2011: 37) and whether labels such as ‘gypsy’ count as slurs. The criterion we put forward in Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016) is the following: in addition to descriptive content, HEs systematically convey some evaluative content that I call ‘HE-evaluation,’ which scopes out when they are embedded under negation, conditionals, modals and questions. In section 1.2, I show that thick terms such as ‘lewd’ and slurs such as ‘wop’ meet these requirements. Let us go back to whether a term like ‘athletic’ should count as evaluative: if the term has standard literal uses that do not convey any evaluation at all, then the term should not count as an HE. And, indeed, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (a.k.a. COCA; Davies 2008) shows both uses of ‘athletic’: some simply mean ‘related to sports’ (no value judgment involved), others convey a positive evaluation of sport-related things.
1 1.In the Roman context, the heavy athletic disciplines were wrestling, boxing, and the pankration, a brutal blend of wrestling and boxing.
2 2.I wasn’t a particularly athletic or popular child.
3 3.Everybody in Cirque is athletic and handsome or beautiful.
Let us now look at slurs: some terms are used both derogatorily and nonderogatorily, i.e. they work as slurs or non-slurring labels depending on the context. Consider the following occurrences of ‘gypsy’ from the COCA:
1 4.On the street, a violinist plays one of Bartok’s Gypsy melodies. The vibrato from his violin feels as if it is penetrating my heart.
2 5.Calling that green-eyed minx a slut is too good for her. They say she’s got Gypsy blood!
In (2)–(3) ‘athletic’ conveys a positive evaluation toward sport-related things or people, just like a thick term; similarly, ‘gypsy’ seems to work like a slur in (5); nevertheless, the crucial point is that this is not a systematic or lexically encoded characteristic of these items. The value judgments that expressions such as ‘athletic’ or ‘gypsy’ might carry are not part of their conventional meanings, as (1) and (4) show. Thus, such expressions are not HEs.
Note that the criterion that I have just provided does not prima facie include so-called multivalent thick terms (see Dancy 1995), i.e. those terms that seem to convey positive and negative content at the same time: ‘eccentric,’ ‘extravagant,’ ‘kinky,’ ‘unorthodox,’ and the like. Similarly, my account would not apply to any terms that do not lexically encode HE-evaluation but can be used in an evaluative way both positively and negatively: for instance, ‘intense’ (see Stojanovic 2016, 2017 on “valence-underspecification”).
Slurs are taken to denigrate groups or individuals on the basis of their belonging to a certain class. Scholars do not usually specify what counts as a class; instead, they present some examples involving ethnic or geographical origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation and tend to restrict their attention to the most inflammatory slurs. As a result, there is no consensus whether certain terms, especially those that are not about the listed typical categories, can count as slurs, since the debate has unfortunately selected the defining general features of slurs by focusing on a small subset. In my proposal, those expressions that denigrate non-prototypical categories (like ‘flack’ for ‘publicist,’ ‘facho’ for ‘fascist,’ ‘stinkpotter’ for owners of a motorized boat, etc.) can in fact count as slurs, as long as they fulfill the criterion I have proposed in the previous section (contra Nunberg 2018). This brings up a crucial issue concerning the descriptive content of slurs, namely, what categories can count as a target group. Consider the criterion of self-identification, according to which for a property to determine a target group, the people instantiating such a property must be willing to identify themselves as bearers of such a property. The self-identification criterion is probably satisfied for properties like being Italian or being Jewish, targeted by the slurs ‘wop’ and ‘kike,’ but epithets like ‘gook’ do not express a property with which people can self-identify: as Jeshion (2016a: 135) underlines, ‘gook’ was used for all natives of the regions occupied by the US Army (Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Filipinos), who most likely do not self-identify with each other. This said, Hom and May (2018) have formulated three options to establish what counts as a group G, the target of a slur:
1 A)There are no restrictions on G; it can be instantiated by any group whatsoever. This is in effect the claim that group membership is not something that is morally evaluable.
2 B)There is a restriction on G supplied by a theory of natural groups. This theory would isolate racial, religious, gender, sexual orientation, etc. as natural groups, and hence as targets of pejoration.
3 C)There is a restriction on G provided by ideologies that are active in socio-cultural contexts. A group could be a value of G only insofar as there is a discriminatory cultural norm that supports it. (Hom and May 2018: 113)1
The authors embrace option (C), while keeping the idea, expressed in option (A), that group membership is not a morally evaluable feature for them: G is a group that is/was the target of unjust, hateful or discriminatory ideology.
I agree with Hom and May about rejecting option (B) as a non-starter, but I do not embrace their solution. On my account any property can in principle individuate a target group, as long as there are speakers who find it interesting or convenient to use a piece of language to pick out such a property while conveying an evaluation of the objects that instantiate it. Note that my view imposes no requirement on whether the evaluation is warranted. My criterion to define a slur differs from Hom and May’s (and from most accounts of slurs) in that (i) slurs do not have to be wrong by definition, as it is not part of how I define a slur that the triggered evaluation is wrong and “unjust,”2 (ii) for a slur to exist, it is not necessary to have a culturally ingrained discriminatory ideology within society—it suffices that a group of speakers coin a term to express a systematic evaluation of people instantiating a certain property, and (iii) even though prototypical examples of slurs convey a negative evaluation, this is not an essential feature; it is conceivable that a slur might convey a positive evaluation. An example of what a slur with a positive polarity may look like—and again, having a positive polarity does not mean being just—is ‘Aryan’: Nazis used this term for Indo-Europeans, while conveying some positive evaluation, thus supporting the idea that being Indo-European is good in and of itself.
Slurs turn out to be very similar to thick terms in this framework, where the polarity of the evaluation could be any in principle (even though it is typically negative), and where the target class of a slur could be any (even though it usually concerns ethnicity, sexual orientation, and the like). Most slurs are both negative and unjust—they convey a negative evaluation of their targets on the basis of characteristics that in no way ground or justify derogation, exclusion, and so on. However, the linguistic mechanism through which slurs encode values does not need their evaluative content to be negative or unjust.
1.1.2 Distinguishing Thick Terms from Thin Terms
A further question—in addition to how to distinguish HEs from ordinary descriptive terms used evaluatively—is how to characterize various kinds of evaluatives, for instance, how to discern hybrid and pure evaluatives. In other words, how can one draw the divide between thick terms, such as ‘generous’ or ‘lewd,’ and thin terms, such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’? The thin versus thick distinction, formulated in metaethics (Williams 1985), is far from being uncontroversial, even though it is widely accepted. For Eklund
