The form of good

TL;DR

This paper examines the idea that the word 'good' has a uniform form in sentences and argues that the differences in its usage are real, not illusory.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new strategy for opposing uniformity theses about 'good' and advocates for non-uniformity contextualism and relativism.

Findings

Uniformity theses about 'good' lack strong motivation.

Tough-adjective data supports the argument against uniformity.

Non-uniformity contextualism and relativism offer better explanations for 'good' constructions.

Abstract

Some philosophers hold that sentences with the word good have a uniform form. On this view, many of the apparent syntactic and semantic differences between (say) That is a good knife, Xavier is good with children and It is good to have pets are illusory. A difficulty in evaluating uniformity theses is that they are often not formulated in a linguistically precise way. I provide an interpretation where uniformity theses treat good as taking the same arguments at some syntactic or semantic level. I then defend the view that the motivation for uniformity theses is weak, and I develop a strategy for opposing them. One version of this strategy is deployed, drawing on under-appreciated data about tough-adjectives. I argue that there is better motivation for alternative analyses of good, namely ‘non-uniformity contextualism’ and ‘relativism’. The resulting picture is one where the apparent syntactic and semantic differences between good-constructions are genuine.

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