ABSTRACT
A thick concept characterizes items and actions as banal, gracious, courageous, kind, fair, rude, and gauche. The key thing is simply that the concept combines and integrates the evaluative and the descriptive. Some philosophers talk of 'thick concepts'. These are concepts that essentially combine evaluation with non-evaluative descriptive content. Consider the experiences that, out of a set of all the experiences one has had, one would judge contain the most value. The value that a thick experience bears depends upon the experience being what it is. So the value that thick experiences bear depends in part upon their determinate properties – whether these are descriptive or evaluative. Consider the notion of a 'thick experience': a set of evaluative and non-evaluative phenomenal properties unified to some sufficient degree by at least one legitimate unity relation. Of course, most of our experiences are thick experiences.
