-
Kaplan ([21) started a fruitful debate on the meaning of pejoratives – as in ‘that
bastard Kresge is famous’ – including slurs and racial epithets as in ‘there are many
chinks in our neighborhood’. Kaplan suggests that a dimension of expressive meaning
is required, separated from the straightforward “at issue”, asserted or truth-conditional
content, which would just be in the latter case that there are too many Chinese people
in the neighborhood. Hom (2008) makes a case for a straightforward account, which
avoids separated expressive dimension. Thus, according to him ‘chink’ makes a
truthconditional contribution akin to that of other predicates such as ‘Chinese’. This would
be a property determining an on his view necessarily empty extension, which can be
roughly expressed as: ought to be subject to higher college admissions standards, and
ought to be subject to exclusion from advancement to managerial positions, and …,
because of being slanty-eyed, and devious, and good-at-laundering, and …, all
because of being Chinese (Hom 2008, 431). A serious problem for this view ([
19
],
3169) lies in the projection behavior of these terms: when sentences such as those
mentioned above are negated (‘there are not many chinks in our neighborhood’), are
antecedents of conditionals (‘if there are many chinks in our neighborhood, it will be
easy to find a good restaurant’), or embedded under modal operators (‘there might be
many chinks in our neighborhood’) or non-declarative mood (‘are there are many
chinks in our neighborhood?’), they still derogate the relevant targets.
To account for this, writers have elaborated on Kaplan’s suggestion, by arguing
that the separated expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is instead either a
conventional implicature ([
32
]) or a presupposition ([
27
] and [
28
], [
37
]).1 In defense of
his account, Hom (2012, 398-401) appeals to generalized conversational implicatures
to explain the projection data. Now, in my view a presuppositional account is prefer
able; however, in order to deflate a very serious objection that has been raised against
accounts of that kind, it is on the one hand essential that we take what is presupposed
to be genuinely expressive, and, related, it is also essential that we adopt a more
complex view than the one usually assumed on the nature of the context relative to which
speech acts make their contributions. Moreover, the other two proposals – the
conventional implicature account, and even Hom’s generalized conversational implicature
view – would also need to assume the extra complexity in contexts I will show we
need, so their proponents might also benefit from the proposal that I’ll argue for in
this paper.
It is not easy to tell apart presuppositions (that someone broke the computer, for the
cleft-construction in ‘it was John who broke the computer’) and conventional
implica1 Williamson ([
45
]) argues for a similar view. He classifies the expressive contents he proposes
as conventional implicatures, but he understands that category in a traditional way, wider than
the one I assume following Potts’s work (ibid., 151, 153). I take his view to be compatible with
the presuppositional account assumed here as much as with Potts’s view. All these proposals
can be viewer as different ways to elaborate on Kaplan’s view that pejoratives should be
account for by adding a “use-conditional” layer of meaning.
tures (that somehow being poor contrasts with being honest, for ‘but’ in ‘he is poor
but honest’; that John is married, for the non-restrictive wh-clause in ‘John, who is
married, will come to the party’). Both are semantic, by two counts: first, they are
conventionally associated with some lexical items or constructions; second, grasping
them is required for full competent understanding.2 Both are ways of conventionally
indicating “non-at-issue” content. This is the reason why they both project: thus, the
negation in both ‘he is not poor but honest’ and ‘it was not John who broke the com
puter’ negates the “at issue” content, and as a result the same conventional implicature
and presupposition indicated above are expressed. Neither can therefore be rejected
by means of straightforward denials, and as a result speakers must resort to oblique
means such as Saddock’s “hey, wait a minute” objection ([
33
], 2521-2; [
3
], 341-2).
Some researchers appeal to subtle projection differences ([
31
], [
43
]), but there is
no agreement on this among linguists. In particular, the behavior of conventional im
plicatures and presuppositions when they occur in ascriptions of beliefs or acts of say
ing does not neatly distinguish between them. Presuppositions do not typically project
in such cases, but conventional implicatures might behave like them in some (Bach
1999, 338-343).3 Conventional implicatures typically project in such environments,
but presuppositions might also project in some cases ([
37
], 244).4
2 In the case of presuppositions, Stalnaker and other writers dispute this; [11] defends it, for
constructions such as the one just given for illustration.
3 As I have pointed out elsewhere ([10], 45-7), in spite of its title [
1
] in fact does not show that
conventional implicatures (or presuppositions, for that matter), as understood here following
Potts, are a “myth”. Bach only shows that they are not part of “what is said” in his “illocution
ary” sense, which is just to say that they are not part of the “at issue” content of declaratives.
Rather they are, according to him, part of “what is said” in his “locutionary” sense. But this just
means that they are conventional, semantic in the sense that they need to be grasped for full
competent understanding. This is part of current standard views on conventional implicatures,
such as Potts’s. Hom ([
15
], 424-6; [
17
], 391-2) appears to have been misled by Bach’s sugges
tions in his criticisms of the conventional implicature view. Similarly, in his defense of a
Conventional Implicature account Whiting ([
44
], 274-5) fails to properly take this point into
consideration.
4 Ascriptions of propositional attitudes and speech acts are notoriously context-dependent; this
explains the existential quantifications. In his interesting discussion of hybrid theories of evalu
ative terms, modeled on the views on pejoratives I am discussing, Schroeder ([
38
], [
39
]) places
a strong emphasis on a distinction between hybrid expressions whose expressive content project
even in attitude ascriptions, and those that do not. But, as [
14
] points out, these are not proper
ties of expressions themselves: we can only trace tendencies here. Slurs tend to project in
ascriptions, but, as the examples by Schlenker and others show, they do not always do so. Such
tendencies are orthogonal to the divide between conventional implicatures and presuppositions.
Quoting [
1
] (a work that he, unlike Hom – see previous fn. –appraises properly, cf. op. cit.,
2878, fn. 19), Schroeder shows that ‘but’ might well not project in some ascriptions; but, following
[
31
], I am taking non-restrictive wh-clauses as paradigm cases of conventional implicatures,
and they do typically project in attitude ascriptions: John said that Peter, who will be coming
soon, is welcome to the party.
Presuppositions and conventional implicatures have different natures ([
32
], 2012).
Conventional implicatures have the job of providing new information, exactly like as
sertions, except that it is information which (even if relevant) has a relatively back
ground character. Felicitous presuppositions articulate (for some relevant purpose)
part of what is already commonly known. Unfortunately, this fails to offer either a
straightforward distinction, because speakers exploit the fact that a sentence carries a
presupposition to provide uncontroversial background information, by inviting the
process called accommodation ([
25
]). Nonetheless, I am convinced by the arguments
by Macià and Schlenker that the data of projection and rejection, given clear-headed
assumptions about the respective nature of the two phenomena, show that the best
way of classifying the expressive meanings of pejoratives and slurs counts them as
presuppositions, understood as differing from conventional implicatures in the just
described way: they impose requirements on the common ground, as opposed to provid
ing potentially new but background information.
However, perhaps guided by simple-minded assumptions about context that I want
to expose here, both Macià and Schlenker give an inadequate characterization of the
expressive presuppositions of pejoratives, which opens their view to spurious
criticism. Schlenker ([
37
], 238) offers this characterization for the slur ‘honky’: the agent
of the context believes in the world of the context that white people are despicable.
This is a clear-cut condition on a context as understood on the classical Stalnakerian
account, “a body of information that is available, or presumed to be available, as a
resource for communication” ([
41
], 24).5 But, as Williamson points out ([
45
], 151-2), it
cannot be right, because it does not capture the normative status of slurs. Confronted
with slurring utterances like the above, we would challenge the speaker (using per
haps some variation of the “hey, wait a minute” strategy) to retract the derogation of
Kresge or Chinese people; but we would hardly challenge her to retract the suggestion
that she believes that Kresge or Chinese people are despicable. For all we care, she
might well believe it. We do not need to question this; we do not need to dissociate
ourselves from the assumption that they hold such beliefs when our interlocutors utter
slurs we find objectionable. As Camp ([
3
], 333) points out, Potts’s conventional
implicature account has the same problem, for he just posits a condition on the subjective
emotional state of the speaker – something to the effect that s/he actually is in a
heightened emotional state ([
32
], 171; [
33
], 2532).6
5 This is formally modeled as the “context set” – the set of possible worlds compatible with the
presumed common knowledge of the participants. For present purposes, I take Lewis’ ([
25
])
model as a variant of the Stalnakerian model.
6 [
2
] provides a hybrid account of pejoratives and evaluative terms in the framework of “suc
cess” semantics, along the lines of the Davidsonian proposals in [
26
] and [
22
]. This is
compatible with the main claims I am making here. However, like Schlenker and Potts, Boisvert as
sumes a psychological expressivist, non-normative account of the non-declarative additional
speech acts that his account posits, which make it in my view similarly inadequate. To illus
trate: there clearly is a semantic tension between uttering ‘thank you for p!’ together with
‘shame on you for p!’, but this cannot be adequately captured by an account on which the sen
How, then, should expressive meanings, and the contexts to which they contribute,
be understood? This depends on what emotions, and the speech acts conveying them,
are. What pejoratives and slurs express, in my view, is that a certain emotional state
(which can contextually vary along different parameters, cf. [
32
], [
15
], and [
3
],
among others) is fitting or appropriate. Some philosophers argue that emotions are a
particular kind of judgment, to the effect that an object or situation instantiates their
“formal objects”, say, that Chinese people are worthy of contempt, in our example (cf.
[
8
], [
42
], and references there). If this is right, then we do not need to go beyond the
Stalnakerian context. That a speaker of ‘there are too many chinks in our neighbor
hood’ takes it to be common knowledge that Chinese people are worthy of contempt
explains the appropriate reaction to the utterance by non-prejudiced participants in the
same conversation. [
45
] seems to assume something like this.7
This would be a way of dealing with pejoratives analogous to the one offered by a
certain flattening strategy that was popular for a while for non-declaratives. Let me
digress for a moment in order to elaborate on this. It is relatively uncontroversial that,
while questions make contributions to context, their contributions differ from those
that declaratives make. To account for this, elaborating on previous work by Carlson
([
4
]) and others, [
35
] suggests that contexts are structured by a “question under dis
cussion” (QUD) for which discussants try to provide adequate answers.8 The QUD
might have been explicitly asked, but it can also be merely implicit; in some cases, it
may be very general, including the “Big Question”, what is the way things are?
If this is so, contexts should be thought of as structured by including contents
taken with different illocutionary forces: at the very least, a QUD, in addition to the
Stalnakerian context of commonly accepted propositions updated by ordinary
utterances of declarative sentences. Contexts thus include the Stalnakerian set of proposi
tions to which speakers are committed in the way they are committed to their beliefs,
updated by accepted assertions; but they include also a separate class of propositions
to which speakers are committed in the way they are to the questions that direct their
inquiry, updated by new questions and by the assertions that partially answer them.
Both components are mutually known, in felicitous cases.
Now, as [
23
] suggests, questions can be taken as a particular kind of directive
(what literal utterances of imperative sentences signify); and directives in general
independently help to establish the same point about the complex illocutionary structure
of contexts. Several writers have advanced semantic accounts on which these are
semantically distinctive objects, distinct from assertions (what declarative sentences
littences merely indicate that the utterer actually feels grateful and disappointed regarding p; for,
of course, there is no inconsistency in having such feelings regarding the same situation ([
2
],
34).
7 Likewise, [
28
] poses as the expressive presupposition of ‘chink’ that speakers in the context
are willing to treat Chinese people with a certain kind of contempt, on account of being Chi
nese. This is better than Schlenker’s and Potts’ subjectivist proposals, but is still objectionable
along the lines that I develop in the main text.
8 [
36
] offers a clear, short presentation of the idea.
erally signify), just as questions (what interrogative sentences signify) are; [
13
], [
30
]
and [
18
] provide good overviews. Along the lines of [
40
], researchers such as Han,
Portner and Jary & Kissine suggest that strong directives also have a content to be
added (when successful) to a collection of propositions. However, these are not those
constituting the Stalnakerian common ground, but rather a “To Do List” or “Plan Set”
representing something like the active projects of the addressee.
In sum, contexts are illocutionarily structured in complex ways, including different
classes of propositions to which speakers are committed in different modes: in the
way we are committed to our beliefs, but also in the way we are committed to our in
tentions, and to the questions guiding our inquiries. And, as we pointed out above, in
felicitous contexts it is all these different commitments that are matters of mutual
knowledge. As Stalnaker’s ([
40
]) account of assertion emphasizes, an accepted
assertion comes to be presupposed afterwards, allowing for the satisfaction of presupposi
tional requirements later on in the discourse. Similarly, an accepted directive is taken
for granted afterwards, constraining the legitimate moves that can be made in the dis
course game, and the same applies to the QUD.
Now, we could avoid all that complexity if we adopted a well-known suggestion to
deal with non-declaratives by taking them to be synonymous with explicit
performatives, and then taking the latter to have, from a semantic standpoint, the
truth-conditions they appear to do compositionally ([
5
], [
24
]). Thus, ‘take bus 44!’ would just
mean, from a semantic point of view, the proposition that the speaker thereby
requests the audience to take bus 44. Cannot we just adopt this line and avoid having to
ascribe to contexts the complex structure we have so far posited? By taking questions
and directives to express the propositions self-ascribing speech-acts that these views
envisage, we could just stick to the Stalnakerian view of context as a set of proposi
tions. This is what I am calling the flattening scheme, or simply flattening. In previous
work ([9], [11]) I have argued that these views are unmotivated.
Like the flattening suggestion for directives and questions, however, the
corresponding view of emotions and their expression outlined aboves is controversial, and
is rejected by many researchers ([
6
], 67; [
7
], 18-21). If emotions are instead, as I
believe, sui generis normative states ([
29
]; [
6
]; [
7
]), and their expressions speech acts
defined by distinctive norms, then in order to properly incorporate the
presuppositional view of pejoratives we should add further illocutionary structure to the context
set. This additional structure will be constituted by the intentional objects of the
emotional states (say, Chinese people, with their (alleged) condition of generically having
such-and-such features in the case of ‘chink’), taken as subject to the normative con
dition that they are thereby worthy of contempt and hence adequate recipients of
mistreatment. On this view, the “formal object” of the emotion – the property of being
contemptible in this case – is not part of the represented content, but the normative
condition that allegedly justifies addressing the emotional attitude towards it.
On the suggested view of emotions and the speech acts expressing them, the
additional “emotive” structure of contexts should be assumed not only on a
presuppositional account of pejoratives, but also on one on which they are conventional
implicatures. For, even if the expressive content of pejoratives is not background but novel
“information”, if unchallenged it would become part of the context set, licensing
presuppositions down the line. The fact that we need to dissociate ourselves from such a
prospect explains our normative reaction to utterances including slurs we disapprove
of. This is why, even if Potts ([
32
], [
33
]) is right that such contents are conventional
implicatures, his subjective characterization of the expressive implicatures should be
revised to incorporate the present view of contexts.
Presuppositions are “filtered” in some contexts: they do not project when their
triggers occur in the consequent of a conditional whose antecedent states them, or in the
second conjunct of a conjunction whose first conjunct states them: if someone broke
the computer, it was John who broke it; someone broke the computer, and it was John
who did it. Schroeder (2014, 176) uses this point to dismiss the view that the
expressive contents we are considering are presuppositions: “I cannot see how to construct a
sentence of the form “if P, then Mark is a cheesehead” that does not implicate the
speaker in disdain for people from Wisconsin”.
This is right, but it is just as a straightforward consequence of the fact that the
expressive contents we are discussing – be they presuppositions, or conventional impli
catures – are not just forceless propositions, which is what antecedents of conditionals
or conjuncts must be. It only follows that we cannot use the filtering behavior to
discern whether the relevant contents are presupposed or conventionally implicated. The
fact leaves open whether such contents are presented as requirements on the common
ground (and hence have a presuppositional character), or as new background commit
ments (and hence are conventional implicatures). Schroeder’s argument is one more
example of the misleading consequences of ignoring the main claim about the nature
of the expressive contents of pejoratives and slurs, and the contexts on which they
make an impact, which I am making here.9
Some of Hom’s ([
16
], 176-9; [
17
], 390-1) criticisms of the presuppositional and con
ventional implicature view have already been discussed, others have received
adequate replies in the literature. The data about projection and “cancellation” are less
clear than he assumes, and in any case can be accounted for by both proposals ([
28
]).
Intuitions about the truth-values of utterances are much less clear-cut than he and
others take them to be (cf. [
19
], 317), and again can be accounted for by both the
presuppositional and the conventional implicature proposals. Hom mentions “non-orthodox”
cases that lack derogatory implications; but, again, defenders of alternative views
have shown them to have enough resources to deal with them, as pragmatic effects or
cases of polysemy ([
20
], 326-330). Last but not least, what Hom ([
16
], 177?17?)
thinks is the “more fundamental problem with the presupposition account” can be
ad9 It is a particularly revealing one, because it occurs in a paper that is otherwise admirably clear
about the distinction between contents and forces; Schroeder’s ([
39
], 278-280) toy formal
model is as clear as [
12
] when it comes to the proper articulation of meanings that, like expres
sive contents in my view, are propositions-cum-illocutionary forces.
equately resisted if expressive meanings and contexts are assumed to have the sort of
illocutionary complexity I am arguing for. This is how he summarizes it:
To focus on slurring as a means of efficiently entering information into
the conversational record is to miss the fundamental point of slurs,
namely, that they are typically used to verbally abuse their targets, with
no regard to whether the negative content actually gets accommodated
within a framework of rational, cooperative behavior.
He (ibid.) summarizes this by approvingly quoting Richard ([
34
], 21): rather than
trying to enter something into the conversational record, “someone who is using these
words is insulting and being hostile to their targets”. Now, the reply that the present
proposal allows should be obvious. The contrast that Hom and Richard presume
between making a requirement on the conversational record (or making an attempt at
smuggling it there) and insulting/being hostile to some target presupposes a view of
expressive meanings and the contexts to which they contribute of the sort I have been
rejecting here. The contrast vanishes if what is presumed to be in the context is a
represented target taken as fitting the normative condition that it is contemptible and
thereby posed for mistreatment: for this is precisely what the insult and the hostility
amount to. It should be granted that Hom’s and Richard’s presumption that presuppo
sitions merely concern “information” in the conversational record is shared by most
of the theorists they oppose, but it is nonetheless wrong.
Actually, it is not at all obvious how Hom’s own view properly captures the
insulting character of utterances including slurs. His proposal is a form of the already men
tioned flattening strategy for straightforward truth-conditional treatments of
nondeclaratives – the view that emotions are ordinary judgments, and their expression
corresponding assertions. As we said, an immediate concern this raises has to do with
the “projective” behavior of all such expressions under negation, conditionalization,
etc.: as we have seen, intuitively expressive contents “escape” the operators under
which they are embedded in such cases, while, if the expressive content is just
straightforward truth-conditional content, it should remain embedded. But in fact, the
problem already affects simple positive sentences: in principle, an assertion that a
command is given can occur without the command being given; and an assertion that
an emotional state, or the occasion for it, obtains (that something is frightening or
contemptible) can equally occur without the emotional state obtaining (without the
fear or contempt occurring).10
10 The same can intuitively obtain in the opposite direction: the non-cognitive attitude/act (the
command or the derogation) can occur, without the cognitive one (the belief/assertion that the
command or the derogation takes place) taking place, because the thinker/speaker lacks the
conceptual resources to describe the non-cognitive state/act. Hom deals with this apparent
necessity-failure of his account by appealing to semantic externalism: semantically the equiva
lence obtains, even if ordinary speakers lack the resources to appreciate it.
As indicated above, Hom ([
17
], 398-401) purports to explain the generation of the
expressive content (in embedded and simple constructions) as a Gricean generalized
conversational implicature.11 I have serious doubts that this proposal can work on its
own terms, but this need not concern us here. I want to make a point about it related
to the one made above regarding Potts’ conventional implicatures account. In some
cases, generalized conversational implicatures are not projected, but rather generated
“locally”, i.e. interacting with the compositional determination of contents, exactly as
“implicitures”/”explicitures” are. The data suggest that, in some cases, expressive
contents are thus generated locally ([
37
], 244). It remains to be investigated whether
these should be truly handled locally by our best theories; but, if they are, a full theo
retical account of the data will need to contemplate the structurally enriched contexts
we have advanced, even if we classify the generation of expressive contents as a gen
eralized conversational implicature.
In this paper I have assumed a broadly Stalnakerian view of contexts, the concrete
situations relative to which linguistic exchanges take place; I have assumed, that is,
that they are meanings shared by the speakers participating in the relevant linguistic
exchange. I have rejected Stalnaker’s “info-centric” view of such contexts: they
cannot be just propositions, or more in general representational contents, but rather these
contents together with commitments towards them by speakers in different modes.
This should be clear just on the basis of the fact that conversations involve not just as
sertoric utterances, but also directives and questions. With respect to this familiar fact,
I have rehearsed the familiar “flattening” strategy that attempts to reduce
non-declaratives to declaratives, and the reasons that have been advanced against it. In this frame
work I have discussed the semantics of pejoratives and slurs. I have suggested that
flattening will not work in that case either, and I have provided what I take to be a
stronger form of a presuppositional account on which such constructions indicate as
requirements on the content expressive meanings additional to “at issue” contents.
11 The semantic externalism to which Hom appeals to deal with the apparent necessity-failure
(see previous fn.) puts a strain on his appeal to conversational implicature to deal with this suf
ficiency-failure, because implicatures are supposed to be derivable. It is difficult to understand
how ordinary speakers intuiting the allegedly implicatured condition – in our cases, the
derogation of Chinese people, which is what everybody perceives in utterances of ‘there are too many
Chinks in our neighborhood’ – can make the inferences, if they themselves lack the resources to
articulate the content of Hom’s truth-conditional analysis.