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COGNITION & LANGUAGE
Inés Crespo: Affect and interaction in evaluative judgements
Thursday November 29, 2012 | 03:00 -04:00 PM | Cordura Hall 100

"Affect and interaction in evaluative judgements"


Inés Crespo
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam
Visiting student researcher at Dept. of Philosophy, UC Berkeley

(joint work with Raquel Fernández Rovira)


Gradable adjectives like 'heavy', 'hot', 'tasty' or 'delectable' are known to be vague, evaluative, and they feature in so-called faultless disagreements like:

(1)
A: This cake is tasty/expensive.
B: No, it's not!

The lion's share of the existing accounts of taste predicates like 'tasty' focuses on specifying the (context or assessor dependent) conditions under which taste predications like "This cake is tasty" or "I find this cake tasty" are true. Instead, we consider the interactive meaning of these predicates by focusing on the update effects that evaluations of taste, temperature, or weight bring about in conversation.

We argue that to account for these update effects one should consider an affective dimension of cognitive states. We propose to analyse this dimension in terms of the affordances available to the dialogue participants in their environment. Cognitive states also comprise an informational dimension which is entangled with the affective layer. Expertise, a crucial factor in the déroulement of conversations like (1), can be seen as a process of refinement of cognitive states in both the informational and the affective dimension.