Abstract
I plot accounts of slurs on a [semanticist – non-semanticist] spectrum, and then I give some original arguments in favor of semanticist approaches. Two core, related pro-semanticist considerations which animate this work are: first, that the pejorative dimension of a slur is non-cancellable; and, second, that ignorance of the pejorative dimension should be counted as ignorance of literal, linguistic meaning, as opposed to (say) a mistake about conditions for appropriate usage. I bolster these considerations via cases in which slurs are embedded within complex constructions, in which cases the pejorative dimension of a slur gets ensnared within the compositional semantic machinery.
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Notes
There is a delicate trade-off to be negotiated here. On the one hand, slurs can be repugnant, offensive terms which cause real harm; hence there is plenty of reason to avoid mentioning them, and instead using stand-in labels ‘N’, ‘D’, etc. (Cf. Waldron (2012) on slurs and harm, and cf. Hom (2008), Jeshion (2013) for discussions of the “derogatory autonomy” of a slur – i.e., their power to offend does not depend on malicious intent on the part of individual speakers, and so can be not at all mollified by scholarly appeals to use/mention distinctions.) On the other hand, there is a cost to this otherwise well-motivated euphemizing: given that the target data are repugnant, offensive and harmful, it is important to keep those factors in plain sight. Along with many colleagues, I tend to negotiate this tradeoff differently in different contexts – say, a large undergraduate class vs. a small audience of experts. However, for the purposes of this paper, which is about the semantic content of utterances involving slurs, I find it indispensable to explicitly mention some repugnant slurs. (Compare the opening sections of Camp (2018), Pullum (2018), both of whom arrive at the same conclusion.)
For the record, I myself am sympathetic to a variant of Hornsby (2001)/Hom and May (2018) “empty extension” view. (Roughly: slurs inherently include assumptions about the evaluative significance of race, gender, etc. that are not merely repugnant, but simply false – no one is contemptible or inferior in virtue of falling into any such sort of category. Ultimately, this will entail that genuine uses of slurs have null extension.) However, nothing in this paper presupposes this controversial doctrine.
For example, there is robust disagreement over this sort of question:
Is it TRUE or FALSE that Obama is not a nigger?
Subsequent to this initial division, there will be further divisions among those who give the same answer to it, when it comes to why they give the answer they do. FALSE could be divided between (at least) racists and those anti-semanticists who hold that slurs are semantically equivalent to their neutral counterparts; TRUE could be divided between (at least) ‘empty extension’ theorists and those who think of slurs as confined to just stereotype-conforming members of the target group. (All of this variance illustrates the multiple semantic dimensions to slurs. More on this below.)
I follow the convention of using ‘xenophobe’ as shorthand for: racist or homophobe or misogynist or etc.
Cf. Kennedy (2003) for a case study.
There are some rather bracingly quick anti-semanticist arguments which are taken seriously in solid research on the topic (e.g., Nunberg (2018), Pullum (2018)), but which I take to be countered by recognizing the importance of this ‘in virtue of’ component. For example, if the content semantically expressed by ‘Obama is not a nigger’ is that Obama is not contemptible in virtue of being black, then where is the offense in that? We should all agree with it, and feel good about doing so. But, of course, we aren’t. Ergo, semanticist accounts of the pejorative content of a slur are mistaken.
To the contrary, the ‘in virtue of’ component shows why there does not lurk an insurmountable problem for any and all semanticist accounts of slurs here. It entails that it is racist to use the term ‘nigger’; that only a homophobe could possibly use the term ‘dyke’; and so on. These terms rest on repugnant views about the evaluative significance of race or sexual orientation. That suffices to explain their offensiveness, and the point is compatible with a semanticist approach to their derogatory content. (Analogously, purely semantic properties of ‘asshole’ could entail that it is nondisplaceably inappropriate to even so much as mention such things in polite contexts.)
Another such anti-semanticist argument is what Pullum (2018) calls “the problem of unwanted tautologies” – e.g., why doesn’t ‘Dykes are morally contemptible in virtue of their sexual orientation’ feel blatantly redundant? Semanticism entails that it should be a mere tautology, but it feels more substantive than that. This just strikes me as a guise of the paradox of analysis. (‘A circle is a set of points equidistant from a center point’ also doesn’t feel blatantly redundant.)
That is, there is something notoriously oxymoronic about the very idea of a conventional implicature – of “a condition which is part of what the words … mean without being part of what the words say …” (Grice, 1989: 361). The very notion seeks to straddle the S/P interface in a controversial (and perhaps untenable) way. There is some inclination to say: if they are implicatures, then they ain’t semantic; and if they are conventional, then they ain’t pragmatic. Cf. Horn (2012: 82–5) for discussion.
Cf. Williamson (2009: 150): “… someone who says ‘Lessing was Boche, though I do not mean to imply that Germans are cruel’ merely adds hypocrisy to xenophobia …”.
In addition to slurs, there are plenty of other phenomena whose relation to the S/P interface is a matter of ongoing controversy. (Two others just came up: conventional implicatures and presuppositions.) Cf. Grice (1989), Bach (2004), Recanati (2004, 2010), Schlenker (2016) for discussion of various such cases.
Cf., e.g., Grice’s (1989: 25) discussion of interpreting an utterance of ‘He is in the grip of a vice’.
The preceding is based on a true story, in fact relayed to me by a colleague as auto-biographical. I take it that such cases occur more or less commonly.
An anonymous referee has charged that “people who are not racists or homophobes but are completely unconscious of the prejudicial ways in which they talk about certain groups” pose a problem for the arguments of this paper. To the contrary, semanticists can and should count such people as (like Arnaud) semantically incompetent. They are blind to a dimension of the meaning of the terms they utter; whether out of ignorance or unconcern makes little difference. (Compare: I have decided to henceforth just call all green vegetables ‘broccoli’, and let the chips fall where they may. For the rest of us, trying to cooperatively communicate as best we can, such a speaker is practically equivalent to someone making an honest mistake.)
Crucially, [E-B] is not irredeemably xenophobic. Suppose John is a strategic voter whose first choice for President is Obama, and who thinks it would be wonderful if the US had a black President, but thinks that Obama has no realistic chance of winning the election. So, John might strategically vote for his second choice. [E-B] might be apt, while [E-N], and the charge of racism, are not. (Note also that this does not rely on any simple, straightforward relation between constraints on belief reports and the exact contents of the reported beliefs.)
In the terms of Sennett and Copp (2015), what I am running here is a substitution argument for semanticism. I am not moved by their dismissal of such arguments (in §5.1), as it is premised on a position on classic conventional implicatures which I find problematic. Roughly: [P1] you can run a substitution argument on ‘and’ vs. ‘but’, just as surely as you can run one on a slur and its neutral counterpart; [P2] it is not clear that semantics ought to distinguish ‘and’ from ‘but’; ergo [C] substitutivity arguments are inconclusive. Their [P2], while endorsed by the titans from Frege to Grice, would be counted by many contemporaries (in the wake of Bach (1999), Potts (2005), Picardi (2006), McCready (2010), etc.) as resting on thin ice.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Ana Clara Polokof, Evan Simpson, and Rob Stainton for reading previous drafts of this work and offering helpful feedback. This research was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose support I gratefully acknowledge.
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Sullivan, A. Semantic Dimensions of Slurs. Philosophia 50, 1479–1493 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00427-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00427-2