 First, in saying that thick terms and concepts are in some sense both evaluative and descriptive, what is meant by these notions? Illustrative examples of descriptive terms include square, gold, wombat, spotted, recursive, beer, unequal in income, and (plausibly) painful. Paradigmatic examples of evaluative terms include thin terms such as good, bad, ought, right, and wrong. We cannot distinguish the evaluative and the descriptive simply in terms of different functions in our thought and talk. For if judgments involving thick concepts are evaluative judgments, then cognitivists and non-cognitivists disagree about their function. According to non-cognitivists, the primary function of evaluative terms is to express and induce conative attitudes, such as desire, preference, or (dis)approval, which aren’t truth-apt. (A desire for world peace is no more the sort of thing that can be true or false than a command like “Shut up!”) But according to cognitivists, evaluative terms are like descriptive terms in that their primary function is to express cognitive states such as beliefs, which are apt to be assessed as (robustly) true or false. Nor can we capture the distinction between thick and thin terms by identifying the descriptive with the factual: to assume that evaluations cannot be factual would be to assume the kind of distinction between “facts” and “values” which thick concepts are sometimes thought to undermine (see  section 2.1).  In neutral terms we may not be able to do much better than to say that the purely descriptive terms are given by a big list of terms that would generally be classified as falling on the is-side of the distinction between is and ought and all the rest are evaluative terms (Jackson 1998: 120). Descriptive terms would thus be purely non-evaluative. This boundary may not be sharp; in particular, it might be vague whether thick terms such as honest should be classified as purely descriptive or partly evaluative (Jackson 1998: 120). And even if not vague, it is a matter of controversy, as we’ll see in  section 4.  In any case, if we take the evaluative to exclude only the purely non-evaluative, then non-evaluative description will be something given in purely non-evaluative terms. The interesting feature of thick terms and concepts is that even if they count as evaluative on a binary distinction, they are supposed to straddle the distinction.