New Applications of the Assessment-Sensitivity Framework

The idea that various expressions in natural language are assessment-sensitive (that is, their denotation depends not only on the context of utterance, but also on the context of assessment) is not new. Authors such as MacFarlane (2003, 2005, 2009, 2014), Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson (2005), Lasersohn (2005, 2016), etc. have applied this idea to a large array of perspectival expressions such as predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals, gradable adjectives, knowledge attributions, conditionals, future contingents, etc. In this presentation, I attempt to make a prima facie case that the framework can be extended to yet other natural language expressions, including some socially relevant ones. I thus argue that the view is suitable both as a descriptive account of gender terms (“man”, “woman”, “non-binary”) and as an ameliorative one; that it can be applied to expressives (“jerk”, “asshole”) and slurs (“nerd”, the n-word) in a novel way; and that it seems to offer a simple treatment of dogwhistles (“inner city”, “welfare”). To be sure, in order to apply to such expressions, various modifications of the core idea of the framework will have to be introduced. But, although many details remain to be ironed out, I take the prospect of applying the assessment-sensitivity framework to the expressions listed to show both its fruitfulness and its capacity to illuminate important social phenomena.