Gradable Predicates of Experience

Nate Charlow (University of Toronto, St. George, University of Toronto at Mississauga)

Abstract: I provide a semantic analysis of the gradable predicates of experience (GPEs): is tasty, looks red, sounds like ‘yanny’, and so on. On this analysis, unrelativized GPEs express a speaker’s graded assessment of their experience (in an intuitive sense, for which I will propose a semantic formalization). Though the analysis is built to explain the “acquaintance inference” problematized by Pearson (2013); Ninan (2014), it is shown to account for the behavior of GPEs under questions, modal quantifiers, and attitude verbs. It is also shown to account for attested readings of attitude ascriptions embedding GPEs—what I call phenomenal readings—which other accounts have ignored (while providing appealing analyses of cases figuring centrally in certain debates in the philosophy of mind). Finally, it suggests an appealing account of the semantic categories of autocentricity and evaluativity, while explaining the divergent behavior of sentences of these categories with respect to linguistic expressions of disagreement.