Explaining some projection data: derogation and offense

As we saw above, according to the truth-conditional account of slurs, slurs under negation (and other operators) are not derogatory, in the sense that they do not predicate negative properties of a subject. However, Hom and May acknowledge that utterances with embedded slurs like (15)-(17) sound pejorative:

15. Madonna is not a chink.

16. There are no wops in my neighbor.

17. If Peter is a fag, then he is worthy of contempt.

Hom (2012) and Hom and May (2013) distinguish the phenomenon of

‘derogation’ – predication of a negative moral property based on the subjects belonging to a group – from another phenomenon, somehow similar in its effects. In addition to being derogatory, the use of slurs would generate what they call ‘offense’.

As Hom puts it,

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(…) [Derogation] is an objective feature of the semantic contents of pejorative terms. Derogation is the result of the actual predication, or application, of a slur or pejorative term to its intended target group.

(…)[Offense] is a subjective effect of the semantic contents of pejorative terms in a context. Offense is a psychological result on the part of the discourse participants, and is a function of their beliefs and values. (Hom 2012: 397).

There are thus two possible factors responsible for the negative effects that slurs elicit: a truth-conditional component on the one-hand (derogation) and a psychological and pragmatically driven component on the other hand (offense).

Among the critics of such a distinction, Jeshion (2013b) notices that the derogation/offense distinction makes the surprising prediction that ‘John is a nigger’

and ‘Is John a nigger?’ are disparaging for different reasons. Furthermore, it predicts that ‘John is not a chink, he is a nigger’ is derogatory (in the technical sense) towards African-Americans, but not toward Asian people. As we underline in Cepollaro and Thommen (ms), given these two parameters, an utterance U featuring a slur S in a context C can stand in four possible states depending on the linguistic environment and the conversational context, as illustrated in Figure 1. Whenever negative moral properties are predicated of a subject (like in U1), there is derogation (cases a and b);

on the other hand, offense is brought about only in contexts of utterance where a

‘psychological result’ is expected, i.e., when it is problematic in the context of utterance to suggest that the members of the target class are despicable (cases a and c); otherwise – for example in a deeply homophobic society where everyone, including the members of the target class, is homophobic – offense does not arise (cases b and d). The counterintuitive predictions of the derogation/offense distinction are that a question like U2 ‘Were the last six Roman emperors fags?’ does not carry strictly speaking any derogatory content towards homosexual people and it is

‘offensive’ only if it is uttered in a non-completely homophobic scenario. In the hyperbolic-homophobic scenario C2, the question U2 is neither derogatory nor offensive (case d). Similarly, the assertion U1 is derogatory, but not offensive (case

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U1:‘The last six Roman emperors were fags.’

C2: A journalist says that on TV in a deeply homophobic society where everyone - including members of the target class - is homophobic.

No

U2: ‘Were the last six Roman emperors fags?’

C2: A journalist says that on TV in a deeply homophobic society where everyone - including members of the target class - is homophobic.

Hom and May provide another, finer grained, analysis of the causes of offense:

“Offensiveness can be linguistically triggered, because when speakers use predicates, they typically conversationally implicate their commitment to the non-null extensionality of the predicate”. (Hom and May 2013: 310)

So the idea is the following: Speakers tend to use terms that they take to have a non-empty extension; this is true of any predicate (‘bikes’, ‘trees’, etc.). For example, if John asks Mary whether she ever speaks to angels, he will conversationally implicate that he believes that angels exist; Mary and bystanders will generate such an implicature.⁶⁸ Likewise, if John asks Mary whether she ever speaks to ‘wops’,

68 Conversational implicatures are expected to be cancellable. Hom and May rely on the non-pejorative readings of utterances like those listed in (6) to argue in favor of the cancellability of the conversational implicature responsible for offense. ‘There are no kikes, kikes don’t exist’, ‘John is not a kike because there is no such thing’ or ‘No Jews are kikes’. We have seen in section 7.1 that these cases are better understood in terms of metalinguistic effects.

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Mary and bystanders will tend to infer that John believes that ‘wops’ exist (i.e., in Hom and May’s analysis, that there are people who are bad because of being Italian).

Any use of slurs, embedded or not, triggers an implicature of non-null extensionality, which is offensive, given the alleged meaning of slurs.

However, as we claimed in Cepollaro and Thommen (ms), non-vacuity inferences do not satisfactorily explain the offensiveness of embedded slurs. Take a construction where non-vacuity inferences are typically blocked, for example ‘there is no F’:

People do not infer that the speaker believes in the existence of God from her utterance of ‘there is no God’. The same goes with ‘there are no vampires’. Now, note that although vampires do not exist, there are slurs for vampires (e.g. ‘fangs’), just like for other fictional entities⁶⁹ (‘pointyear’ for elves, ‘toaster’ for robots,

‘furface’ or ‘moondog’ for werewolves). Imagine that John is afraid of being bitten by a vampire on his way home and Mary wants to reassure him. She could utter (18) or (19):

18. Don’t worry! There are no vampires! They don’t exist.

19. Don’t worry! There are no fangs! They don’t exist.

Although neither (18) nor (19) trigger existential inferences because of the ‘There is no F’ form, the utterance of (19) still carries Mary’s negative evaluation of vampires. The negative evaluative content about vampires in (19) cannot be the result of non-emptiness inferences. Therefore, non-null-extensionality implicatures do not explain the projection of the evaluative content of slurs.⁷⁰

Wrapping up, in this chapter I presented and discussed the truth-conditional account of slurs. The main difficulty faced by this approach is to account for projection data, i.e. for the fact that embedded slurs are typically disparaging. I

69 The ‘fangs’ example comes from the HBO tv-series True Blood; among gamers, there are slurs for all sort fictional entities (tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasticSlurs).

70 One could instead think that what triggers offense is not the inference of non-emptiness per se, but the inference of possible non-emptiness. ‘Wop’ triggers offense because it suggests that the speaker believes that it is possible that Italians ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation because of being Italian. This variation does not work either, as Mary could reassure John by saying

‘Don’t worry, there could be no fangs! It is simply impossible that fangs exist’ and this would not delete the pejorative content towards the fictional entities.

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presented two kinds of alleged solutions to the problem put forward by Hom (2008, 2010, 2012) and Hom and May (2013, 2014, forthcoming): To take the non-offensive readings of embedded slurs as evidence of the truth-conditional nature of the pejorative content (7.1) and to introduce an additional pragmatic mechanism that is responsible for the perceived offensiveness of slurs (7.2). I showed that neither of these strategies is apt to solve the projection problem: The first one fails because the non-pejorative readings of certain negated slurs are elicited by metalinguistic readings of negation; the second one fails because the derogation/offense distinction provides unsatisfactory predictions if offense is interpreted as a psychological reaction caused by speakers’ beliefs, while it provides wrong predictions when offense is interpreted as a psychological reaction caused by non-null extensionality implicatures.

I take the data discussed in this chapter to show that the derogatory content of slurs is not truth-conditional. Note moreover that rejecting the truth-conditional theory does not automatically mean to endorse the so-called identity thesis, according to which slurs and neutral counterparts are co-referential, as in order to establish reference, other dimensions of the linguistic machinery have to be taken into account, as discussed in section 3.3.

In the next chapter, I present and discuss the truth-conditional analysis of thick terms, put forward by Kyle (2013).