Slurs and Thick Terms. Bianca Cepollaro

they are evaluative; they project because they are presupposed. This is a crucial difference between my account and the hybrid expressivist account of slurs developed by Jeshion (2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018, 2020). According to the hybrid expressivist strategy, the derogatory content of slurs projects because it is expressive rather than descriptive. Jeshion analyzes slurs as truth-conditionally equivalent to their neutral counterparts. In her framework, ‘wop’ has the same truth- conditional meaning as ‘Italians’: utterances like ‘Leonardo da Vinci is a wop’ are strictly speaking true, utterances like ‘Leonardo da Vinci is a boche’ are strictly speaking false.¹⁶ Note that Jeshion’s account is not committed to the existence of a neutral counterpart for every epithet: all she needs to postulate is the existence of a group-defining property, something which turns out to be crucial for a uniform account of slurs and thick terms (see section 4.1). For Jeshion, what distinguishes non-loaded expressions (neutral counterparts or more complex non-loaded paraphrases) from epithets is that the semantics of slurs also includes—at a non -truth-conditional level—an additional element, i.e. an expressive component. In particular, slurs encode contempt.¹⁷ What ‘wop’ means is something like ‘Italian,’ pronounced with a contemptuous intonation, or accompanied by pejorative modifiers (such as ‘dirty,’ ‘rotten,’ etc.). Contempt is to be understood as the attitude that one holds towards those that one regards as inferior as persons. In Mason’s words, contempt should be understood as “presenting its object as low in the sense of ranking low in worth as a person in virtue of falling short of some legitimate interpersonal ideal of the person, one the contemner endorses if not one that she herself succeeds in meeting” (Mason 2003: 241). In Jeshion’s analysis, contempt not only expresses the speaker’s feelings—like other attitudes do (fear, anger, etc.)—but also represents its target as worthy of contempt. Note that contempt does not necessarily give rise to detectable behavior: in order to express contempt, slur-users do not need to display their attitude towards the target in particularly patent ways, other than using a slur.

      In addition to these two components (truth-conditional and expressive), Jeshion’s semantics also has a third identifying component: a slur-user aims to identify the target by pinpointing “what the target is.” The identifying component is needed to explain how contempt works when encoded in slurs: in a way, the slur-user would not express contempt towards the target qua person, if the properties selected by the truth-conditional component were not taken to be fundamental (which is different from essential ) to the identity of the target.

To wrap up, Jeshion explains slurs’ projectivity by appealing to features of their expressive content. However, if the reason why the derogatory content projects is that—being expressive—it does not interact with semantic operators, this expressivist strategy implies that any occurrence of a slur must involve the expression of contempt. If that were the case, the possibility of suspending the derogatory content of slurs, or attributing it to someone other than the speaker (see section 5 and Jeshion 2020), would be ruled out. For a more systematic criticism of Jeshion’s hybrid expressivism, see Bach (2018); see also Jeshion (2017) for a response to the main objections.

1.3 CONCLUSION

      In this chapter, I have introduced the category of hybrid evaluative (HE), which includes slurs such as ‘wop’ and thick terms such as ‘lewd’: in addition to conveying descriptive content (e.g. ‘Italian,’ ‘sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries’), such expressions presuppose what I call ‘HE-evaluation’ (e.g. ‘Italians are bad for being Italian,’ ‘things or individuals that are sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries are bad because of being so’). I have shown that hybrid evaluatives display a presuppositional behavior in that their evaluative content survives when they occur in complex utterances such as ‘Madonna’s show is not lewd’ or ‘Madonna might be a wop.’ The presupposed evaluation is particularly hard to reject: this feature makes HEs very powerful tools through which language not only encodes evaluation but also is able to impose it.

      NOTES

      1 1. I have changed the original numbers of these examples to distinguish them from the numerical sequence of this section.

      2 2. For a discussion of the idea that the evaluation of slurs might be properly focused, that is, that in some cases the target class might deserve the evaluation conveyed (prototypical examples are ‘Nazi,’ or the French ‘facho’), see Predelli (2010: 184, fn. 15), Miščević (2011: 166), DiFranco (2017), Marques (2017a: 7), Nunberg (2018). Hom and May (2018) are against this idea of properly focused slurs: “In a certain sense, mass murderers form a group, and being a mass murderer justifies negative moral evaluation in virtue of the action one must take in order to become a member of that group. Being a member of that group, however, does not justify being the target of pejoration. Qua group, mass murderers are no different than any other group in this regard.”

      3 3. See, for instance, Roberts (1996), Potts (2005, 2007b, 2007c, 2012), Simons et al. (2010), Tonhauser (2012).

      4 4. I will not discuss Hay (2013), as his proposal does not concern thick terms, but mainly thin ones and he analyzes them along the lines of general non-slurring insults (‘jerk,’ ‘asshole,’ etc.).

      5 5. Hornsby (2001) discusses some aspects of Hare’s theory of evaluatives that resemble her idea that slurs are useless.

      6 6. Following Schlenker, Beaver and others, I indicate with ‘πx’ the presupposition triggered by a given utterance x.

      7 7. This mechanism is typically accounted for in terms of so-called accommodation (see Lewis 1979): I will get back to it in section 3.1.

      8 8. In Cepollaro, Domaneschi and Stojanovic (2020) we present an experiment where we tested whether non-slurring expressives like ‘that jerk’ impose a contextual constraint. Contra Tonhauser et al. (2013), our results suggest that they do not.

      9 9. I owe this example to Isidora Stojanovic (p.c.).

      10 10. They are talking about The Priest and the Acolyte, a story by John Francis Bloxam.

      11 11. Note that the metalinguistic reading is easier to access with some kind of follow-up or with a marked intonation.

      12 12. From “Responding to AntiGay/Homophobic Slurs,” a document by the School Health Programs Department—Student Support Services—San Francisco Unified School District, published on the website https://www.healthiersf.org/, available at http://www.healthiersf.org/LGBTQ/InTheClassroom/docs/Responding%20to%20Homophobia.pdf. Accessed Feb. 7, 2020.

      13 13. A standard test for presuppositions introduced by von Fintel (2004) relies on the fact that speakers can felicitously assess the presupposed content by saying something like ‘Hey, wait a minute. I had no idea that . . .’

      14 14. Unless what is at stake is the interlocutor’s knowledge regarding the speaker’s belief, in which case answers such as ‘I didn’t know you thought my ex is a loser’ or ‘I didn’t know you had such a bad opinion of my ex’ sound appropriate.

      15 15. There are many cases of legal actions against hate speech involving face-to-face interactions; the spread of social network and online forms of communication provided new challenges. See Brown (2015) for a philosophical examination of hate speech law.

      16 16. For Richard (2008, 2011), the fact that the meaning of slurs is expressive implies that slurring utterances are never truth-apt. For a ‘pure