Abstract
Christopher Hom has recently argued that the best-overall account of the meaning of pejorative terms is a semantic account according to which pejoratives make a distinctive truth-conditional contribution, and in particular express complex, negative socially constructed properties. In addition, Hom supplements the semantic account with a pragmatic strategy to deal with the derogatory content of occurrences of pejorative terms in negations, conditionals, attitude reports, and so on, according to which those occurrences give rise to conversational implicatures to the effect that the pejorative terms are non-empty, which explains the offensiveness of those occurrences. In this paper, I aim to defend this semantic strategy from several recent objections, and I will also present a novel objection, which in my view shows that we should understand the semantic account as a version of inferentialism, rather than radical externalism.
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Notes
The symbol “*” indicates that the utterance in the brackets is infelicitous.
This formulation is a simplification from Hom’s original one. In my view the complications omitted here are not essential for our purposes.
This account can nicely explain the asymmetry between (2) and (3) above. That is, in (2) the pejorative content has wide scope, due to the conversational implicature that the partner firing Cary is an extreme state of affairs to the same degree of severity of a violation of the moral impermissibility associated with “fucking” (and this is why the pejorative content scopes out), whereas in (3) the pejorative content is just the literal meaning, which has narrow scope in this case. What about (6): “If Cary fucks up another case, then he will be fired”? In this case, according to Hom, this occurrence of “fucks up” does not have the literal meaning that he appeals to in the other cases, but this is rather a case of a dead metaphor. That is, according to Hom, this occurrence of “fucks up” literally means something along these lines: “causes harm of a comparable severity to the degree of severity of having sex outside of marriage”. This literal content has narrow scope in this occurrence, as the semantic account predicts.
We could argue that given the content of the conversational implicature, there is also derogation, since the conversationally implicated content asserts that some people have those negative properties and ought to be discriminated, because of belonging to the target group, which is derogatory.
See Boghossian (2003) for a very clear elaboration of inferentialism.
As I see it, inferentialism and descriptivism are two sides of the same coin: the descriptivist idea can be formulated in terms of competent speakers associating the term with a certain description, whereas the inferentialist idea can be formulated in terms of the meaning of the term being determined by the corresponding inferential role associated with the term, that is, the inferences involving the concept that competent speakers are disposed to make, given their possession of the concept. We can typically formulate the inferential role in terms of a complex description associated to the term. I assume for the sake of simplicity that these two ideas are interchangeable. See Jackson (1998) for further discussion.
My claim is that racists and non-racists that grasp the meaning of the pejorative term N will share the inferential abilities expressed by (D*), that is to say, they would both infer that someone is D* if they are N. But they have many differences regarding other inferential dispositions. For instance, racists will believe that if someone is NPC (non-pejorative correlate), then they have the negative properties assumed by the ideology, whereas non-racists deny this. What they both hold is that if someone is N, then they have the negative properties assumed by the ideology, but whereas racists believe that some people are N (namely the NPC), non-racists deny this.
Hom & May (2018) have recently proposed a version of the semantic account of pejoratives that moves away from radical externalism, and is a bit closer to descriptivism. In particular, they argue that the semantic content of a pejorative is something like “ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation because of being a member of G” (6). However, they do not explicitly motivate this new view in terms of the problems for a causal theory of reference concerning empty terms, as I do, so in this paper I offer an additional motivation for going in that direction. Moreover, they suggest that the groups G that can form the basis of pejorative terms are those “that for whatever odious reasons have associated with them an unjust, hateful or discriminatory ideology that is culturally ingrained within society” (7). This seems very plausible but does not yet answer the central question in my paper, namely, what is the causal connection between pejorative terms and the discriminatory ideologies and practices that give rise to them. My account gives an answer to this question, by focusing on evaluative descriptions that involve indexical terms picking out salient ideologies and discriminatory practices, whose reference is fixed causally. In this way, we solve the problem of empty reference (i.e., how can empty terms be causally connected with their referents?), plus the problem of error and ignorance (i.e., how can people who are ignorant of the properties expressed by current ideologies be competent users of pejoratives?) at the same time.
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Diaz-Leon, E. Pejorative Terms and the Semantic Strategy. Acta Anal 35, 23–34 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00392-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00392-2