Leopold Hess

The topic of this essay is derogatoriness of speech in the sense of its capacity to harm or offend in a way that is commonly taken to be unacceptable in a liberal society. I take the folk terms slur and hate speech to aim at capturing this aspect. The question I am interested in is: what makes speech derogatory, as opposed to merely insulting? I identify two main ways of approaching this question, both in public discourse and in philosophical theorizing: an expressivist approach (derogation consists in expression of hateful attitudes, e.g. Marques 2023, Jeshion 2013) and an identitarian one (derogation results from violating people’s right to self-identification, including choice of respectable terms for the group they belong to; e.g. Anderson and Lepore 2013). I argue that both approaches face difficulties with their theoretical foundations and empirical adequacy, but more importantly they are politically problematic, as they allow for powerful social groups to label any dissent or criticism as derogation. The common problem of the expressivist and identitarian approaches is that they are essentially subjectivist, basing their construal of derogatory speech on the attitudes of either, respectively, the speaker or the target. However, not every inimical attitude is derogatory, and not everyone who feels insulted is thereby derogated – in the strongly normative sense implied by our concepts of slurs or hate speech. One can stipulate additional extra-subjective conditions under which the attitudes in question support classifying some speech as derogatory – but that makes it doubtful if relying on the attitudes is necessary at all. I propose an account of derogatory speech that does away with subjective conditions and defines derogation as property of speech that is a material part of social practices of discrimination and subordination. Instead of considering the (unavoidably opaque and often self-serving) attitudes of actors in a public sphere, we should focus on the material analysis of actual, objectively observable practices. To substantiate this approach to derogatory speech it is necessary to explain how it can materially contribute to practices of discrimination and subordination. To do this I refer primarily to theories of social practice and ideology found in the work of Sally Haslanger (2012, 2018) and Louis Althusser (1971). On the view I outline, the role of speech is not to create social situations of subordination, but to legitimize and reproduce them. Derogatory speech interpellates its targets as subordinate subjects of already existing practices of discrimination and violence. That is also why offending or insulting speech targeted at those in power cannot constitute derogation.

Thick terms are expressions that convey both descriptive and evaluative meanings. Philippa Foot suggested a simple and attractive account of the semantics of such terms, in which their meaning is defined through entailments between certain descriptions and evaluations. The account is often considered untenable because of the existence of objectionable thick terms which would combine some descriptions with unacceptable evaluations. This leads to what Matti Eklund calls the Emptiness Problem. I develop an interpretation of Footian semantics within an inferentialist framework in which this problem can be circumvented. I argue that the extension of objectionable thick terms is empty because indeterminate, but it can be distinguished from the extension of a descriptive counterpart, because extension of a term is determined jointly by the rules governing both its introduction and elimination. The objectors deny that rules for terms such as perverted are harmonious and thus can reject its use without denying that there are things to which it would apply. I also discuss how this account can be extended to other, related categories of expressions, such as gendered pejoratives.

Expressives, i.e. words such as ‘damn’ or ‘bastard’, seem to convey a specific kind of content, different from, or on top of, “regular” descriptive meaning. Following the seminal work of Chris Potts (2005), the meaning of expressives is often conceptualized within a two-dimensional semantic framework, in which descriptive and expressive contents are separated as a result of special rules of semantic composition (cf. Gutzmann 2015). This approach is successful in accounting for some interesting semantic properties of expressives, e.g. their projective behavior, and has also been extended to other classes of expressions, such as racial slurs or honorifics. However, it does not offer any actual insight into the nature of expressive meaning (the two-dimensional formalism operates on dummy values, independently of what they may stand in for). The present paper offers an alternative, pragmatic account of expressives based on the observations that expressive meanings seem to involve directly the speaker (her states, emotions or attitudes) rather than just abstract (e.g. truth-conditional) contents, and that the utterer of an expressive is responsible for the choice of loaded, often taboo vocabulary. The account is developed in a commitment-based scorekeeping model of discourse (inspired by Lewis 1979 and Brandom 1994), in which hearers interpret speakers’ utterances by attributing commitments to them. Besides assertoric commitments (and potentially other kinds), expressive commitments can be distinguished. These are commitments to the appropriateness or applicability of a given expression, which also can be attributed to speakers based on their utterances (separately from assertoric commitments). What characterizes expressives as a lexical class is that they always raise the issue of speaker’s expressive commitment. In short, expressive meanings are commitments to the appropriateness of strongly charged (often vulgar or taboo) vocabulary - which, in turn, can signal a speaker’s heightened emotional state, negative attitude etc.

This paper offers a general model of the semantics of lexicalized social meanings, i.e. semiotic properties of certain expressions in a socio-political context. Examples include slurs, problematically charged expressions such as inner city, as well as terms such as mother, which also carry implicit ideological associations. Insofar as their linguistic properties are concerned, social meanings can be construed as context-structuring devices: without introducing specific at-issue contents, they evoke background assumptions which shape the context of conversation. An inferentialist model of discourse is developed to account for this effect, in which the discursive significance of an utterance is defined as the set of inferences it licenses relative to a discursive context. A discursive context is a set of propositions that can serve as auxiliary premises in material inferences, together with a salience ranking that makes some of these propositions more readily available and therefore more relevant to determining discursive significance. Social meanings are defined as functions on discursive contexts that modify the salience ranking, increasing the salience of certain assumptions and stereotypes. As a result, they impact the discursive significance of utterances indirectly and independently of at-issue contents. They are also largely independent of speaker intentions in virtue of the ideological nature of discursive contexts.

Most accounts of the derogatory meaning of slurs are semantic. Recently, Nunberg proposed a purely pragmatic account offering a compelling picture of the relation between derogatory content and social context. Nunberg posits that the semantic content of slurs is identical to that of neutral counterparts, and that derogation is a result of the association of slur use with linguistic conventions of bigoted speakers. The mechanism responsible for it is a special kind of conversational implicature. However, this paper argues that Nunberg’s proposal suffers from technical and conceptual problems regarding the application of the concepts of implicature and convention. It is proposed that the implicature mechanism should be replaced by expressive commitment attribution. The account advocated here preserves crucial insights of Nunberg’s analysis, 25–48, 2013a, Analytic Philosophy 54, 350–363, 2013b; Bolinger Nous, 51, 439–462, 2017), giving them a firmer conceptual basis. It supports a distinction between derogation and offensiveness of slurs that improves on the one proposed by Hom and May, 293–313 2013), and sheds light on puzzling borderline cases: the use of slurs by ignorant speakers and controversies surrounding the status of some words as potentially slurs.

Given the apparent nondisplaceability and noncancellability of the derogatory content of slurs, it may appear puzzling that non-derogatory uses of slurs exist. Moreover, these uses seem to be in general available only to in-group speakers, thereby exhibiting a peculiar kind of context-sensitivity. In this paper the author argues that to understand non-derogatory uses we should consider slurs in terms of the kind of social practice their uses instantiate. A suitable theory of social practices has been proposed by McMillan. In typical uses the practice is one of bigotry and discrimination. Non-derogatory uses are only possible to the extent that they consitute acts of an alternative, non-derogatory practice. In the core cases it must be a subversive practice of satire or reappropriation. The social identity of speakers is not an ultimately decisive factor but it is an important constitutive condition: most non-derogatory practices of slur-use can only be performed by a member of the target group.

The aim of the paper is to reveal and criticize some of the hidden assumptions of the discussion on the nature of proper names. Those assumptions work in favor of the New Theory of Reference (NTR), which in fact seems more plausible than it should, were the assumptions made explicit. Three theses, it is argued, are assumed with no proof by all sides of the proper names debate: (1) proper names refer to their objects in a different way than common names do; (2) proper names are rigid designators; (3) "we know what we say", i.e. the meaning of a sentence is identical to some cognitive content that is associated with it by the speaker. It is shown that the main source of plausibility of those assumptions, which serve as premises in arguments for the NTR, is the NTR itself

The paper concerns mutual relations between two metaphysical positions: “superessentialism,” claiming that all properties of every object are essential, i.e.necessary, and “necessitarianism,” claiming that everything is necessary, i.e. there is only one possible world. The theories of Spinoza and Lewis serve as examples. In section I the two positions are characterized. In section II and III interpretations of Spinoza’s and Lewis’s metaphysics are presented, and it is explained to what extent they can both be considered superessentialists and necessitarians. In section IV the two theories are compared. In section V three possible ways of arguing for superessentialism are presented. It is then shown that the premises of these arguments appear, at least implicitly, in both of the theories. In section VI additional premises are numbered which have to be further assumed to prove necessitarianism. In the final section it is shown how Lewis can claim that there are contingent facts, while being a superessentialist and a necessitarian. It is argued that his claim of contingency is a matter of semantics, not of metaphysics.