Fregean tone. Väyrynen (2013), who defends the view that thick terms do not encode evaluations, discusses some of the major difficulties raised by such a distinction. According to Väyrynen, the evaluative content associated with thick terms arises from conversational mechanisms that can vary on a case-by-case basis. In Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016), we defend the opposing view that HE-evaluations are recorded in the meaning of such expressions as evaluative presuppositions. Thus our view has to answer the question of what distinguishes pure evaluatives from hybrid ones.
One way to distinguish thin and thick terms is to rely on the notion of at-issueness: the evaluative content is at-issue for thin terms and presupposed—hence not-at-issue—for HEs, whose descriptive content is instead what is at issue. The at-issue versus not-at-issue distinction, widely accepted in discourse analysis,3 amounts to the idea that utterances typically have something like a main point, i.e. a so-called question under discussion (QUD); the at-issue propositions associated with an utterance are relevant to the QUD, in the sense that they entail “a partial or complete answer to the QUD” (Simons et al. 2010). Every proposition associated with an utterance that is not relevant to the QUD is labeled as ‘not-at-issue.’ Presuppositions are typically not relevant to the QUD, as they amount to content that is taken for granted. Going back to the thin versus thick distinction, the idea is that the evaluation is not-at-issue (it is taken for granted) in the case of thick terms, but at-issue (it is the main point, relevant to the QUD) in the case of thin terms. Although this idea sounds plausible to a certain extent, the picture appears to be quite complicated, as the HE-evaluation can become precisely what is at issue:
1 6.A.Madonna’s show was lewd.B.I disagree. It was sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries, indeed, but it was not bad in any way.
However, this is not surprising after all: as I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 3, presupposed content can become at-issue under the appropriate circumstances; the cases of negotiation involving metalinguistic disagreement—like (6)—are particularly interesting for evaluatives. For the time being, I consider other examples that seem to challenge the idea of a sharp divide between thick and thin terms.
The first problems are raised by those terms that are thought to be on the edge between thin and thick, such as ‘just.’ ‘Just’ seems to have some descriptive content, but very little so to say. This impression of being on the edge between the thick and the thin can be explained in terms of how specific the descriptive content is. For example, the descriptive at-issue content of ‘just’ is quite vague, something like ‘in accordance with standards and requirements.’ In contrast, most thick terms are more specific than that in their at-issue content (and slurs even more so): for instance, ‘lewd,’ meaning ‘sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries,’ and ‘wop,’ meaning ‘Italian.’ However, one could simply acknowledge that some thick terms have a very general descriptive content that needs to be contextually specified, without giving up the distinction between thin and thick terms.
In Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016), we argued that further difficulties for postulating a sharp boundary between the thin and the thick stem from those expressions that are ‘thicker’ than the all-purpose evaluatives ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and nevertheless resemble very closely such expressions in that they (i) are typically used to convey evaluative content and (ii) do not have a rich descriptive content in addition to the evaluative one. We considered two such cases. Highly positive and highly negative expressions, such as ‘awesome,’ ‘excellent,’ ‘fantastic,’ ‘magnificent,’ on the one hand, and terms like ‘awful,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘terrible,’ on the other hand. The above terms look like intensified thin terms (something like ‘good (or bad) to a very high degree’). However, there seems to be some additional lexical information that distinguishes those expressions from each other, that is, some descriptive meaning: ‘excellent’ is for what is superior to the rest in a certain area, ‘terrible’ is for what provokes terror and so on. The second case includes terms that look like thin terms, but in relation to a specific domain: ‘beautiful,’ ‘ugly,’ or ‘evil.’ As a matter of fact, when discussed within the realm of aesthetics, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are taken to be thin terms. Similarly, ‘evil’ would likely count as thin in ethics, as it means something along the lines of ‘morally bad.’ On the other hand, if instead of thinking about evaluatives from a specific domain, one considers them from a broader perspective, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are narrower than the all-purpose ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ because the former constrain the evaluation to the aesthetic field; similarly, ‘evil’ is narrower than ‘bad,’ as the negative evaluation that it encodes is linguistically constrained to the moral domain. We drew the conclusion that terms like ‘excellent’ and ‘horrible,’ ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are thicker than ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but thinner than ‘courageous’ or ‘cruel.’
The problematic cases presented in Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016) do not inevitably knock down the idea of a distinction between thin and thick terms. Let me sketch a tentative alternative explanation. One could analyze ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ as thin terms restricted to a certain domain, corresponding to ‘aesthetically good’ and ‘aesthetically bad.’ Similarly, one could analyze ‘excellent’ and ‘awful’ as intensified thin terms, corresponding to ‘very good’ and ‘very bad.’ In light of this observation, ‘beautiful,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘excellent’ and ‘awful’ appear to be more complex than ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but not necessarily thicker. Compare them to comparatives and superlatives, for example: one would not say that ‘better’ is thicker than ‘good,’ but only that it is more complex, as it is a modification of ‘good’ that roughly means ‘more good.’ The same goes for ‘very good’ (‘excellent’): it is a modification (intensification, in this case) of ‘good.’ Presumably one could say the same also for ‘aesthetically good’ (which corresponds to ‘beautiful’) and ‘morally bad’ (‘evil’). These terms (‘better,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘evil,’ etc.) do not mix description and evaluation, but express evaluation with some restrictions. They remain thin terms, whose content has been somehow modified, by either a comparative or an intensifier (as in the case of ‘better’ and ‘excellent’), or by a domain restrictor (as in the case of ‘beautiful’ and ‘evil’), without thus becoming thick. They can be analyzed as (modified) thin terms, distinct from thick terms in that only the latter mix descriptive and evaluative content. This is just a suggestion of one way in which one can try to resist a skeptical attitude with respect to the thin/thick distinction.
1.1.3 Previous Suggestions for a Uniform Account
The idea that slurs and thick terms can be analyzed along the same lines was hinted at in some previous works. Even though the one I defend is the first systematic and fully fledged unified account of slurs and thick terms, a few authors over the years have suggested a comparison between these two kinds of expressions in different ways.4 In this section, I briefly mention these works, starting from scholars working on thick terms and moving to scholars working on slurs.
Hare (1963) discusses whether it is necessary to endorse a certain moral perspective in order to understand terms and concepts that mix description and evaluation (see section 2.3); he mentions two such expressions: ‘courageous’ and the N-word (Hare 1963: 187). He endorses the idea that both expressions convey at the same time evaluative and descriptive contents and that, when speakers do not share such evaluations, they have to abandon these terms and substitute them with neutral counterparts.5 He remarks that speakers are more accurate in perceiving that a word carries evaluative contents when they do not endorse them, thus suggesting, interestingly, that for most scholars it may be easier to perceive the evaluative content of the N-word than the evaluative content of ‘generous.’
While
