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Syntactic theory has tended to vacillate between implausible methodological extremes. Some linguists hold that our theories are accountable solely for the corpus of attested utterances; others assume our subject matter is unobservable intuitive feelings about sentences. Both extremes should be rejected. The subject matter of syntax is neither past utterance production nor the functioning of inaccessible mental machinery; it is normative - a system of tacitly grasped constraints defining correctness of structure. There are interesting parallels between syntactic and moral systems, modulo the key difference that linguistic systems are diverse whereas morality is universal. The appropriate epistemology for justifying formulations of normative systems is familiar in philosophy: it is known as the method of reflective equilibrium.
Language of Responsibility. The Influence of Linguistic Abstraction on Collective Moral Emotions
(2017)
Two experiments investigated the effects of linguistic abstractness on the experience of collective moral emotions. In Experiment 1 participants were presented with two scenarios about ingroup misbehavior, phrased using descriptive action verbs, interpretative action verbs, adjectives or nouns. The results show that participants experienced slightly more negative moral emotions with higher levels of linguistic abstractness. In Experiment 2 we also tested for the influence of national identification on the relationship between linguistic abstractness and emotional reactions. Additionally, we expanded the number of scenarios. Experiment 2 replicated the earlier pattern, but found larger differences between conditions. The strength of national identification did not moderate the observed effects. The results of this research are discussed within the context of the linguistic category model and psychology of collective moral emotions.