6 Contents
10 Conclusion
11 References
Many scholars have helped my work along, with their suggestions, objections, comments and much more. I shall thank Claudia Bianchi, Maddalena Bonelli, Laura Caponetto, Inés Crespo, Esa Díaz-León, Filippo Domaneschi, Christopher Gauker, Michael Glanzberg, John Horden, Robin Jeshion, Natalia Karczewska, Max Kölbel, Uriah Kriegel, Dan López de Sa, Robert May, Teresa Marques, Dima Mohammed, Alba Moreno Zurita, Geoffrey Nunberg, Francesca Panzeri, Eduardo Pérez Navarro, Mihaela Popa Wyatt, Erich Rast, François Recanati, Martina Rosola, Marco Santambrogio, Jennifer Saul, Marina Sbisà, Philippe Schlenker, Andrés Soria Ruiz, Benjamin Spector, Isidora Stojanovic, Brent Strickland, Simone Sulpizio, Ken Taylor, Tristan Thommen, Giuliano Torrengo, Pekka Väyrynen, Julia Zakkou and Dan Zeman for engaging discussions and very helpful suggestions. Many thanks also to the conference audiences of the workshops and seminars where I presented different parts of this work in Pisa, Malta, Bucharest, Gargnano, Paris, Trieste, Milan, Barcelona, Storrs, Dubrovnik, Bochum, Lisbon, Toulouse, Hamburg and Genoa for their precious insights and for the good time.
Thanks to my editor, Robert Stainton, and to Rowman and Littlefield. Special thanks are due to Marina Sbisà and Dan Zeman for their extremely thorough and detailed reviews that helped me improve my book both in its structure and its content. Previous versions of this manuscript benefited from the comments and suggestions of Pier Marco Bertinetto, Claudia Bianchi, Robin Jeshion, Isidora Stojanovic and Pekka Väyrynen. All remaining errors are mine. I thank the project PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014 (in particular BIMestre-PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014 and PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014-SEM) from the NOVA University of Lisbon, the grant G45J18000030001 from the University of Milan, and the PRIN project The Mark of Mental (MOM) 2017P9E9N from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan.
I am especially indebted to Claudia Bianchi and Isidora Stojanovic for encouraging me to publish this book and for being generous and supportive mentors. But most of all, I should thank them for being inspiring scholars and human beings, in so many ways. It is a privilege to learn from them.
Thanks to my friends and colleagues in Barcelona, Paris, Pisa, Lisbon and Milan, and all around the world: I have been incredibly fortunate to meet each of you. Heartfelt thanks to my closest friends: it took me a while to find you but it was worth it.
I am forever grateful to my partner Gio for his love and support. His sharpness, his curiosity, his care and dedication helped both me and this book very much. I don’t really have words to thank my family, particularly my parents, Biagio and Francesca, and my brother, Carlo: being unconditionally loved by highly original and talented people surely helps, and not just with books.
What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In the last few decades, philosophers of language and linguists have turned their attention to the evaluative and expressive dimensions of language. ‘Evaluative’ and ‘expressive’ are quite inclusive labels, ranging from expressive intensifiers like ‘damn’ to slurs like ‘wop’ and interjections like ‘shit,’ and from thick terms like ‘lewd’ to thin ones like ‘good.’ In this book I almost exclusively discuss two classes of terms for which I put forward a uniform account: slurs and thick terms. The thesis that I defend is that in employing such terms, in addition to saying something purely factual about people and things, speakers also presuppose certain values, as if they were common ground among the conversation’s participants. This work illustrates how this linguistic mechanism is able to explain the pervasive social and moral effects of evaluative language.
The study of slurs and thick terms has been mainly conducted in two different —although related—fields: philosophy of language and linguistics for slurs, and ethics and metaethics for thick terms. Despite the close relation between these disciplines, only a few scholars have adopted an interdisciplinary stance: The literature on thick terms addresses issues such as the cognitivism/non-cognitivism dispute and the fact/value distinction, while the debate on slurs tends to focus on the question of how these epithets encode values, as well as on their linguistic properties. Väyrynen (2009, 2011, 2012, 2013) is among the first scholars to systematically apply the tools of linguistics and philosophy of language to the study of thick terms, providing the basis for the possibility of asking whether slurs and thick terms rely on the same linguistic mechanisms.
In this book I develop a uniform account of slurs and thick terms: classes of expressions that I shall call ‘hybrid evaluatives’ (HEs). My work is a contribution to filling the gap between the research on thick terms conducted in metaethics and the investigation of slurs carried out in linguistics and philosophy of language. In addition to merging these two fields, this study also engages in a fruitful dialogue with the experimental research on evaluative speech conducted in social psychology and experimental philosophy. The aim of this book is to show that the mechanism that underlies slurs and thick terms is one and the same, and that the phenomenal differences that one can observe depend on the peculiarities of their descriptive content. My work leaves aside the debate on thick and pejorative concepts and focuses on thick and pejorative terms instead. If one wants to apply my theses to evaluative concepts, one can do so only under the assumption that the meaning of thick terms and slurs amounts to what the corresponding concept expresses. I do not want to commit myself to the simplified view that language and concepts stand in a one-to-one relation: I will just stay neutral on thick and slurring concepts and focus on language. On the other hand, the analysis of value speech that this work outlines provides a sound basis for thinking about the role of evaluative language in our daily lives and communication.
This book consists of two parts. Part I presents a novel presuppositional analysis of HEs, a category including slurs and thick terms. In chapter 1, I introduce the class of HEs: first, I settle some preliminary issues such as how to define HEs and how to distinguish them from related notions; then, I illustrate the presuppositional behavior of these expressions, with respect to projection and rejection, and discuss an alternative explanation of the data. chapter 2 is devoted to the semantics of HEs: I analyze their evaluative and descriptive content, assess the issues of reference and extension and spell out what exactly is presupposed by these expressions. I discuss how to interpret failure in the case of evaluative presuppositions and show how these topics relate to highly debated questions about values in ethics. In chapter 3, I investigate the effects of the use of HEs in conversation: I show that the
