 It is natural to assume that if a thick term conveys an evaluation as a matter of truth-conditions, that evaluation is either positive or negative but not both and the evaluation is the same in all contexts where the term is used to make an assertion. (We’ll discuss non-assertive contexts below.) But many paradigmatic thick terms can be used to evaluate negatively in some contexts while positively in others. Some philosophers claim that the Semantic View cannot explain this “contextual variability” in the evaluative valence of T-utterances. Although frugal normally conveys a positive evaluation, calling someone whose “main job is dispensing hospitality” frugal counts as a criticism (Blackburn 1992: 286). Similarly, although cruel normally conveys a negative evaluation, it might be thought to convey positive evaluation when the cruelty of an action is “just what made it such fun” (Hare 1981: 73). Such variability might be thought to show that thick virtue concepts aren’t evaluative concepts (Brower 1988). However, variability in valence is compatible with the Semantic View (Väyrynen 2011). These examples might be thought to involve a non-literal use of the thick term or to convey the non-typical evaluation not by way of word meaning but by way of speaker meaning. (What the speaker means in using some word can come apart from the meaning that the word has in the language. I can intend to be speaking about plums of any kind when I use the word prune but that doesn’t make it any less the case that in English prune means dried plums.) Or it might be that the normal evaluation is built into the truth-conditions of the sentences involving it and the opposite evaluation can be explained in terms of one of the pragmatic mechanisms we’ll consider in  section 4.2.  Or it might be that although thick terms are semantically evaluative, their valence isn’t fixed but rather their meanings allow involve different evaluations in different contexts (Dancy 1995). These also don’t exhaust the options for a semantic explanation of variability (Kyle 2020: 926). More generally, it doesn’t seem promising to explain valence reversal by appeal to lexical deflationism, ambiguity, or echoic use of language (Cepollaro 2018). 