Lucien Baumgartner

Pejoration describes semantic change whereby words shift from neutral or positive to negative over time. We propose the Evaluative Absorption Model, both to characterize a specific pejoration phenomenon and to operationalize it by tracking (1) an initial rise in explicit negative modifiers in attributive position as a word acquires a negative sense, and (2) a subsequent decline in such modifiers once that sense becomes conventionalized. We illustrate this trajectory for four nouns — “propaganda”, “manipulation”, “harassment”, and “discrimination” — using diachronic corpus data from Google Ngram. Our model offers a transparent method for quantifying semantic pejoration.

Legal judgment is threatened by a plethora of biases. Among those, the effect of outcome bias – the tendency to let outcome severity distort assessments of mental states and culpability – is particularly well documented and its impact is hypothesized to be pervasive. AI advisory systems could in principle help alleviate human bias, but Almeida et al. (2024) found substantial outcome effects in several commercial LLMs, suggesting AI judgment may be comparably biased. We reassess these findings using eight current open-source models (Cogito, Deepseek- R1, Gemma 3, Llama 3.1, Mistral, Phi 4) across multiple parameter sizes and temperature settings, replicating the Flood Paradigm from Kneer and Skoczeń (2023). Using a multilevel model with 100 responses per condition per temperature, we find that current open-source models exhibit little to no outcome bias—in stark contrast to both human participants and the older LLMs tested previously. Only Cogito and Deepseek-R1 show small effects, and temperature variation contributes negligibly. However, models differ substantially in baseline judgment severity—Mistral rates culpability considerably higher than Gemma 3 or Phi 4—demonstrating that absence of outcome bias does not guarantee neutrality. Our findings support cautious optimism about research into open-source LLMs as debiasing tools in legal contexts, while emphasizing that bias is multidimensional and responsible deployment requires evaluation across bias types and doctrinal domains.

Corpus analysis allows researchers to inform, illuminate, and investigate many problems. This chapter provides easy access to some of the central tools commonly used in corpus linguistics. After a short exploration of pre-built corpora and a brief literature review surveying corpus-analytic studies in philosophy, we illustrate these tools by running several corpus analyses on the term “conspiracy theory.” These analyses show that “conspiracy theory” is a strongly evaluative term. The reader of this chapter can follow each of the steps of the corpus analyses using the online material that is freely available.

This graduate textbook provides a basic introduction to experimental philosophy (x-phi). In nine chapters, different methods and tools used in X-Phi are explained, spanning quantitative vignette studies, interactive experiments, corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments as well as qualitative interview studies. Each chapter introduces a specific experimental method by means of a case study in an easily accessible way and covers the whole research process from the development of a research question to the interpretation of the data.

The meaning of being healthy is widely debated, with many suggesting it is a multidimensional concept encompassing key dimensions such as the absence of disease, the presence of well-being, and a healthy lifestyle. While recent studies indicate that lifestyle may be a dominant dimension, it remains unclear whether this holds true across populations or if significant differences exist, particularly between laypeople and healthcare professionals. Our studies reveal a difference, but surprisingly, in the opposite direction of what the literature would predict: medical professionals are substantially more likely than laypeople to frame discussions of “healthy” and “unhealthy” in lifestyle contexts. This result challenges prevailing assumptions about the biomedical focus of healthcare professionals and has implications for improving health communication.

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity.

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room.

This article introduces a new pragmatic framework for dual character concepts and their expressions, offering an alternative to the received lexical‐semantic view. On the prevalent lexical‐semantic view, expressions such as “philosopher” or “scientist” are construed as lexical polysemes, comprising both a descriptive and a normative dimension. Thereby, this view prioritizes established norms, neglecting normative expressions emerging in specific contexts. In contrast, the pragmatic view integrates pragmatic modulation as a central element in explaining context‐dependent dual character concepts and expressions. This not only accounts for a wider range of phenomena but also addresses several theoretical shortcomings of the lexical view.

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.

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity.

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted.

This paper presents the results of two corpus studies investigating the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and genuine theories. The results of these studies show that conspiracy theories lack the epistemic and scientific standing characteristic of theories more generally. Instead, our findings indicate that conspiracy theories are spread in a manner that resembles the dissemination of rumors and falsehoods. Based on these empirical results, we argue that it is time for both re-engineering conspiracy theory and for relabeling "conspiracy theory". We propose relabelling conspiracy theories as either "conspiracy stories" or "conspiracy narratives" to more accurately convey their true nature.

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms.