Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior

One aim of this paper is to make a contribution to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable

adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations (e.g., ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘elegant’). And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary semantic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that

examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment turns out to be different from what they had in mind.