[First published 09/2016; substantive revision 02/2021.] Evaluative terms and concepts are often divided into “thin” and “thick”. We don’t evaluate actions and persons merely as good or bad, or right or wrong, but also as kind, courageous, tactful, selfish, boorish, and cruel. The latter evaluative concepts are "descriptively thick": their application somehow involves both evaluation and a substantial amount of non-evaluative description. This article surveys various attempts to answer four fundamental questions about thick terms and concepts. (1) A “combination question”: (...) how exactly do thick terms and concepts relate evaluation and non-evaluative description? (2) A “location question”: is evaluation somehow inherent to thick terms and concepts, such as perhaps an aspect of their meaning, or merely a feature of their use? (3) A “delineation question”: how do thick terms differ from the thin and from other kinds of evaluative terms? (4) Given answers to these questions, what broader philosophical significance and applications might thick concepts have? (shrink)

Abstract This paper examines the treatment of thick ethical concepts in Williams's work in order to evaluate the consistency of his treatment of ethical and epistemic concepts and to assess whether the idea of a thick concept can be extended from ethics to epistemology. A virtue epistemology is described modeled on a cognitivist virtue ethics. Williams's genealogy of the virtues surrounding propositional knowledge (the virtues of ?truthfulness?) is critically evaluated. It is concluded that this genealogy is an important contribution to (...) the project of virtue epistemology. Thick concepts must not only feature in the account but will sustain more of the marks of objectivity than their ethical counterparts. This is so even on Williams's demanding assumptions. (shrink)

In ‘What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?’, Bernard Williams reaffirms J. L. Austin’s suggestion that philosophy might learn from tort law ‘the difference between practical reality and philosophical frivolity’. Yet while Austin regarded tort law as just another repository of time-tested concepts, on a par with common sense as represented by a dictionary, Williams argues that ‘the use of certain ideas in the law does more to show that those ideas have strength than is done by the mere (...) fact that they are part of the currency of common sense’. But what does it mean to show that ideas or concepts ‘have strength’? How does conceptual strength relate to the distinction between practical reality and philosophical frivolity? And what special features of the law are supposed to make it a better test of conceptual strength than common sense? In this chapter, I reconstruct and develop Williams’s answers to these questions. I show why Williams believes that we need to test the concepts forming the currency of common sense against practical reality as embodied by legal practice; I identify seven features of tort law that make it particularly suitable to act as such a test; I distinguish three respects in which concepts can show strength, and unpack Williams’s metaphor of microwave-resistant concepts: concepts capable of holding and presenting material for intense critical scrutiny without succumbing to it themselves; lastly, I show how philosophy can learn to identify systematically weak concepts, and the limits of otherwise valuable concepts, by considering which concepts fail the test. (shrink)

The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. We use evaluative terms and concepts every day. We call actions right and wrong, teachers wise and ignorant, and pictures elegant and grotesque. Philosophers place evaluative concepts into two camps. Thin concepts, such as goodness and badness, and rightness and wrongness (...) have evaluative content, but they supposedly have no or hardly any nonevaluative, descriptive content: they supposedly give little or no specific idea about the character of the person or thing described. In contrast, thick concepts such as kindness, elegance and wisdom supposedly give a more specific idea of people or things. Yet, given typical linguistic conventions, thick concepts also convey evaluation. Kind people are often viewed positively whilst ignorance has negative connotations. The distinction between thin and thick concepts is frequently drawn in philosophy and is central to everyday life. However, very few articles or books discuss the distinction. In this full-length study, Simon Kirchin discusses thin and thick concepts, highlighting key assumptions, questions and arguments, many of which have gone unnoticed. Kirchin focuses in on the debate between 'separationists' and 'nonseparationists'. Thick Evaluation argues for a version of nonseparationism, and in doing so argues both that many concepts are evaluative and also that evaluation is not exhausted by thin positive and negative stances. (shrink)

Is the idea of the voluntary important? Those who think so tend to regard it as an idea that can be metaphysically deepened through a theory about voluntary action, while those who think it a superficial idea that cannot coherently be deepened tend to neglect it as unimportant. Parting company with both camps, I argue that the idea of the voluntary is at once important and superficial—it is an essentially superficial notion that performs important functions, but can only perform them (...) if we refrain from deepening it. After elaborating the contrast between superficial and deepened ideas of the voluntary, I identify the important functions that the superficial idea performs in relation to demands for fairness and freedom. I then suggest that theories trying to deepen the idea exemplify a problematic moralization of psychology—they warp psychological ideas to ensure that moral demands can be met. I offer a three-tier model of the problematic dynamics this creates, and show why the pressure to deepen the idea should be resisted. On this basis, I take stock of what an idea of the voluntary worth having should look like, and what residual tensions with moral ideas this leaves us with. (shrink)