate whether such theories can be supported on linguistic grounds. The project aims to remedy this deficit by investigating whether there is any linguistic support for theories according to which evaluative discourse is subjective in nature.