Slurs and Thick Terms. Bianca Cepollaro

2018) and subordinating speech acts (Langton, Haslanger and Anderson 2012). The first three accounts have difficulties in explaining the genesis of derogatory epithets, the complicity phenomenon (i.e. the fact that slurs’ pejorative content does not seem to be ascribed to the speaker only ), and the contrast between slurs and other ‘affiliatory’ terms. The speech act account, however, has trouble dealing with the so-called authority problem, as well as difficulties in showing that the derogatory content of slurs is not lexically encoded. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss the deflationary account of thick terms, developed by Pekka Väyrynen, which holds that the evaluation associated with thick terms (T-evaluation in Väyrynen’s terms) conversationally arises as a pragmatic implication. These implications are not part of the asserted content, nor are they the main point of the utterance in literal uses of thick terms in normal contexts: they are typically backgrounded. The pragmatic account has the advantage of being more parsimonious than any other account of thick terms, but it fails to recognize some instances of projection of the evaluative content (the alleged defeasibility data). In sum, in the first two chapters of part II, I show that single-source approaches fail to properly account for the behavior of HEs and I argue that the difficulties that these proposals have speak in favor of a hybrid approach.

In chapter 8, I discuss an alternative hybrid approach: the conventional implicature (CI) view. It agrees with truth-conditional accounts that the derogatory content of epithets is linguistically encoded, but it holds with pragmatic theories that the pejorative content does not belong to the truth-conditional dimension of meaning (Potts 2005, 2007c, Williamson 2009, McCready 2010, Gutzmann 2011, Williamson 2009, Whiting 2013). While the previous approaches I present have been independently developed for both slurs and thick terms, the CI view has been proposed only for slurs, ¹ since the alleged defeasibility of the evaluative content of thick terms made scholars discard a conventional implicature approach. After presenting the account and showing how similar it is to the presuppositional approach (presupposition and conventional implicature being “close neighbor[s] in the linguistic literature,” Abbott 2006: 2), I point out the aspects for which the presuppositional view ought to be preferred, also looking at some experimental literature.

      The picture I sketch in this work is that HEs represent a device through which language implicitly conveys linguistically encoded evaluations. On my account, HEs rely on presuppositions, which are—in Chilton’s (2004) words—“at least one micro-mechanism in language use which contributes to the building of a consensual reality.” By employing these terms, we implicitly take for granted a certain moral perspective, a certain set of beliefs concerning what is good and what is bad (an “ethos,” as Gibbard 2003b calls it). We implicitly apply a certain lens to the world and expect everyone else to do the same. Because the presupposed content is presented as not open to discussion, if it is not challenged, it has the potential to shape contexts. In this sense, using HEs is a powerful tool through which language not only encodes evaluation but also is able to impose it. Talking about the stereotypes evoked by slurs, Nunberg (2018) talks about cognitive shortcuts that we employ to make sense of the world; I argue that this is true not just for slurs and stereotypes but also for HEs in general, as they are devices through which language can convey evaluations in a way that is both linguistically encoded and implicit (see Sbisà 2007).

      In this work, I mention (but do not use) several slurs and a few other bad words, as a study on pejoratives cannot be conducted without analyzing the occurrences of these terms. I hope that this will not disturb or offend my readers and that the theoretical contribution will compensate for any discomfort.

      NOTE

      1 1. Copp (2001, 2009) did propose an analysis of moral terms based on conventional implicatures. However, he characterizes conventional implicatures in such a way that they are very different from Grice’s and Potts’ and they are thus labeled ‘conventional simplicature.’

Part I

       THE PRESUPPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF HYBRID EVALUATIVES

      In this section I develop a unified account of two classes of terms that have provoked a lively debate in linguistics, philosophy of language, ethics and metaethics: slurs and thick terms. These expressions seem to have a hybrid nature, as they carry at once descriptive and evaluative contents. The label ‘hybrid evaluative,’ introduced in Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016), works as an umbrella term that covers both slurs and thick terms (and possibly other expressions). The core tenet of this unified account is the following: both classes of terms carry descriptive content at the level of truth conditions, but they presuppose an evaluative content, i.e. they trigger an evaluative presupposition. Thus, for example, the adjective ‘lewd’ has roughly the same truth-conditional content as ‘sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries,’ but it also triggers the presupposition that things that are sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries are bad because of being so. Along similar lines, I analyze a slur like ‘wop’ as having the same truth conditions as ‘Italian’ but triggering at the same time the presupposition that Italians are bad because of being Italian.

According to this view, slurs are very similar to other evaluatives: so-called objectionable thick terms. Many authors (Eklund 2011, 2013, Harcourt and Thomas 2013, Kyle 2013, Väyrynen 2013) distinguish between unobjectionable and objectionable thick terms: the former convey an evaluation that speakers are willing to accept as appropriate or warranted; the latter convey an evaluation that speakers are not willing to share. Whether the HE-evaluation is shared/sharable is completely orthogonal to whether it is negative or positive: a speaker might approve of the negative evaluation associated with ‘selfish’ and reject the one associated with ‘lewd’; she may share the positive evaluation conveyed by ‘courageous’ and reject the one associated with ‘chaste.’ These two features, polarity—the HE-evaluation being positive (P) or negative (N)—and objectionability—the HE-evaluation being warranted (W) or unwarranted (U)—give rise to four combinations. While thick terms seem to admit all four combinations (PW ‘generous,’ PU ‘chaste,’ NW ‘brutal,’ NU ‘lewd’), slurs tend to instantiate NU only, i.e. they typically convey negative and objectionable evaluations. Unlike the polarity of the evaluation, the objectionable/unobjectionable distinction is not lexically encoded, but depends on the sets of values endorsed by speakers.

      The first chapter of part I introduces the class of hybrid evaluatives (HEs): I settle some preliminary issues about the definition of ‘hybrid evaluative’ and discuss the presuppositional behavior of these expressions. In chapter 2, I focus on the semantics of HEs. chapter 3 is dedicated to the conversational dynamics which slurs and thick terms give rise to, by focusing on the ways in which people can react to them. In chapter 4, I defend the two main tenets of my proposal—(i) the uniformity claim: slurs and thick terms should be analyzed along the same lines, and (ii) the presuppositionality claim: slurs and thick terms trigger evaluative presuppositions—against potential objections. In chapter 5, I consider non-standard uses of HEs, including the reclamation of slurs and the variability of thick terms.

Chapter One

       Hybrid Evaluatives

      A New Class