‘Evaluative,’ ‘expressive,’ ‘normative,’ ‘pejorative,’ ‘slur,’ ‘thick,’ and ‘thin’ are widespread labels in ethics, metaethics, philosophy of language and linguistics, and yet there is not much consensus about how to understand these notions. In this section I put forward a criterion to distinguish HEs from descriptive terms that can be used evaluatively. I elaborate on the controversial notion of ‘group’ involved in the definition of slurs (section 1.1.1) and discuss the problematic thin-thick dichotomy by apppealing to the distinction between at-issue and not-at-issue content, while acknowledging that a clear-cut divide is hard to obtain (section 1.1.2). I briefly discuss some proposals that take into consideration the idea that slurs and thick terms can be analyzed along the same lines (section 1.1.3).
In the literature on thick terms, the paradigmatic examples are expressions such as ‘lewd,’ ‘generous,’ ‘courageous,’ ‘chaste,’ and ‘cruel.’ Thick terms are studied in metaethics (Hare 1963, Williams 1985, Blackburn 1992, Gibbard 1992, among others) and are typically believed to combine descriptive and evaluative meanings. The former can usually be paraphrased: the descriptive content of ‘lewd’ is something like ‘sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries’; ‘generous’ descriptively corresponds to ‘willing to give without expectation of compensation,’ ‘chaste’ to ‘abstaining from sexual intercourse,’ and so on. Moreover, thick terms also convey (or express, depending on what theory one favors) a value judgment about such an object or individual. Thus, in calling a person ‘lewd,’ speakers usually imply something negative about the person, while in judging an act as ‘generous,’ they typically convey a positive evaluation of the act at stake. Scholars investigate how the use of a thick term is associated with value judgments, but they disagree about what semantic and pragmatic machinery makes it possible for them to express or convey evaluations.
In recent years, philosophers and linguists have focused their attention on another class of terms that appear to mix description with evaluation, namely, slurs. Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups on the basis of their belonging to a certain category, such as sexual orientation (terms such as ‘faggot,’ targeting homosexual men; or ‘dyke,’ targeting homosexual women, etc.), nationality (‘wop,’ targeting Italians; ‘boche’ targeting Germans, etc.); ethnic origins (‘chink’ targeting Asian people, especially Chinese, etc.) and so on and so forth. Once more, these terms raise interrogatives as to whether they lexically encode evaluation, whether these expressions allow non-offensive uses (Brontsema 2004; Bianchi 2014a; Croom 2014, Cepollaro 2017a, Ritchie 2017), whether they can be mentioned without provoking offense (Hornsby 2001; Anderson and Lepore 2013a, 2013b), whether they constitute a legitimate and uniform lexical category (Croom 2011, Nunberg 2018), and so on.
It is not always clear how to determine whether a certain lexical item should count as a slur (or as a thick term) or not. For instance, it is disputed whether expressions such as ‘athletic’ count as thick terms (see e.g. Eklund 2011: 37) and whether labels such as ‘gypsy’ count as slurs. The criterion we put forward in Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016) is the following: in addition to descriptive content, HEs systematically convey some evaluative content that I call ‘HE-evaluation,’ which scopes out when they are embedded under negation, conditionals, modals and questions. In section 1.2, I show that thick terms such as ‘lewd’ and slurs such as ‘wop’ meet these requirements. Let us go back to whether a term like ‘athletic’ should count as evaluative: if the term has standard literal uses that do not convey any evaluation at all, then the term should not count as an HE. And, indeed, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (a.k.a. COCA; Davies 2008) shows both uses of ‘athletic’: some simply mean ‘related to sports’ (no value judgment involved), others convey a positive evaluation of sport-related things.
1 1.In the Roman context, the heavy athletic disciplines were wrestling, boxing, and the pankration, a brutal blend of wrestling and boxing.
2 2.I wasn’t a particularly athletic or popular child.
3 3.Everybody in Cirque is athletic and handsome or beautiful.
Let us now look at slurs: some terms are used both derogatorily and nonderogatorily, i.e. they work as slurs or non-slurring labels depending on the context. Consider the following occurrences of ‘gypsy’ from the COCA:
1 4.On the street, a violinist plays one of Bartok’s Gypsy melodies. The vibrato from his violin feels as if it is penetrating my heart.
2 5.Calling that green-eyed minx a slut is too good for her. They say she’s got Gypsy blood!
In (2)–(3) ‘athletic’ conveys a positive evaluation toward sport-related things or people, just like a thick term; similarly, ‘gypsy’ seems to work like a slur in (5); nevertheless, the crucial point is that this is not a systematic or lexically encoded characteristic of these items. The value judgments that expressions such as ‘athletic’ or ‘gypsy’ might carry are not part of their conventional meanings, as (1) and (4) show. Thus, such expressions are not HEs.
Note that the criterion that I have just provided does not prima facie include so-called multivalent thick terms (see Dancy 1995), i.e. those terms that seem to convey positive and negative content at the same time: ‘eccentric,’ ‘extravagant,’ ‘kinky,’ ‘unorthodox,’ and the like. Similarly, my account would not apply to any terms that do not lexically encode HE-evaluation but can be used in an evaluative way both positively and negatively: for instance, ‘intense’ (see Stojanovic 2016, 2017 on “valence-underspecification”).
Slurs are taken to denigrate groups or individuals on the basis of their belonging to a certain class. Scholars do not usually specify what counts as a class; instead, they present some examples involving ethnic or geographical origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation and tend to restrict their attention to the most inflammatory slurs. As a result, there is no consensus whether certain terms, especially those that are not about the listed typical categories, can count as slurs, since the debate has unfortunately selected the defining general features of slurs by focusing on a small subset. In my proposal, those expressions that denigrate non-prototypical categories (like ‘flack’ for ‘publicist,’ ‘facho’ for ‘fascist,’ ‘stinkpotter’ for owners of a motorized boat, etc.) can in fact count as slurs, as long as they fulfill the criterion I have proposed in the previous section (contra Nunberg 2018). This brings up a crucial issue concerning the descriptive content of slurs, namely, what categories can count as a target group. Consider the criterion of self-identification, according to which for a property to determine a target group, the people instantiating such a property must be willing to identify themselves as bearers of such a property. The self-identification criterion is probably satisfied for properties like being Italian or being Jewish, targeted by the slurs ‘wop’ and ‘kike,’ but epithets like ‘gook’ do not express a property with which people can self-identify: as Jeshion (2016a: 135) underlines, ‘gook’ was used for all natives of the regions occupied by the US Army (Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Filipinos), who most likely do not self-identify with each other. This said, Hom and May (2018) have formulated three options to establish what counts as a group G, the target of a slur:
1 A)There are no restrictions on G; it can be instantiated by any group whatsoever. This is in effect the claim that group membership is not something that is morally evaluable.
2 B)There is a restriction on G supplied by a theory of natural groups. This theory would isolate racial, religious, gender, sexual orientation, etc. as natural groups, and hence as targets of pejoration.
3 C)There is a restriction on G provided by ideologies that are active in socio-cultural