LITMIR.BIZ

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I put forward a uniform account: slurs and thick terms. The thesis that I defend is that in employing such terms, in addition to saying something purely factual about people and things, speakers also presuppose certain values, as if they were common ground among the conversation’s participants. This work illustrates how this linguistic mechanism is able to explain the pervasive social and moral effects of evaluative language.

      The study of slurs and thick terms has been mainly conducted in two different —although related—fields: philosophy of language and linguistics for slurs, and ethics and metaethics for thick terms. Despite the close relation between these disciplines, only a few scholars have adopted an interdisciplinary stance: The literature on thick terms addresses issues such as the cognitivism/non-cognitivism dispute and the fact/value distinction, while the debate on slurs tends to focus on the question of how these epithets encode values, as well as on their linguistic properties. Väyrynen (2009, 2011, 2012, 2013) is among the first scholars to systematically apply the tools of linguistics and philosophy of language to the study of thick terms, providing the basis for the possibility of asking whether slurs and thick terms rely on the same linguistic mechanisms.

In this book I develop a uniform account of slurs and thick terms: classes of expressions that I shall call ‘hybrid evaluatives’ (HEs). My work is a contribution to filling the gap between the research on thick terms conducted in metaethics and the investigation of slurs carried out in linguistics and philosophy of language. In addition to merging these two fields, this study also engages in a fruitful dialogue with the experimental research on evaluative speech conducted in social psychology and experimental philosophy. The aim of this book is to show that the mechanism that underlies slurs and thick terms is one and the same, and that the phenomenal differences that one can observe depend on the peculiarities of their descriptive content. My work leaves aside the debate on thick and pejorative concepts and focuses on thick and pejorative terms instead. If one wants to apply my theses to evaluative concepts, one can do so only under the assumption that the meaning of thick terms and slurs amounts to what the corresponding concept expresses. I do not want to commit myself to the simplified view that language and concepts stand in a one-to-one relation: I will just stay neutral on thick and slurring concepts and focus on language. On the other hand, the analysis of value speech that this work outlines provides a sound basis for thinking about the role of evaluative language in our daily lives and communication.

This book consists of two parts. Part I presents a novel presuppositional analysis of HEs, a category including slurs and thick terms. In chapter 1, I introduce the class of HEs: first, I settle some preliminary issues such as how to define HEs and how to distinguish them from related notions; then, I illustrate the presuppositional behavior of these expressions, with respect to projection and rejection, and discuss an alternative explanation of the data. chapter 2 is devoted to the semantics of HEs: I analyze their evaluative and descriptive content, assess the issues of reference and extension and spell out what exactly is presupposed by these expressions. I discuss how to interpret failure in the case of evaluative presuppositions and show how these topics relate to highly debated questions about values in ethics. In chapter 3, I investigate the effects of the use of HEs in conversation: I show that the question of how slurs and thick terms encode evaluation and the question of what effects they produce are deeply related; the experimental research in psychology provides interesting insights in this respect. In chapter 4, I defend the two central claims of my view against potential objections: the points raised here may be a bit technical, but they serve to address or anticipate potential criticisms. First, I focus on the uniformity claim, according to which slurs and thick terms should be analyzed along similar lines. My strategy is to distinguish superficial differences from authentic ones, and show that the latter do not challenge a uniform account, as certain features of the semantics of slurs and thick terms can explain the phenomenal divergences one observes. Then, I defend the presuppositionality claim, according to which HEs encode evaluative presuppositions. I address the main objections raised against presuppositional accounts of slurs and thick terms, and show that these objections do not constitute an obstacle to the presuppositional approach. Finally, chapter 5 is dedicated to nonstandard uses of HEs, including the reclamation of slurs and the variability of thick terms. The gist of my proposal is that both phenomena—typically treated as mutually independent—stem from a fairly common mechanism in language use, namely, echo. I devote special attention to reclamation and defend three main claims about (i) how reclamation often involves multiple phases, (ii) the role of in-groupness, and (iii) the empowering effects of irony.

      In a nutshell, my analysis of HEs, as presented in part I, is the following: Both slurs and thick terms pick out a certain descriptive property and at the same time they trigger an evaluation of that content (let us call it HE-evaluation). For example, ‘wop’ means ‘Italian,’ but at the same time it triggers the presupposition that Italians are bad because of being Italian; ‘lewd’ means ‘sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries’ and triggers the presupposition that things or individuals that are sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries are bad because of being so, etc. Slurs have a stronger projective power than thick terms; this fact can be explained by appealing to certain features of their descriptive content, together with extra-linguistic factors.

Part II is a critical review of alternative theories put forward to account for slurs and thick terms respectively. This overview of the competing approaches is not only meant to survey the existing accounts and argue for the superiority of the presuppositional theory; it is also an occasion to spell out in greater detail my proposal, by comparing it to alternative views. Because slurs and thick terms have been mainly studied separately, the theories I consider often deal with only one of these classes and neglect the other. The overview I provide in this part is far from a complete survey of all the theories on the market (see Popa-Wyatt 2020). Rather, I select three families of accounts for their relevance to specific aspects of my own approach, while leaving aside others— including expressivist accounts of HEs, for instance—for the sake of brevity. The first two chapters of part II are dedicated to “single-source” approaches, as Jeshion (2016b) calls them: truth-conditional approaches and deflationary approaches. In chapter 6, I first discuss the truth-conditional analysis of slurs, focusing on Hom (2008, 2010, 2012) and Hom and May (2013, 2014, 2018), and then consider the truth-conditional theory of thick terms, formulated by Kyle (2013). The main problem with truth-conditional approaches is to account for the projection of the evaluative content. I show that the strategies employed to explain projection without appealing to non-truth-conditional meaning ultimately fail. In particular, I show that (i) Hom and May’s data in support of a non-pejorative interpretation of embedded slurs actually stem from meta-linguistic readings, and that (ii) pragmatic mechanisms (both Hom and May’s offense and Kyle’s conversational implicatures) cannot explain projection data. Therefore, the truth-conditional analysis of HEs fails to explain the basic data and should be abandoned. The intuition that I share with these approaches is that slurs and thick terms linguistically encode evaluative contents.

      Chapter 7 is dedicated to deflationary accounts of slurs and thick terms, which in contrast deny this intuition and defend the opposite view. First I focus on derogatory epithets, by discussing the so-called deflationary accounts, according to which slurs have a fairly unexceptional semantics. I include in this category all those accounts according to which the derogatory content associated with slurs is not part of their encoded meaning (again, broadly understood: not just truth conditions but also conventional implicatures, presuppositions and the like). I present four approaches that employ different tools: taboo and prohibitions

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