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The semantics of deadnames

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Abstract

Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic explanation for this derogation.

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Notes

  1. Waldron and Schwencke (2018).

  2. Molloy (2018).

  3. Twitter Rules and Policies, Hateful conduct policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy.

  4. This point is made by Davis and McCready (2020) See also Ennis (2016) and Reidel (2017).

  5. Molloy (2018).

  6. Quoted in McNamara (2017).

  7. Id.

  8. Sims (2016).

  9. Dielhenn (2017).

  10. Hom (2012).

  11. Since this notion of derogation is an objective, social one, it seems to imply that names that have been purely privately rejected by their bearers, who haven’t expressed this rejection to others, aren’t deadnames in this technical sense and that their use doesn’t derogate. For example, if Steve doesn’t like their old name “Mary” and doesn’t want to be called Mary, it might be upsetting to have their friends and family call them Mary. But if Steve hasn’t told anyone about this rejection, the use of “Mary” isn’t disrespectful in the objective social sense meant here. Its use couldn’t constitute an offense against the person’s social status, even if it is privately painful. Note that this doesn’t mean that a deadnaming can never derogate if the speaker is ignorant of the changed name (cf. footnote 15). What a name expresses about the target’s social standing may escape the speaker’s understanding, it just can’t escape the entire community of speakers. For comparison, my use of a slur can be derogatory even if I don’t know what it means, but something can’t be a slur if no one knows what it means.

  12. For one of any number of discussions, see Kilbride (2018).

  13. See, e.g., the Seattle Police Department Manual §16.200 (http://www.seattle.gov/police-manual/title-16---patrol-operations/16200---interaction-with-transgender-individuals).

  14. This phenomenon is not unique to deadnames of course. See the offense caused by instances of “niggardly,” a word which has neither historical nor semantic relationships with any derogatory slur. See Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “niggard,” accessed August 1, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niggard.

  15. Note also that not all derogations of this kind will be given the same moral treatment. This is not at issue in this paper, but it seems likely that at least some deadnamings that communicate disrespect are blameless. Prima facie, deadnamings by people who do not know that the deadnamed person has changed their name and who have no epistemic failings with respect to this ignorance are blameless. Nevertheless, what such people communicate does derogate, just as a speaker can derogate by using a slur without understanding its full import.

  16. I owe this point to Elisabeth Camp.

  17. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

  18. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

  19. The misuse of pronouns and other gendered terms to misgender someone, i.e., to refer to them or describe them as someone of a gender other than the one they identify with, is another prominent way of disrespecting trans individuals. It is worth noting that this is not quite the same linguistic phenomenon, however, so it won’t be my main target here. I note a similarity between my view of deadnames and the literature on misgendering in Sect. 4.1

  20. For example, “Alice called Mary an asshole” does not implicate the speaker in Alice’s insult.

  21. As I address below in Sect. 1.5 sentences (3) and (4) do have a nonderogatory reading in addition to a derogatory one.

  22. For discussion, see Anderson and Lepore (2013).

  23. In addition to syntactic differences between deadnames and slurs, these differences help indicate why deadnames will not be handled by an account of slurs.

  24. According to predicativists, names have the semantic type of predicates in all of their occurrences, but it is uncontroversial that names occur in predicate position as a syntactic matter in sentences like (9)–(11). So far, the examples in this paper have involved deadnames occurring as singulars in argument position. SeeFara (2015).

  25. See Langton (2017). I take it that the examples below are not, strictly speaking, blocking because they do not involve challenging a presupposition of the act of deadnaming.

  26. Twitter, November 30, 2019. Unmodified copies of tweets cited here are on file with the author.

  27. Twitter, December 25, 2019.

  28. Twitter, December 13, 2019.

  29. Twitter, December 24, 2019.

  30. Twitter, April 18, 2018.

  31. Twitter, October 29, 2019.

  32. Twitter, October 15 2019.

  33. Twitter, October 19, 2018.

  34. Importantly some authors think that there are clear cases of non-derogatory, non-appropriative uses of slurs. See, e.g., Hom (2008, 429). Hom’s cases of these innocent uses of slurs are quite similar to the innocent uses of deadnames I discuss here, so if this account of slurs is right, this is another case of a parallel between the two kinds of speech.

  35. Compare this kind of comparison to a common test used to detect ambiguity or context sensitivity: “If n is genuinely ambiguous, it should be possible to fix the facts of the world, then find two contexts, one in which an utterance of f(n) is true and one in which an utterance of  f(n) is true (where f(n) is a declarative sentence containing n in a non-intensional position, and the two contexts do not affect the interpretation of any other expressions in f(n)).” Khoo (2017).

  36. This phenomenon is a deadnaming instance of the more familiar phenomenon on which propositional attitude reports containing names are typically ambiguous. See generallyNelson (2023).

  37. That is, they are “type e” expressions with an individual as their semantic value.

  38. The naming convention for the view comes from John Stuart Mill and Chapter II of Mill (1856). More modern versions of this view emerged with Marcus (1961) and Kripke (1980). Advocates of this view are many, including Kaplan (1989), Salmon (1991), Soames (2009), and Jeshion (2015).

  39. SeeKripke (1980) at pp. 90–97. Other views of reference, e.g., Evans (1973) and Devitt (1983), also appear to predict that deadnames and their live counterparts would be coreferential. See Evans (1973) and Devitt (1983).

  40. And one may already be on order for Anderson and Lepore given the diversity of different slur reclamation cases.

  41. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to expand on this point.

  42. Bolinger (2017).

  43. See Bolinger (2017, 447).

  44. The analogous situation is discussed at Bolinger (2017, 449–450) on the possibility of a language where there is no inoffensive counterpart to a slur.

  45. Nunberg (2018).

  46. Nunberg (2018, 267).

  47. See Nunberg (2018, 269–270).

  48. Alternatively, Millians could concede that the derogatory behavior of deadnames has to do with their conventional content, but distinguish two different dimensions of content, isolating the problematic content of deadnames from the content that is truth-conditionally relevant or at issue. Compare this view to Camp 2018, which discusses this kind of two-factor theory in the context of slurs (Camp, 2018).

  49. Twitter, December 25, 2019.

  50. Twitter, December 13, 2019.

  51. Twitter, December 24, 2019.

  52. Twitter, April 18, 2018.

  53. Twitter, October 29, 2019.

  54. Twitter, October 15 2019.

  55. See Nunberg (2018, 244).

  56. See Marcus (1961, 309–310) for this metaphor.

  57. Fara (2015) at p. 60.

  58. “Øthe” denotes the unpronounced definite determiner postulated by predicativism.

  59. Fara (2015) at p. 64.

  60. See, e.g., Jeshion (2017), Jeshion (2018) and Jeshion (2015).

  61. Kripke (1980) at pp. 48–70. Kripke appeared to only be considering names as the occur as bare singulars in argument position.

  62. Fara (2015) at pp. 97–108.

  63. For criticism, see Schoubye (2016) and Lee (2020).

  64. See Kripke (1977) and Donnellan (1966).

  65. See Kripke (1977) at p. 256.

  66. Id. at p. 262.

  67. Id. at 263.

  68. Cosker-Rowland (2023). I thank an anonymous reviewer for this connection.

  69. Cosker-Rowland (2023, 20).

  70. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point.

  71. SeeAnderson and Lepore (2013) at pp. 27–29 for this objection against predicate content theories of slurs.

  72. Russell (1905).

  73. Id. at p. 489.

  74. See, e.g.,Strawson (1950) and Devitt (2004). For a defense of Russell’s analysis of these cases, see Neale (1990), ch. 4.

  75. The relevant notion of appropriateness could be more particularly spelled out in a number of different ways. What I take from the derogation data is that naming involves a predicate with some kind of positive normative valence, such that referring to someone by a name is a way of saying this is an acceptable or fitting way to refer to them. For a discussion of the moral concept of “fittingness” and the complexities of this moral domain, see Howard (2018).

  76. Richard (2008) at pp. 3–4.

  77. McNamara (2017) (cf. fn. 6).

  78. See, e.g.,Tirrell (2012).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nikki Ernst, Kate Hazel Stanton, Robin Jeshion, Malte Willer, the attendees of the Words Workshop, an audience of the Pittsburgh Graduate Work-in-Progress talk series, and two anonymous referees for providing generous and helpful feedback during the writing of this article. This article would not have appeared without support from them and many others.

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    Taylor Koles

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Koles, T. The semantics of deadnames. Philos Stud 181, 715–739 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02113-x

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