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Aesthetic adjectives lack uniform behavior Liao, Shen-yi McNally, Louise, 1965- Meskin, Aaron Aesthetic adjectives Aesthetic concepts Gradable adjectives Predicates of personal taste Experimental semantics Experimental philosophy Experimental philosophical aesthetics Context Comparison class The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent. Shen-yi Liao’s work was supported by a European Community FP7 Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship, grant PIIF-GA-2012-328977. Louise McNally’s work was supported by Spanish MINECO grant FFI2013-41301-P, AGAUR grant 2014SGR698, and an ICREA Academia award. 2017-09-26T12:26:26Z 2017-09-26T12:26:26Z 2016 info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion Liao S, McNally L, Meskin A. Aesthetic adjectives lack uniform behavior. Inquiry. 2016; 59(6):618-31. DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208927 0020-174X http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32802 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208927 eng Inquiry. 2016; 59(6):618-31. DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208927 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/1PE/FFI2013-41301-P info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7/328977 © Taylor & Francis. This is an electronic version of an article published in Liao S, McNally L, Meskin A. Aesthetic adjectives lack uniform behavior. Inquiry. 2016; 59(6):618-31. DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208927. Inquiry is available online at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208927 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess application/pdf application/pdf Taylor & Francis (Routledge)