Language, Action and Thought

The aim of the paper is to evaluate the prospects for an aesthetically informed assessment-sensitive semantic account of thick aesthetic predicates (TAPs) such as ‘balanced’, ‘unified’, ‘sombre’, and ‘shocking’. We distinguish two meaning dimensions concerning TAPs, truth-conditional and use-conditional or expressive, and provide a dualist semantics that posits assessment sensitivity at both levels. Then we evaluate the extent to which assessment sensitivity is an apt rendition of aesthetic discourse involving TAPs. We distinguish between experiential TAPs (‘sombre’, ‘shocking’) and theoretical TAPs (‘unified’, ‘balanced’), and argue that there is evidence for a relativistic construal both at the truth-conditional and the expressive level for experiential TAPs, but not for theoretical TAPs. Thus, an upper bound is found on how much assessment sensitivity characterises aesthetic discourse.