  Although sentimentalism can adopt dispositionalism rather than FA theory, those versions that embrace normative reduction reduce the values on which the theory focuses to a primitive normative notion of fittingness or merit. Thus the shameful is understood as what merits shame, the funny as what merits amusement, and so forth. Moreover, sentimentalism can aspire to give a non-circular account of those sentiments that are claimed to be part of basic human nature, despite having (somewhat) different elicitors in different cultures and individuals. How many such sentiments there are, and which ones, is a matter of dispute that need not be entered into here. The important point is that even these forms of sentimentalism need not adopt an FA theory of all values; they can focus on those values that seem most intimately tied to specific human sentiments, such as the shameful, funny, fearsome, and pride-worthy. This modest sentimentalism holds an FA theory only of certain values, those most amenable to response-dependency and normative reduction. It must deny response-independent accounts of these values, such as the incongruity theory of humor, on which the funny is analyzed as the incongruous. Sentimentalists will hold that such theories are either open to manifold counterexamples or are only speciously response-independent (Scruton 1987). 