ABSTRACT
Suppose a man says to a woman that she has “the most beautiful eyes in the world” and the woman says to the man that he is “wonderful in a way that nobody else is”. Do we take these statements at face value? It would be odd to do so. e woman might rush off and compare her features and dimensions with photographs of various other women who exemplify and fi x her standard for beauty. But it would be odd to suppose that the man is applying any precise standard at all, that he is even familiar with all the eyes in the world or that he is commenting only about her eyes rather than commenting about who she is and what she means to him. Utterances of this sort do not indicate that the speaker has set himself up as a judge of some extensive competition in which the rest of humanity are unwitting entrants. If asked, “Why are my eyes so beautiful?”, he might reply, “because they are yours”, and the obvious circularity here would reinforce the point that while he is commenting about her beauty, he is not engaging in a strict and literal description that is focused on precisely one aspect of her anatomy. It would similarly be odd for the man to puzzle about the true nature of his own wonderfulness in the light of her comments and to do so in order to gain personal insight. ese are familiar ways of speaking, terms of endearment. ey say something but they do not count as evidence for the pessimist’s claim that love involves delusion in the form of an overestimation of those we love.
