Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives: Linguistic Foundations and Philosophical Applications

In Ignorance , Peter Unger famously argues for a version of radical skepticism, that everyone knows “hardly anything to be so.” Skepticism, of course, is nothing new. What was unique about Unger's position is that it relied on a distinction between relative and absolute terms, leading to a number of discoveries about the behavior and semantics of gradable adjectives. This paper will consider the research program that his argument has spawned, first in linguistics and then increasingly making its way back to philosophy, influencing debates in aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy.