This paper presents an account of how to evaluate formal models of science: models and simulations in social epistemology designed to draw normative conclusions about the social structure of scientific research. I argue that such models should be evaluated according to their representational and predictive accuracy. Using these criteria and comparisons with familiar models from science, I argue that most formal models of science are incapable of supporting normative conclusions.

The economics of science is a discipline with a long history, and yet one where there if often too little dialogue between its constituent parts. The articles in this issue's focused discussion begin to address that problem by examining recent developments in science's economic circumstances from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Prediction markets, which trade contracts based on the results of predictions, have been remarkably successful in predicting the results of political events. A number of proposals have been made to extend prediction markets to scientific questions, and some small-scale science prediction markets have been implemented. Advocates for science prediction markets argue that they could alleviate problems in science such as bias in peer review and epistemically unjustified consensus. I argue that bias in peer review and epistemically unjustified consensuses are genuine (...) problems in science, and that current attempts to solve them fail in practical circumstances. Prediction markets do show some promise for answering scientific questions while avoiding the pitfalls of consensus and peer review. However, there are strong reasons to believe that science prediction markets will not perform nearly so well as election prediction markets, and implementing prediction markets on a large scale could have significant unintended consequences for the organization of scientific research. The promise of prediction markets to solve current problems in assessing scientific claims is therefore largely illusory. (shrink)

According to Margaret Gilbert’s collective epistemology, we should take attributions of beliefs to groups seriously, rather than metaphorically or as reducible to individual belief. I argue that, similarly, attributions of belief to markets ought to be taken seriously and not merely as reports of the average beliefs of market participants. While many of Gilbert’s purported examples of group belief are better thought of as instances of acceptance, some collectives, such as courts and markets, genuinely believe. Such collectives enact truth-aimed processes (...) that are beyond the control of any single individual. These processes produce beliefs that are distinct from any individual belief and do not merely report the “average” or “majority” view of the group. In the case of markets, beliefs are indicated by prices, though it is often difficult to infer beliefs from prices and those inferences are almost always uncertain. Reliabilism is the best available standard of justification for market beliefs. In some cases market beliefs are reliable and prove to be true. Thus, in some cases markets can know. (shrink)

Historian and philosopher of science Steve Fuller has long embraced his role as a public intellectual. As part of that mission, he testified in the 2005 Dover school board trials, arguing that intelligent design could legitimately claim scientific status. He has since written two books on the intelligent design controversy. Science, his latest effort, is part of The Art of Living series. It is ostensibly an exploration of what it means to “live scientifically,” but is more accurately described as an (...) argument for the necessary connection between science and theology. Fuller’s central argument should be no surprise to those familiar with his previous commentary on intelligent design. It is a two-pronged pragmatic argument. On the one hand, Darwinism is dispensable: most work in biology does not rely on Darwin’s theory of evolution (think molecular biology). On the other hand, religion is indispensable for scientific progress: without believing that the universe has been designed to be intelligible to humans, there is no motivation for scientists to attempt to comprehend it. However, in Science Fuller goes further than this. He also claims that a designer with intelligence resembling our own is the best explanation for the success of science. (shrink)

David Tyfield’s two-volume The Economics of Science is an ambitious and valuable attempt to explain recent developments in economics of science using a critical realist/Marxian framework, and at the same time to unite critical realism with science and technology studies.

This chapter presents an alternative to the standard view that at least some of the evaluations that the so-called “thick” terms and concepts in ethics may be used to convey belong to their sense or semantic meaning. After introducing the topic and making some methodological remarks, the chapter presents a wide variety of linguistic data that are well explained by the alternative view that at least a very wide range of thick terms and concepts are such that even the evaluations (...) that are most closely connected to them are only a certain kind of defeasible implications of their utterances which can be given a conversational explanation. The chapter then describes some reasons to think that this explanation of the data presented is superior to the standard view, although a fuller assessment must await further work. The chapter closes by explaining the largely deflationary consequences of this account for claims that thick terms and concepts have deep and distinctive significance to evaluative thought and judgment. (shrink)

Non-cognitivists claim that thick concepts can be disentangled into distinct descriptive and evaluative components and that since thick concepts have descriptive shape they can be mastered independently of evaluation. In Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, John McDowell uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to show that such a non-cognitivist view is untenable. In this paper I do several things. I describe the non-cognitivist position in its various forms and explain its driving motivations. I then explain McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism and the Wittgensteinian considerations upon (...) which it relies, because this has been sufficiently misunderstood by critics and rarely articulated by commentators. After clarifying McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism, I extend the analysis to show that commentators of McDowell have failed to appreciate his argument and that critical responses have been weak. I argue against three challenges posed to McDowell, and show that the case of thick concepts should lead us to reject non-cognitivism. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our (...) operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts. (shrink)

[First published 09/2016; substantive revision 02/2021.] Evaluative terms and concepts are often divided into “thin” and “thick”. We don’t evaluate actions and persons merely as good or bad, or right or wrong, but also as kind, courageous, tactful, selfish, boorish, and cruel. The latter evaluative concepts are "descriptively thick": their application somehow involves both evaluation and a substantial amount of non-evaluative description. This article surveys various attempts to answer four fundamental questions about thick terms and concepts. (1) A “combination question”: (...) how exactly do thick terms and concepts relate evaluation and non-evaluative description? (2) A “location question”: is evaluation somehow inherent to thick terms and concepts, such as perhaps an aspect of their meaning, or merely a feature of their use? (3) A “delineation question”: how do thick terms differ from the thin and from other kinds of evaluative terms? (4) Given answers to these questions, what broader philosophical significance and applications might thick concepts have? (shrink)

This paper presents an alternative to the standard view that the evaluations that the so-called "thick" terms and concepts in ethics may be used to convey belong to their sense or semantic meaning. I describe a large variety of linguistic data that are well explained by the alternative view that the evaluations that (at least a very wide range of) thick terms and concepts may be used to convey are a certain kind of defeasible implications of their utterances which can (...) be given a conversational explanation. I then provide some reasons to think that this explanation of the data is superior to the standard view, but a fuller assessment must await further work. In closing I briefly survey the largely deflationary consequences of this account regarding the significance of thick terms and concepts for evaluative thought and judgment. (shrink)

One major insight derived from the moral twin earth debate is that evaluative and descriptive terms possess different levels of semantic stability, in that the meanings of the former but not the latter tend to remain constant over significant counterfactual variance in patterns of application. At the same time, it is common in metanormative debate to divide evaluative terms into those that are thin and those that are thick. In this paper, I combine debates about semantic stability and the distinction (...) between the thin and the thick by presenting a new seamless inferentialist account of thin and thick evaluative terms which, despite subsuming them under the same metasemantic analysis, can nevertheless account for their varying levels of semantic stability. According to this position of ‘seamless metaconceptualism’, thin and thick evaluative terms do not belong to different categories, but are both understood as metaconceptual devices which do not differ in kind, but in scope. By providing the same analysis for both thin and thick terms, seamless metaconceptualism not only entails that the latter cannot shoulder the philosophical work that some have attributed to them, but also removes much of their surrounding intrigue. (shrink)

The thick-esse /thin-essence view asserts that esse—the act of existing—constitutes all of the ontological positivity, perfection, and intelligibility of a being, while essence is simply an internal limitation or mode of the esse of a being. In this paper I explain why Fr. W. Norris Clarke’s Thomistic personalism relies on the thick-esse /thin-essence view; acknowledge three objections to the thick-esse /thin-essence view; reply to these objections; and provide a positive argument for the thick-esse /thin-essence view. I conclude that Clarke’s reliance (...) on a thick-esse /thin-essence view does not militate against his Thomistic personalism; on the contrary, it militates in its favor. In order to reach this conclusion, though, I make it clear that the details of Clarke’s thick-esse /thin-essence view must be modified to fall in line with the details of William E. Carlo’s thick-esse /thin-essence view. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that so-called "thick" terms and concepts in ethics (such as 'cruel,' 'selfish,' 'courageous,' and 'generous') are contextually variable with respect to the valence (positive or negative) of the evaluations that they may be used to convey. Some of these philosophers use this variability claim to argue that thick terms and concepts are not inherently evaluative in meaning; rather their use conveys evaluations as a broadly pragmatic matter. I argue that one sort of putative examples of contextual variability (...) in evaluative valence that are found in the literature fail to support the variability claim and that another sort of putative examples are open to a wide range of explanations that have different implications for the relationship between thick terms and concepts and evaluation. I conclude that considerations of contextual variability fail to settle whether thick terms and concepts are inherently evaluative in meaning. In closing I suggest a more promising line of research. (shrink)

In this article I compare Ryle's notion of a thick description with Williams' notion of a thick concept so as to illuminate our understanding of both. In doing so I suggest lines of thought that show us that the notion of 'evaluation' in play in many people's writings should be broadened. Doing so will help to lessen the credibility of separationist notions of thick concepts.

What is the relation between the concept good and more specific or ‘thick’ concepts such as admirable or courageous? I argue that good or more precisely good pro tanto is a general concept, but that the relation between good pro tanto and the more specific concepts is not that of a genus to its species. The relation of an important class of specific evaluative concepts, which I call ‘affective concepts’, to good pro tanto is better understood as one between a (...) determinable and its determinates, whereas concepts such as courageous can be analysed in terms of affective concepts and purely descriptive concepts. (shrink)

This book explores, in rich and rigorous ways, the possibilities and limitations of “thick” autonomy in light of contemporary debates in philosophy, ethics, and bioethics. Many standard ethical theories and practices, particularly in domains such as biomedical ethics, incorporate minimal, formal, procedural concepts of personal autonomy and autonomous decisions and actions. Over the last three decades, concerns about the problems and limitations of these “thin” concepts have led to the formulation of “thick” concepts that highlight the mental, corporeal, biographical and (...) social conditions of what it means to be a human person and that enrich concepts of autonomy, with direct implications for the ethical requirement to respect autonomy. The chapters in this book offer a wide range of perspectives on both the elements of and the relations between “thin” and “thick” concepts of autonomy as well as their relative roles and importance in ethics and bioethics. This book offers valuable and illuminating examinations of autonomy and respect for autonomy, relevant for audiences in philosophy, ethics, and bioethics. (shrink)

A virtue account is focused on the character of those who argue. It is frequently assumed, however, that virtues are not action guiding, since they describe how to be and so fail to give us specific actions to take in a sticky situation. In terms of argumentation, we might say that being a charitable arguer is virtuous, but knowing so provides no details about how to argue successfully. To close this gap, I develop a parallel with the thick-thin distinction from (...) ethics and use Hursthouse’s notion of “v-rules”. I also draw heavily from the work in argumentation by Daniel Cohen to develop Wayne Brockriede’s notion of arguing lovingly. But “argue lovingly” has a delicious ambiguity. For Brockriede it describes how we engage with others arguers. It can also mean, however, a loving attachment to knowledge, understanding, and truth. Applying the thick-thin distinction to argumentation in general and loving argumentation in particular shows that a virtue theoretic approach to argumentation is valuable for two reasons: it can provide one articulation of what it means to be a virtuous arguer and provide some insights into how to become one. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts in ethics somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. The non-evaluative aspects of thick terms and concepts underdetermine their extensions. Many writers argue that this underdetermination point is best explained by supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative in some way such that evaluation plays a role in determining their extensions. This paper argues that the extensions of thick terms and concepts are underdetermined by their meanings in toto, irrespective of whether their extensions are partly (...) determined by evaluation; the underdetermination point can therefore be explained without supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative. My argument applies general points about semantic gradability and context-sensitivity to the semantics of thick terms and concepts. (shrink)

What is the difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind? Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts (such as good, bad, right and wrong) are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones (including brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, and mean) are termed thick concepts. In this volume, an international (...) team of experts addresses the questions that this distinction opens up. How do the descriptive and evaluative functions or elements of thick concepts combine with each other? Are these functions or elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how other thick concepts work, such as those found in aesthetics and epistemology? How, if at all, are thick concepts related to reasons and action? These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and raise fascinating issues about. (shrink)

This paper uses the distinction between thick and thin ethical concepts to illuminate the philosophical discourse referred to as “applied ethics.” It explores what thick ethical concepts have to offer in terms of a method for discussing issues in applied ethics. By focusing on thick ethical concepts, applied ethics can avoid the pitfall of creating a conceptual gap between empirical discourse and normative discourse. Applied ethics, the paper argues, is linked to philosophical and anthropological aspirations that have traditionally sought to (...) uncover the thick normative vocabulary relevant to particular practices and cultures. By focusing on thick descriptions, applied ethics discloses the rich normative meaning of our social practices and social relations. The concepts used therein are often unintelligible apart from the particular social practices through which their meaning is manifested. Accordingly, thick ethical concepts are philosophically useful for adopting a nonrepresentational conception of language, which underlies the expression of meaning of particular social practices. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel distinction between accounts of scientific representation: it distinguishes thin accounts from thick accounts. Thin accounts focus on the descriptive aspect of representation whereas thick accounts acknowledge the evaluative aspect of representation. Thin accounts focus on the question of what a representation as such is. Thick accounts start from the question of what an adequate representation is. In this paper, I give two arguments in favor of a thick account, the Argument of the Epistemic Aims of (...) Modeling and the Argument of the Normativity of the Practice of Modeling. I also discuss possible objections to a thick account: the Argument from Misrepresentation and the Objections from Model Testing. The conclusion will be that the arguments on balance support a thick account of representation. (shrink)

Thick concepts provide a focal point for several important issues in ethical theory. Separatists argue that the descriptive and evaluative elements of a thick concept can be separated out. Non-separatists deny this and claim that there are no descriptive boundaries delimiting a thick concept. A common strategy for both camps in the debate has been an appeal to armchair intuitions of various everyday thick concepts. My alternative strategy consists in a closer study of the professional practice of risk analysis. As (...) a well-developed practice, it provides substantial material for analysis. Moreover, its central concepts of risk and safety are typically seen as scientific concepts fitting the separatist analysis. Still, I argue that there are several evaluative aspects in risk and safety ascription that are hard to account for on a separatist analysis. I consider three separatist strategies, and conclude that they all fail. The result is a corroboration of the general non-separatist thesis put forward by theorists such as John McDowell and Bernard Williams. (shrink)

Many theorists hold that there is, among value concepts, a fundamental distinction between thin ones and thick ones. Among thin ones are concepts like good and right. Among concepts that have been regarded as thick are discretion, caution, enterprise, industry, assiduity, frugality, economy, good sense, prudence, discernment, treachery, promise, brutality, courage, coward, lie, gratitude, lewd, perverted, rude, glorious, graceful, exploited, and, of course, many others. Roughly speaking, thick concepts are value concepts with significant descriptive content. I will discuss a number (...) of problems having to do with how best to understand the notion of a thick concept. Thick concepts have been widely discussed in the .. (shrink)

Many philosophers of the last century thought all moral judgments can be expressed using a few basic concepts — what are today called ‘thin’ moral concepts such as ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘right,’ and ‘wrong.’ This was the view, fi rst, of the non-naturalists whose work dominated the early part of the century, including Henry Sidgwick, G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad. Some of them recognized only one basic concept, usually either ‘ought’ or ‘good’; others thought there were two. But they (...) all assumed that other moral concepts, including such ‘thick’ ones as the virtue-concepts ‘courageous’ and ‘kindly,’ can be reductively analyzed using one or more thin concepts and some more or less determinate.. (shrink)

Thick ethical concepts are characterized by having both a “world-guided”/descriptive and an “action-guiding”/prescriptive aspect. The purpose of this paper is to argue that if we conceive of rationality as a thick ethical concept we will be able to understand two things. First, why people are inclined to believe that rationality – even if defined in terms of rational requirements – actually is normative. The action-guiding aspect of the concept of ‘rationality’ is responsible for this. It is highlighted for example by (...) the fact that accusing somebody of behaving irrationally works as a stand-alone criticism of an action or actor. Second, we can also understand why those recent arguments by Broome and Kolodny trying to show just how rationality is normative fail. They are proceeding solely based on a world-guided definition of rationality. This does not lead to a misapplication of the concept stricto sensu; but to a thin concept which necessarily fails to grasp the evaluative force of the concept of ‘rationality’. This is particularly insightful for economists who often tend to use ‘rationality’ as a standard for judging behavior. (shrink)

The term naturalism arouses strong emotions; religious naturalism even more. In this essay, naturalism is explored in a variety of contexts, in contrast to supernaturalism (in metaphysics), normativism (in ethics and epistemology), and rationalism (in the philosophy of mind). It is argued that religious naturalism becomes a “thick” naturalism, a way of life rather than just a philosophical position. We can discern a subculture with a historical identity, a variety of dialects, stories that evoke attitudes and feelings, as well as (...) more systematic theological elaborations. In this context, religious naturalists are called to thicken further the ways of life that embody their religious and naturalist sensitivities. In order to speak of a naturalist theology in this context, one has to define theology in a way that avoids assumptions regarding the supernatural; this can be achieved by presenting theologies as particular combinations of cosmologies (informed by the sciences) and axiologies (values). (shrink)

In this paper I develop my account of moral particularism, focussing on the nature of thick moral concepts. My aim is to show how the particularist can consistently uphold an non-reductive cognitivist ‘dual role’ view of thick moral concepts, even though she holds that the qualities ascribed by such concepts can vary in their moral relevance – so that to judge that something is generous or an act of integrity need not entail that the object of evaluative appraisal is good (...) to some extent. A novel particularist account of thick concepts is proposed, in response to recent work on variance holism. The particularist rejects the holist’s attempt to preserve the idea that thick concepts are evaluative concepts by postulating a special semantic content, a contextually variable evaluative valence, as theoretically unmotivated and conceptually confused. Instead it is argued that the thick concepts have determinable evaluative content in situ only. (shrink)

A term expresses a thick concept if it expresses a specific evaluative concept that is also substantially descriptive. It is a matter of debate how this rough account should be unpacked, but examples can help to convey the basic idea. Thick concepts are often illustrated with virtue concepts like courageous and generous, action concepts like murder and betray, epistemic concepts like dogmatic and wise, and aesthetic concepts like gaudy and brilliant. These concepts seem to be evaluative, unlike purely descriptive concepts (...) such as red and water. But they also seem different from general evaluative concepts. In particular, thick concepts are typically contrasted with thin concepts like good, wrong, permissible, and ought, which are general evaluative concepts that do not seem substantially descriptive. When Jane says that Max is good, she appears to be evaluating him without providing much description, if any. Thick concepts, on the other hand, are evaluative and substantially descriptive at the same time. For instance, when Max says that Jane is courageous, he seems to be doing two things: evaluating her positively and describing her as willing to face risk. Because of their descriptiveness, thick concepts are especially good candidates for evaluative concepts that pick out properties in the world. Thus they provide an avenue for thinking about ethical claims as being about the world in the same way as descriptive claims. -/- Thick concepts became a focal point in ethics during the second half of the twentieth century. At that time, discussions of thick concepts began to emerge in response to certain disagreements about thin concepts. For example, in twentieth-century ethics, consequentialists and deontologists hotly debated various accounts of good and right. It was also claimed by non-cognitivists and error-theorists that these thin concepts do not correspond to any properties in the world. Dissatisfaction with these viewpoints prompted many ethicists to consider the implications of thick concepts. The notion of a thick concept was thought to provide insight into meta-ethical questions such as whether there is a fact-value distinction, whether there are ethical truths, and, if there are such truths, whether these truths are objective. Some ethicists also theorized about the role that thick concepts can play in normative ethics, such as in virtue theory. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interest in thick concepts had spread to other philosophical disciplines such as epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of law. -/- Nevertheless, the emerging interest in thick concepts has sparked debates over many questions: How exactly are thick concepts evaluative? How do they combine evaluation and description? How are thick concepts related to thin concepts? And do thick concepts have the sort of significance commonly attributed to them? This article surveys various attempts at answering these questions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Profit maximizers have reasons to agree with stakeholder theorists that managers may need to consider different values simultaneously in decision making. However, it remains unclear how maximizing a single value can be reconciled with simultaneously considering different values. A solution can neither be found in substantive normative philosophical theories, nor in postulating the maximization of profit. Managers make sense of the values in a situation by means of the many thick value concepts of ordinary language. Thick evaluation involves the simultaneous (...) consideration of different values: making sense of a value always involves knowing how to engage with it given the other values in the situation. This also goes for profit: maximization is only one way of engaging with the value of profit, and grasping whether maximization is appropriate involves considering other values. We discuss some consequences of our approach for stakeholder theorists and profit maximizers. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify the view that thick concepts are irreducibly thick. I do this by putting the disentangling argument in its place and then setting out what nonreductivists about the thick are committed to. To distinguish the view from possible reductive accounts, defenders of irreducible thickness are, I argue, committed to the claim that evaluative concepts and properties are nonevaluatively shapeless. This in turn requires a commitment to (radical) holism and particularism. Nonreductivists are also committed to the claim (...) that a thick concept is in itself evaluative, and not evaluative because of any link to thin evaluation. (shrink)

Thick moral concepts are a topic of particular disagreement in discussions of reasons holism. These concepts, such as justice, are called “thick” because they have both evaluative and descriptive aspects. Thin moral concepts, such as good, are purely evaluative. The disagreement concerns whether the fact that an action is, for example, just always a reason in favor of performing that action. The present argument follows Jonathan Dancy’s strategy of connecting moral reasons and concepts to those in other domains. If Dancy (...) is correct then we should expect holism about thick moral concepts to the same extent to which we find holism for other sorts of thick concepts. Using this strategy two claims are defended: that reasons holism is characteristic of non-moral thick concepts—specifically, of aesthetic, epistemic and prudential thick concepts—and that such non-moral concepts exemplify useful and heretofore unnoticed models for thick moral concepts. (shrink)

This article explores the justification for the defendant’s restitutionary obligation to the plaintiff consequent on an unjust enrichment. It focuses on the dominant corrective justice explanation, according to which the duty of restitution instantiates this virtue. It identifies two types of corrective justice explanation: a thin and thick version, attributed to John Gardner and Ernest Weinrib, respectively. According to the thin version, corrective justice is confined to the remedial relation between the plaintiff and the defendant; it is solely concerned with (...) the norm of justice that provides reasons to transfer back. The thick account in contrast does not restrict corrective justice to this remedial stage. Rather, it understands it as encompassing the relationship between the parties from the outset. Both accounts fail to provide a satisfactory explanation for the duty of restitution for unjust enrichment. Their failures, however, are instructive, illuminating a possible route to a more nuanced understanding of private law’s remedial obligations and their justifications. (shrink)

Thick concepts, namely those concepts that describe and evaluate simultaneously, present a challenge to science. Since science does not have a monopoly on value judgments, what is responsible research involving such concepts? Using measurement of wellbeing as an example, we first present the options open to researchers wishing to study phenomena denoted by such concepts. We argue that while it is possible to treat these concepts as technical terms, or to make the relevant value judgment in-house, the responsible thing to (...) do, especially in the context of public policy, is to make this value judgment through a legitimate political process that includes all the stakeholders of this research. We then develop a participatory model of measurement based on the ideal of co-production. To show that this model is feasible and realistic, we illustrate it with a case study of co-production of a concept of thriving conducted by the authors in collaboration with a UK anti-poverty charity Turn2us. (shrink)

In ethics, aesthetics and increasingly in epistemology, a distinction is drawn between thick and thin evaluative concepts. A common characterisation of the distinction is that thin concepts have only evaluative content, whereas thick concepts combine evaluative and descriptive content. Because of this combination, it is again commonly thought that thick concepts have various distinctive powers including the power to undermine the distinction between fact and value. This paper discusses the accuracy of this view of the thick concepts debate, as well (...) as assessing the prospects for a thick concepts argument against the fact value distinction, while introducing the three main philosophical positions on the nature of thick concepts. (shrink)

Although thick ethical concepts have been neglected in Murdochian scholarship, this article argues that they were central to the thought of Iris Murdoch. In the first section, the article provides a sustained account of thick ethical concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, demonstrating how these concepts align with and illuminate familiar aspects of her philosophical essays. The first section also explores the ways in which Murdoch's alternative account of moral concepts was at the heart of her overall attack on the noncognitivism of (...) her day. In the second section, the article provides a reading of The Black Prince and considers the ways that thick ethical concepts offer new insight into Murdoch's literary activity. It concludes by suggesting that studying Murdoch's philosophy and literature in light of thick ethical concepts reveals a deep unity between her two intellectual projects. (shrink)

If liberal Protestantism begins with suspicion of tradition, is “thick” liberal Protestant theology possible or must liberal Protestant theology always be “thin”? This review essay examines several recent contributions to “thick” theology that make use of, and speak to, social and political engagement. The books under review describe and reflect on the varied forms of Christian political activism and organizing that have emerged in recent years around issues of immigration, fair wages, and global justice. I argue that a distinction between (...) Christian activism and Christian organizing must be made, where the former denotes advocacy on behalf of a community and the latter means standing together with a community, bringing out the capacities of community members, and allowing oneself to be transformed in the process. Further, I reflect on whether liberal Christian theology necessarily results in liberal politics. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the experience of a poem qua poem is an experience of poetic thickness , i.e. an experience in which poetic form and poetic content are inseparable. I present a critical analysis of A. C. Bradley’s ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ lecture in Section 1, indicating both the strengths and weaknesses of his conception of resonant meaning. Section 2 draws on subsequent work by I. A. Richards and Peter Lamarque to advance my account (...) of the relationship in question, poetic thickness, understood as a demand made of a poem rather than a property discovered therein. In Sections 3–6 I discuss four objections to form-content unity from Peter Kivy: perfect circularity, ubiquitous unity, the sugar-coated pill tradition, and the defence from tradition. I show that all these objections fail against poetic thickness. I conclude that the experience of a poem qua poem is indeed an experience of thickness, and that poetic thickness is therefore a necessary condition of poetry. (shrink)

Social dimension of moral responsibility has started to gain more attention in moral philosophy, be it within the network of action theory, or any other meta-ethical domain. Although there are many social acts and therefore social dimensions of responsibility, I aim to indicate one aspect of sociality in our thinking and practice, particularly in our moral thinking, that is the thick concepts. In this work, I consider Vargas’s concept moral ecology (2015, 2018) as a tool to understand certain social aspects (...) of moral responsibility, while claiming to extend his line of thinking in moral ecology by giving a more active role to the individual agent within the ecology that she is engaged in. I claim that when we understand the relationships between the agent and her surrounding ecology in a more complex, and under certain circumstances in a rather reciprocal way, we can have a better and more nuanced understanding of non-ideal moral landscapes that we are engaged in, while maintaining a certain kind of responsibility to the agents in their social environments. I will use the term niche construction and niche selection – concept that are already at use within the similar biological line of thought within action – to refer to such situations where agents are actively shaping their environments. (shrink)

The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology.

Argues that there is a puzzle about how our own thick concepts, which motivate us simply because they are our own, can be legitimated in any stronger sense than that, from a perspective which is not an “insider perspective.”.

Bernard Williams argued that philosophers should pay more attention to the role thick ethical concepts play in our moral thinking, and, separately, that all reasons for action depend in the first place upon the agent's pre-exisitng motives. Here I argue that these two views are in tension. Much like the standard examples of thick ethical concepts, the concept REASONABLE is likewise thick, and the features of the world that guide its correct use have much less to do with the agent's (...) pre-existing motives than internalism about reasons for action maintains. (shrink)

'Thick neural event' is introduced to mean an event that requires firings of more than one neuron and a substantive (i.e. additional to merely temporal and spatial) relation among them. It is shown that some well regarded theories (e.g. by Lamme, Koch, etc.) strongly suggest that neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) are thick neural events. It is then shown that thin (= not thick) neural events provide sufficient causation for neural events leading to behaviour, and that there are good reasons (...) to reject overdetermination by thick events. Thus, any physicalism that recognizes legitimacy of a search for NCCs must either reject theories that embrace thickness of NCCs, or accept the epiphenomenalistic view that the properties in virtue of which we are conscious are not properties in virtue of which events causally contribute to our behaviour. (shrink)

Ethicists are typically willing to grant that thick terms (e.g. ‘courageous’ and ‘murder’) are somehow associated with evaluations. But they tend to disagree about what exactly this relationship is. Does a thick term’s evaluation come by way of its semantic content? Or is the evaluation pragmatically associated with the thick term (e.g. via conversational implicature)? In this paper, I argue that thick terms are semantically associated with evaluations. In particular, I argue that many thick concepts (if not all) conceptually entail (...) evaluative contents. The Semantic View has a number of outspoken critics, but I shall limit discussion to the most recent--Pekka Väyrynen--who believes that objectionable thick concepts present a problem for the Semantic View. After advancing my positive argument in favor of the Semantic View (section II), I argue that Väyrynen’s attack is unsuccessful (section III). One reason ethicists cite for not focusing on thick concepts is that such concepts are supposedly not semantically evaluative whereas traditional thin concepts (e.g. good and wrong) are. But if my view is correct, then this reason must be rejected. (shrink)

This is a review essay devoted to Pekka Väyrynen’s The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty. Väyrynen’s book, concerned with thick terms and thick concepts, argues for a pragmatic view on the evaluativeness associated with these terms and concepts. The essay raises a number of critical questions regarding what Väyrynen’s arguments for his view actually show. It deals with, for example, thick properties, the fact-value distinction, what it is for terms and concepts to be (semantically) evaluative, and whether Väyrynen’s arguments (...) generalize to thin evaluative concepts. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize the pairing of irreducible thickness with the traditional view of evaluation which says evaluation is a matter of encoding good or bad in some way. To do this, I first explicate the determination view, which holds that irreducibly thick concepts are to thin concepts as determinates are to determinables. I then show that, even if the determination view did establish irreducible thickness, it would not have proven that the evaluative is well understood as being an (...) instance of the determination relation; in order to do that, the determination view needs to show how the evaluative fit a general analysis of the determination relation. However, when the determination view attempts to fill in the analysis, we get implausible results—so implausible, I claim, that we should see the results as a reductio to the view. To generalize the criticism to any view like the determination view, I show that the same results ensue when we model the evaluative on mereology. Finally, I diagnose the general failure by claiming that the evaluative domain, as conceived by the defender of irreducible thickness, just does not have the structure to secure the tight connection between thick and thin concepts while also carving up our conceptual economy in a plausible way. (shrink)

David Furley has suggested that we think of Callicles’ immoralism as attacking a thick concept. I take up this suggestion and apply it to the argument of Plato’s Gorgias more generally. I show that the discussion between Socrates, Gorgias and Polus, which prepares the ground for Callicles, is precisely addressing the thickness of the concept of justice: it reveals that this concept is both descriptive and evaluative and that formulating a revisionist position about justice is therefore extremely difficult. Callicles’ strategy (...) is best read as a response to this difficulty, which sets the stage for Socrates’ revisionist account of justice. (shrink)

In recent literature many theorists, including Eklund (2011), endorse or express sympathy towards the view that the evaluative content of thick terms is not asserted with utterances of sentences containing them but rather part of their secondary content. In this article we discuss a number of features of thick terms which speak against this view. We further argue that these features are not shared by another, recently much-discussed, class of hybrid evaluative terms, so-called slurs, and that the evaluative contents of (...) these might thus very well be secondary. (shrink)

Critics argue that non-cognitivism cannot adequately account for the existence and nature of some thick moral concepts. They use the existence of thick concepts as a lever in an argument against non-cognitivism, here called the Thick Concept Argument (TCA). While TCA is frequently invoked, it is unfortunately rarely articulated. In this paper, TCA is first reconstructed on the basis of John McDowell’s formulation of the argument (from 1981), and then evaluated in the light of several possible non-cognitivist responses. In general, (...) TCA assumes too much about what a non-cognitivist is (or must be) committed to. There are several non-cognitivist theories, and only some fit the view attacked by TCA. Furthermore, TCA rests on a contestable intuition about a thought experiment, here called the External Standpoint Experiment (ESE). It is concluded that TCA is remarkably weak, given how frequently the argument is invoked. (shrink)