There's one more kind of language that we need to discuss, because it's also used to stop the skeptical regress. Much like assuring and guarding and discounting, and this language is Evaluative. Just imagine, that a politician says, You ought to support my healthcare plan, because it would be good for the country. What is the word good doing here? Some philosopher's going to tell you that the word good is just a way of expressing your emotions. Or maybe telling you what to do. So the politician is saying, Yay, for my healthcare plan or telling you in an imperative form, you ought to support my healthcare plan. But that can't really be the whole story, because when someone says, Yay, Duke, like I do when I cheer for the Duke team. First of all I'm not saying that the team is good, I might cheer for the Duke team, even when I know they're not good. And secondly, you can't ask me why. If I say, Yay, Duke, it doesn't make any sense if you turn to me and say, but why? Why, yay Duke? It don't make any sense. So, merely to express your emotions with something like Yay, Duke, is very different from saying Duke has a good team. And saying Yay for my healthcare plan, is very different from saying that the healthcare plan is good for the country. Similarly, if I say, I don't like fish, so we shouldn't have fish for dinner. Well, I don't really owe you a reason. I can just say I just don't like the taste of fish, end of story, leave me alone. I don't owe you a reason for why I don't like fish, I just don't. But, if I say it's immoral to eat fish, it's wrong to eat fish. You ought not to eat fish. It's a very different story, now I owe you a reason. If I say, it's immoral to eat fish I need to say what's immoral about it? I need to point to some feature of eating fish that makes it immoral. I can't just use that evaluative language without some kind of reason to back it up, that would be illegitimate. So, what that shows is that merely expressing preferences is very different from making an evaluation and saying that something is good or bad or right or wrong or immoral or moral. And one way to capture this feature evaluative language is to interpret a word like Good as meets the standards and Bad as violates the standards. Notice it's very vague, because it doesn't tell you what the standards are and those standards will change from one context to another. If you're talking about a good painting, the standards of a good painting are different from when you're talking about say a good investment. Where the standards are going to be completely different from the aesthetic case. So, if we interpret good as meets the standards, and we say, my health care program is good for the country. Then that means, it meets the standards for what will make the country function in a certain way. Whereas if we say, eating fish is immoral, what we're saying is that eating fish violates a certain kind of standard. And more specifically it's a moral standard. That's why we use the word immoral. So we can interpret this language in terms of meeting or violating standards. And then, to give the reason, why it's good or bad, or right or wrong, or moral or immoral. We can cite the standard and apply it to the case in order to give a reason for why the evaluation holds. But now, here's the trick, when we call it good, we don't say what the standards are. We leave that up to the context to specify what kind of standard we're talking about. So, it's kind of like assuring, when you say, I assure you, and you might cite some, authority or tell them that you have some reason, and you don't tell them what the reason is. When you call it good, you say it does meet the standards, but you don't say the standards are. So, by alluding to the standards without actually laying them out, you have made your claim a little more defensible. Because, if you lay out the standards, they might be questionable and your audience would know exactly what to question and what to deny and how to object. But, if you simply say it's good, and all you're saying is, it meets the standards. Then, you've avoid it on objection and made your premise more defensible. And that's how this type of evaluation of language might help to stave off the skeptical regress. And here's another way evaluation can help. We don't always have to agree what the standards are. Suppose you're driving down the road and I say, you know we ought to turn left here. And you say, yeah we ought to turn left here. Well I might think that we ought to turn left here, because that's going to be a quicker way to get to our destination. But you might think that we ought to turn left here, because that's going to be a more beautiful view and you'll be able to look out on the hills. But, we can agree that we ought to turn left here. Cause, we both agree that turning left meets the standards, even though my standards are efficiency and getting there quickly. And your standards are aesthetic and getting beautiful views. So if you can get more people to agree to your premise simply by saying this health care plan will be good for the country, without saying exactly how it's going to be good. Then you've avoided people disputing your objections, because they can agree to it since they can use their own standards to determine whether it is good or not. And that could be yet another way to avoid the skeptical regress. Notice that evaluation can occur at a lot of different levels. We have some words that are very abstract like good and bad and ought and ought not, should, should not, right, wrong. And those words can be used in a lot of different context. You can have the wrong investment, or a good investment. Or an investment that you ought to make. But you can also drive on the right path, or a bad path or a way that you ought not to go. And so, you can have navigational standards and economic standards, but they can all be expressed by these very general abstract evaluative words. Like good and bad and right and wrong and ought and out not and should and should not and so on. But other evaluative words are much more specific. Now, for example, you can call a painting beautiful or ugly. But you don't call fertilizer beautiful or ugly. You would never say that a stock is beautiful or ugly. They're just not the kind of thing to be evaluated in that way. So an evaluative word like beautiful or ugly is more specific. It only applies to a small range of things. Things whereas other words apply like good and bad, apply to almost anything. Here's another example. Cruel or brave, a person can be cruel or brave. But you can't say that a painting is cruel or brave. Or a desk is cruel or brave, or a chair is cruel or brave. A chair might be comfortable. But a painting is not comfortable, and a soldier is not comfortable. Soldiers are brave or not, chairs are comfortable or not, but chairs are not brave or not, and soldiers are not comfortable or not. So these evaluative words like brave or cowardly, and beautiful are ugly, or comfortable or uncomfortable. Apply only to limited ranges of things, rather than to just about anything. So we have very general, or abstract devaluative words, and we have more specific More concrete evaluative words. And, of course, which ones are specific or concrete will vary. Some are more concrete than others. It's not an absolute dichotomy. But, some words that are evaluative really will apply to almost anything. And other words apply to a more limited class. And they vary in how limited that class of things they apply to will be. So you might ask, why are all these words evaluative words? Think about it. If you want to explain a more limited evaluative word like beautiful, you want to explain what it means. You need to define it in terms of the more general words, like good. If you want to say it's beautiful, you can say that kind of means looks good. I know that's not quite right, but basically, when you want to define the word beautiful, you need to cite one of the more general words good. And then cite the specific way in which it's good, namely, the way it looks. And when you want to say an economic word like bargain. Bargain means a good price. It sells for a good price, and a good price is a low price. So, when you define what a bargain is, you need to cite the word good in order to define bargain. So the relation between these very general evaluative words and the more specific evaluative words that makes them all evaluative. Is that you need to define the specific evaluative words in terms of the more general ones. So it all comes down to what makes something evaluative is its connection to what's good or bad or right or wrong or what ought or ought not to be done or should or shouldn't be done and so on. You know, the trickiest cases of evaluative words are, words that are contextually evaluative. They don't actually get defined by good or bad or right and wrong as their general meaning. But they do suggest an evaluation in a particular context. Let me give you an example of what I mean. A conservative politician might criticize her opponent by saying, Wow, his policies are way too liberal. Now, by calling them liberal, is that a criticism? Well, she intends it as a criticism, but does the word liberal mean that it's bad? Not really if you think about it, because the opponent might say, i'm proud to be a liberal. Being liberal's good, yes it's liberal, so what? Yes it's liberal, nothing wrong with that. The word liberal by itself doesn't mean that it's bad, even though the conservative thinks that things that are liberal are bad. So that word liberal is not evaluative in the strict sense, because it doesn't get defined by the words good or bad or right or wrong or should or should not. It's only evaluative in the context. It suggests an evaluation, because of the assumptions of the speaker, but it doesn't in and of itself mean that anything is bad, or good, for that matter. Because of this difference, we will call language evaluative only when it's openly and literally evaluative. So that it gets defined in terms of words like good or bad or right or wrong, and not when it's merely contextually evaluative. That is in the context given the assumptions of the speaker. This person needs to be suggesting an evaluation. If they're not openly, saying, this is good or bad or right or wrong, then, they're not really, using what language that we will call, evaluative. But there're a couple of tricky examples that are worth bringing up, okay? You might think, that if you take two good things, and put them together, it gets better. And when you add a bad thing to a good thing, it makes it worse. At least, that's the way it usually works. But notice, that when you say something's good, that suggests it's good. But when you say eh, it's pretty good, then you just added pretty, which is something good, to the word good. But, pretty good, it's not really any better than good, it might even be worse, but then you can add a negative word in the middle. huh, that was pretty darn good. Well that means it's very good, so you're actually taking a negative word darn and putting it in the middle of two positive words, pretty and good, and made something that means very good. So you really have to think carefully about exactly what the language means. It's not going to be a simple formula of adding and subtracting goods and bads to figure out whether the language is evaluative. Now another word that's surprising is the word too. I like spicy food so when I say, this food is spicy. That's good or, at least, it's neutral. To say it's spicy to me means I'm probably going to like it, but notice that if we just add that little word too. If I were to say this food is too spicy, that means it's bad. The little word too takes a positive evaluation or sometimes just something that's neutral and makes it bad. So the word too is actually a negative evaluative word, because it turns what was neutral or positive into something bad. It moves it in that negative evaluative direction. So it's a negative evaluative word. So is there anything wrong with using evaluative language? No, some people seem to think that you shouldn't evaluate at all that you should just describe. But they're just kidding themselves. Try going through life without deciding what's good or bad or right or wrong or what you ought or ought not to do. You can't really live your life without making evaluations at some point. So it's a mistake to think that evaluation is always bad. Of course, when you do evaluate, it's not like saying Yay, Duke. You have to give a reason. So you should think about the standards that you're applying and why they apply to this case. That's going to be your reason for evaluating the thing as good or bad. Because often going to be hard to come up with the exact standards that you're applying. Because people tend to think of things as good or bad without getting very specific about what the standards are. So you're not always going to be able to tell people what your standards are, and when you ask them, they're not always going to be able to specify what their standards are. But it's still going to be useful exercise, whenever you make an evaluation to think about why you think this thing is good or bad, or right or wrong. What are the standards that you're applying? And when somebody disagrees with you, to ask about what their standards are. So that you can understand where the disagreement is coming from. Although evaluation can be very useful and legitimate, it can also be dangerous. Because some people use evaluative terms without reasons. Let's call that Slanting. You slant when you use an evaluative word and don't give any justification for that use of the word. So you might call somebody an idiot or a queer and you're using an evaluative word or at least you take it to be negatively evaluative. And you haven't given any reason why there's anything wrong with what you're calling that nasty word. Now, that's slanting if you don't have any reason and that can be terribly illegitimate. When do people do it? Well they typically do it when they don't have any reason. If you don't have any reason for your evaluation you just use some nasty name like, you idiot. And, so when people start using language like that. When they start slanting then that's a good indication to you as a critic that that's the point at which their argument is probably week. Their using that kind of language to paper over cracks as I put it before in their argument. So as to hide what's the real weakness. So we can to use evaluative language in arguments, and how it gets placed at certain points to signal where the weaknesses, and the strengths, in the argument are. So now, what we've got, is we've got Argument Markers, we've got Assuring Terms, Guarding Terms, Discounting Terms, Evaluative Language. And in the next few lectures, we're going to look at a general technique that looks at all those different types of language. And uses those different categories to analyze some real passages that we found in newspapers. But before that, let's do a few exercises, just to make sure that you understand Evaluation.
