Slurs and Thick Terms. Bianca Cepollaro

In light of this observation, ‘beautiful,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘excellent’ and ‘awful’ appear to be more complex than ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but not necessarily thicker. Compare them to comparatives and superlatives, for example: one would not say that ‘better’ is thicker than ‘good,’ but only that it is more complex, as it is a modification of ‘good’ that roughly means ‘more good.’ The same goes for ‘very good’ (‘excellent’): it is a modification (intensification, in this case) of ‘good.’ Presumably one could say the same also for ‘aesthetically good’ (which corresponds to ‘beautiful’) and ‘morally bad’ (‘evil’). These terms (‘better,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘evil,’ etc.) do not mix description and evaluation, but express evaluation with some restrictions. They remain thin terms, whose content has been somehow modified, by either a comparative or an intensifier (as in the case of ‘better’ and ‘excellent’), or by a domain restrictor (as in the case of ‘beautiful’ and ‘evil’), without thus becoming thick. They can be analyzed as (modified) thin terms, distinct from thick terms in that only the latter mix descriptive and evaluative content. This is just a suggestion of one way in which one can try to resist a skeptical attitude with respect to the thin/thick distinction.

1.1.3 Previous Suggestions for a Uniform Account

The idea that slurs and thick terms can be analyzed along the same lines was hinted at in some previous works. Even though the one I defend is the first systematic and fully fledged unified account of slurs and thick terms, a few authors over the years have suggested a comparison between these two kinds of expressions in different ways.⁴ In this section, I briefly mention these works, starting from scholars working on thick terms and moving to scholars working on slurs.

      Hare (1963) discusses whether it is necessary to endorse a certain moral perspective in order to understand terms and concepts that mix description and evaluation (see section 2.3); he mentions two such expressions: ‘courageous’ and the N-word (Hare 1963: 187). He endorses the idea that both expressions convey at the same time evaluative and descriptive contents and that, when speakers do not share such evaluations, they have to abandon these terms and substitute them with neutral counterparts.⁵ He remarks that speakers are more accurate in perceiving that a word carries evaluative contents when they do not endorse them, thus suggesting, interestingly, that for most scholars it may be easier to perceive the evaluative content of the N-word than the evaluative content of ‘generous.’

      While supporting a different view from Hare’s, Blackburn (1992) treats slurs and thick terms along similar lines. He endorses a deflationary view according to which there is no such thing as a term encoding description and evaluation at the same time. According to Blackburn (1992: 296), the attitudes associated with slurs and thick terms are typically communicated via intonations, prosody and the like. However, he seems to acknowledge that some negative content might in fact be lexicalized for slurs, but not for most thick terms: “The dictionary puts no ‘positive’ indicator of attitude by any of Hume’s terms [i.e. positive thick terms], in the way that it puts ‘derog.’ or ‘usually contempt.’ by certain epithets of abuse” (Blackburn 1992: 286).

Gibbard (2003a) suggests that slurs might match the definition of ‘thick term’ provided by Williams, that is, expressions that mix classification (i.e. description) and attitude (i.e. evaluation). However, slurs (understood as thick terms à la Williams) would work differently from how prototypical thick terms (like ‘chaste’ and ‘cruel’) work, according to Gibbard. For him, when one does not endorse the attitude conveyed by a thick term like ‘chaste’ or ‘cruel,’ one cannot regard an utterance featuring such a term as true or false; however, he claims that one can evaluate the truth value of a slurring utterance, in the sense that non-bigots recognize bigoted utterances as truths “objectionably couched” (Gibbard 2003a: 300). It is worth noting that Gibbard (1992, 2003a, 2003b), interestingly, analyzes thick terms as (i) having both descriptive and evaluative content and (ii) triggering a presupposition. Nevertheless, his presuppositional account—deeply inspiring as it is—is not fully developed or detailed. Gibbard appeals to the notion of presupposition, but he is not interested in deploying the set of tools that comes with it, including projection, common ground, accommodation, failure, rejection, complicity, etc. (see the rest of chapter 2 and chapter 3). The way in which Gibbard uses ‘presupposition’ is very broad (“The ethos of a community offers presuppositions on which thick meanings depend,” Gibbard 2003b: 177). He is not concerned with providing a linguistic analysis of thick terms: “In this sense, the term ‘zowy’ [an invented thick term] carries (. . .) a presupposition. Making this loose sense precise, though, would be a tricky matter, to say the least, and I won’t attempt to do so” (Gibbard 2003b: 146). Rather, he investigates broader questions, such as whether there are normative facts; he draws crucial distinctions between properties, concepts, states of affairs, natural and non-natural facts; he investigates whether normative facts, beliefs, and truths are pseudo or genuine, and so on. These issues are beyond the scope of this book. Instead, my aim is to develop a more refined analysis of the semantics and the pragmatics of slurs and thick terms, detailed enough to generate predictions and to allow a systematic comparison between these two classes of expressions. My interest concerns the “location of evaluation” (Väyrynen 2011), i.e. the question of how to characterize the relation between description and evaluation, rather than issues such as the relation that moral terms (thin and thick) and reasons bear to action, the debate between internalism and externalism on reasons and the like (see Gibbard 2003a).

      More recently, Elstein and Hurka (2011) have analyzed thick terms and slurs along similar lines: they call an epithet like ‘kraut’ “fully thick,” as opposed to terms such as ‘selfish,’ which they analyze as starting in a middle position between thin terms and slurs (Elstein and Hurka 2011: 524). In this respect, their account resembles Gibbard’s, as they analyze slurs as the items that most precisely fulfill the definition of thick terms provided by Williams (1985).

      Finally, Väyrynen (2013: 150–156) discusses the idea of treating pejoratives as objectionable thick terms. Väyrynen (2016a) leaves room for the possibility of applying his deflationary account of thick terms as associated with pragmatic implications to slurs. In particular, he underlines some analogies between his account of thick terms and Bolinger’s (2017) deflationary account of slurs, which I critically discuss in chapter 7.

When the debate on slurs and pejoratives began flourishing, scholars working on derogatory epithets started considering the comparison between slurs and thick terms. Richard (2008) underlines that slurs and thick terms raise the same kind of problem: questions as to how the evaluation is related to a certain lexical item, whether speakers change the meaning of an evaluative term when they succeed in using it without its typical evaluative content and the like. Williamson (2009) is agnostic on whether his analysis of slurs in terms of conventional implicature could apply to evaluative moral terms. Hom (2010) calls his own account of slurs “thick” (see section 6.1), because he postulates a semantics of pejoratives that includes descriptive and evaluative content (even though he does not suggest a uniform—truth-conditional, in his case—analysis of slurs and thick terms). Miščević (2011), while commenting on Richard (2008), endorses the idea that slurs and thick terms could get a uniform treatment and argues contra Richard in favor of the truth-aptness of utterances involving these evaluative terms (I will come back to whether the utterances featuring slurs and thick terms are truth-apt in section 2.3).

      All these suggestions constitute crucial and inspiring hints, but regrettably none of them was satisfactorily developed: in order to defend the thesis that slurs and thick terms work in a similar way, a fully fledged account is needed.