Category Archives: philosophy of language

Featured Philosop-her: Robin Jeshion

October 24, 2014 By in guest post, philosophy of language, political philosophy, race theory

robinjeshion

Robin Jeshion is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. She specializes in the philosophy of language and mind, focusing especially on topics concerning the ways that language contributes to shaping cognition, and cognition shapes and is manifest in language.  Her research includes work on the relationship between the semantics of singular terms and the nature of singular thought; the semantics of demonstratives and the nature of perception and spatial representation; the semantic, cognitive, and social functions of proper names.  Most recently, she has been writing about slurring terms, and related expressions, attempting to understand to what extent attitudes and/or social structures are incorporated within their semantics and pragmatics.  Outside of mind and language, she has written about mathematical intuition, a priori knowledge, the epistemological status of proofs, and Frege’s logicism. Before returning to USC, she taught at Yale University, the University of California, Riverside, the University of Arizona, and spent a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, supported by an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship. This spring, she will deliver the Wedberg Lectures in Stockholm, presenting Dehumanizing Slurs, four talks that bring together much of her work on this topic.

Slurs, Dehumanization, and the Expression of Contempt

Robin Jeshion

Thank you, Meena, for running this terrific blog and inviting me to present a post.  I’ve lately been thinking and writing about slurring words, expressions like “Kike”, “Chink”, “Spic”, and “faggot”, pejorative terms that target individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, socioeconomic status, occupation, and various other socially important properties.  Such expressions raise a spate of questions regarding their semantics and pragmatics: Do sentences containing slurs ever express truths?  How can we account for what has come to be called in the literature the ‘offensiveness’ of slurs? Is it somehow semantically encoded as a proposition, perhaps a proposition encoding the stereotype of the group or a proposition encoding that the group merits contempt? Or is it rather that slurs are terms conventionally used for expressing a speaker’s attitude, perhaps an attitude of contempt?  Is a semantic explanation needed at all to account for slurs’ offensiveness – perhaps it can rather be explained entirely pragmatically, e.g., by reference to social prohibitions on uses of slurs or socio-linguistic facts regarding which groups tend to use slurs? Do those who use slurs engage in actions of “othering”, and if so, is this captured linguistically?  How can we explain the fact that uses of slurs are extraordinarily destructive – dehumanizing – to their targets and can tend to make hearers feel complicit?  What accounts for the fact that those who use slurs signal something about their social allegiances and affiliations? How should we explain the appropriation of slurs, the phenomena through which a slur’s offensiveness is neutralized?  What is the relationship between slurring terms and various other pejoratives, expressions like “jerk”, “freak”, “wino”, “blimp”, “commie” – are any of these of the same linguistic type? And how are they related to approbatives like “goddess”, “hottie, “saint”, and “ace”? And bare expressive intensifiers like “damn” and ‘effin”? It would be easy to go on, to spin out twelve more questions. With such a rich set of phenomena – and obviously deeply important social, political, and psychological matters at stake – it is no wonder that interest in such expressions has been rapidly accelerating.

The text that follows is adapted from a paper in which I offer a bare sketch of my semantic theory of slurs.  The view is inspired by two key ideas.  One is that there are multiple sources of the offensiveness in utterances of slurs, only some of which ought to be explained semantically. The dominant aspect of slurs’ offensiveness that should be explained semantically is needed to explain their capacity to dehumanize. John Amaechi, the first NBA player to openly identify as gay, called slurs “a threat to human dignity” and remarked about the slur “faggot”:

…young people are being killed and killing themselves simply because of the words and behaviors they are subjected to for being perceived as lesbian or gay, or frankly just different. This is…an indication of the power of that word, and others like it, to brutalize and dehumanize.

Amachi’s remarks are apt. Slurs dehumanize.

We need a theory of slurring terms that fully explains how and why they dehumanize, one that explains how they signal that their targets are unworthy of equal standing or full respect as persons, that they are inferior as persons. Extant analyses of slurs’ semantics have faired poorly on this score. I hope to do better with the account I offer.

The other key idea is that slurring terms function semantically in virtually the same way that their neutral counterparts function when given contemptuous intonation and when fronted by certain expletives or negative adjectives.

[1]Jake is a Kike.

[1a]Jake is a fucking Jew.

[1b]Jake is a JewC.

(I use italics to denote intonational stress, and superscripts to italicized material to indicate the type of prosodic pattern given to the word, where the superscript letter denotes the affective attitude conveyed by that pattern. Here, “C” denotes contemptuousness.) In effect, [1],[1a], and [1b] all mean the same thing.

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On the view I favor, slurring terms possess three separable semantic components. One is the group-designating component. A slurring term, references the group that is referenced by its neutral counterpart. The truth of sentence [1] depend only upon whether Jake is Jewish, and so is truth conditionally equivalent to [1NC].

[1] Jake is a Kike.

[1NC] Jake is Jewish.

So slurring terms share some semantic structure with their neutral counterparts. However, given that the slur and neutral counterpart make parallel semantic contributions along this dimension, the group-designating component does not account for slurs’ offensiveness. This marks its separation from the other two components of the semantics, both of which, likewise, make no contribution to the truth conditions.

The second component is expressivist:  slurring terms are used to express contempt for members of a socially relevant group on account of their being in that group or having a group-defining property. Note that this component involves the expression of the speaker’s attitude toward his targets, not a separately semantically encoded descriptive content, say, contemptible on account of being Jewish.  Views on which slurring terms semantically encode such descriptive contents are markedly different.  Suppose that “Kike*” encodes the descriptive content given by “worthy of contempt on account of being Jewish”. Then, although it is not misconceived to regard the utterances of

[1] Jake is a Kike

[1c] Jake is a Kike*

as communicating the same information, they do so in different ways.  While the utterance of [1c] encodes the proposition that the target is worthy of contempt on account of being Jewish, the utterance of [1] does no such thing.  It communicates, rather, the speaker’s contempt itself, which is expressed, not asserted.  A proponent of the analysis involving semantic descriptive encoding will be hard-pressed to explain why the negation of [1c], as in “Jake is not a Kike*” or “It is not the case that Jake is a Kike*”, are not what would be used to deny the derogating content of [1]. Yet they ought to do so if “Kike” is synonymous with “Kike*”.

This expressive component indicates that slurring terms share semantic properties with other expressives like intensifiers (“totally” in “That is totally interesting”), exclamatives (“holy crap!”, “Wow!” “Ouch!”) and other explicitly performative expressives (“right on!”) which similarly function to express speakers’ emotional or attitudinal states and do not contribute meaning by predicating a descriptive content.

Despite this similarity in semantic structure with other expressives, do not assimilate the expressive component of slurring terms to the “mere” expression of a feeling, like a flash of anger or a state of frustration. While contempt is an affectively laden attitude, often accompanied by feelings of abhorrence, hostility, and hatred, no particular “raw” subjective feeling need be felt by one who uses a slur.  Indeed, one could express contempt for someone coolly, without any “heat-of-the-moment” feeling.  Furthermore, the expression of contempt differs from the expression of purely subjective feelings like pain or fear or astonishment, which are largely insulated from normative assessment and neither implicate nor represent their objects as pain-, fear-, or astonishment- worthy.  By contrast, contempt, like resentment, is a highly structured affectively- and normatively-guided moral attitude that is subject to evaluation for its appropriateness.  As such, in using slurs, speakers not only express their own contempt for the target, but also implicitly represent (but still do not say or assert that) their targets as worthy of contempt. And because contempt is a moral attitude specifically held toward those one regards as inferior as persons, users of slurs thereby implicate that targets ought to be so-regarded as inferior.

The third component to slurs’ semantics is what I call the identifying component. Extant expressivist views neglect this component, and thus, to my mind, haven’t gone far enough in accounting for how the nature of contempt infects slurring terms’ semantics. Contempt involves taking those properties that are the basis for regarding the target contemptuously as fundamental to the targets’ identity as a person and this feature of contempt is semantically encoded. As a matter of the semantics of the slurring term, an utterance of

[2] He is a faggot

does not simply ascribe a property to the target, here, that of being gay.  It classifies the target in a way that aims to be identifying. In calling someone “faggot”, the homophobe takes a property that he believes someone to possess and semantically encodes that it is the, or a, defining feature of the target’s identity.  As such, it is used to shape the target’s social identity, and so to dictate how others ought to treat, regard, think of, and respond to its target. As a matter of their semantics, “Kike”, “Chink”, Nigger”, “faggot”, “whore” are used so as to signal that being Jewish, Chinese, black, gay, a prostitute identify what its targets are.

The classification of the target in a way that aims to be identifying should not be conflated with any notions of metaphysical identity or essentialism.  In wielding slurs, racists, anti-Semites, and homophobes are not in the business of presenting their target’s group membership either as an essential, metaphysically necessary property, or as determining or explaining their other properties.   Rather, they express that the target’s group membership is the, or among the, most central characteristic(s) for classifying what the target is, as a person, construed along a broadly moral dimension.

Notice that the identifying component is dependent upon the expressive component because the identifying component partially captures what it is to regard someone with contempt.  That is, it follows from what it is to find someone contemptible on the basis of being gay that one takes that person’s sexual orientation as the most or among the most central aspects of that person’s identity. This dependence is, at heart, moral-psychological, but is manifest in the semantics. A speaker who expresses contempt toward her target for being G thereby also expresses and implicitly represents G as fundamental to her target’s identity as a person.  Thus, within a single speech act, the speaker expresses both her contempt and way of identifying the target as a person.

Together, the expressive and identifying components explain slurs’ common and conventional capacity to derogate. As a matter of their semantics, slurs function to express the speaker’s contempt for his target in virtue of the target’s group-membership and that his target ought to be treated with contempt in virtue of that group-membership, because what the target is, as a person, is something lesser, something unworthy of equal or full respect or consideration. In this way, slurs, as a class, conventionally function to dehumanize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Featured Philosop-her: Janice Dowell

October 10, 2014 By in featured philosopher, philosophy of language Tags: 1 Comment

 

Janice Dowell

Janice Dowell is an associate professor of philosophy at Syracuse University and a Regular Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre. Her work spans several subfields in philosophy, including metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ethics. In the philosophy of mind, she is best known for her work defining what it takes to be a physical property for the purposes of characterizing the thesis of physicalism.  Her work in metaphysics has focused on methodological issues, particularly those concerning what it takes to justify metaphysical reductions.  Her most recent work defends Kratzer’s canonical semantics for modal expressions against a series of challenges.  Currently, she’s working on a book on deontic modals that supplements Kratzer’s basic semantics with an account of how it is modal propositions are determined at contexts of use (under contract with OUP).  Her paper, “The Metaethical Insignificance of Moral Twin Earth”, received the 2014 Marc Sanders Prize for Metaethics.

 

 Constructing and Justifying Semantic and Metasemantic Theories

Janice Dowell

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Thanks so much to Meena for offering me this opportunity to discuss an issue I’ve been thinking about lately!  These are a few early-stage thoughts on how we might best construct and justify semantic and metasemantic theories.  My own immediate interest in this topic stems from my interest in assessing rival semantic theories for modal expressions in English, especially deontic ones.  But my hope is that these thoughts are of some interest to those interested in semantic and metasemantic theorizing more broadly, including metaethicists interested in understanding the semantics of normative and evaluative expressions in English.  Comments, questions, and suggestions very welcome.

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Recently, there’s been a lot of really interesting work done by philosophers of language and linguists on understanding what sorts of meanings a semantic theory for some natural language, L, should assign the expressions of L. Is the content of a sentence at a context a set of worlds, a set ‘centered’ worlds, a set of probability spaces, a structured proposition, or what? In related debates, metaethicists wonder what sorts of meanings such a theory should assign L’s normative or evaluative expressions. How might we best approach these questions? What constraints, if any, do a plausible metasemantic theory place on good answers to them?  Here are some preliminary thoughts on some of the constraints on constructing plausible semantic and metasemantic theories. (NB: Some of these thoughts are expressed in a forthcoming paper, The Metaethical Insignificance of Moral Twin Earth.  The issues here, though, are not narrowly metaethical, but more broadly methodological ones for semantic and metasemantic theorizing.)

First, I make explicit a few of my background assumptions to keep us all on the same page:

A semantic theory for a language, L, assigns a meaning to each of L’s simple expressions and identifies rules of composition for complex expressions such that their meanings are the products of the meanings of the simples out of which they are composed, together with the rules they exemplify.

Among other things, a semantic theory should fit with and help explain data about what competent speakers are able to do with L, especially, communicate, coordinate, and collect information.  This feature of semantic theories yields our first constraint on semantic theorizing: Since helping to provide such explanations is one of the central aims of semantic theorizing, let us call doing so the “Communication, Coordination, and Collection Constraint on Semantic Theories” or the “CCC Semantics Constraint”, for short.

In contrast to a semantic theory, a metasemantic theory for L is a theory that tells us why and how it is that the phonetic and orthographic sequences that make up L have the meanings our best semantic theory represents them as having.

How do these two kinds of theory relate to one another?  Start with what we know:

1)   There are noises we able to make, scribbles we are able to produce.  Somehow, some of these noises and scribbles, those that correspond to words in the English language, acquired the meanings our best semantic theory, T, assigns to them.

2)   Using a language with those meanings allows competent speakers to communicate, coordinate, and collect information.

Keeping this in mind, what should we think about the relationship between our theories?  Should we think: Lucky are we!  For we narrowly missed living in a world in which we spoke a language, but one which didn’t allow us to coordinate our activities or communicate and collect information.  Or, rather, should we think: It’s no accident! Part of the explanation for why our expressions have the meanings that they do is that, in using expressions with those meanings, we are able to communicate, coordinate, and collect information.  The latter is clearly so much more plausible than the former, that I propose the following,

CCC Metasemantics Constraint: A metasemantic theory should help us understand how the sequences that make up L acquired semantic significance such that speakers of L are able to do what they do with L’s expressions, centrally, communicate, coordinate, and collect information.

So far we’ve seen that that a standard characterization of semantic and of metasemantic theories each suggest constraints on candidate such theories for particular natural languages.  I’ll now argue that there are important senses in which semantic and metasemantic theories are each contingent and empirical.  Since contingent and empirical theories are justified by abduction (rather than, say, by derivation from a priori principles), these facts shed light on how best to construct and justify such theories.

In the sense reserved here, a feature of a world, w, is contingent just in case it varies across worlds considered as counterfactual, as ways w could have been.  That there are albino tigers is a feature of the actual world, but not of all ways that world could have been, so it is a contingent feature of the actual world in this sense.  A feature of a world w is empirical in the reserved sense just in case it varies across worlds considered as actual, as ways w could turn out to be.  That water is H2O is an empirical feature of the actual world in this sense.

The phenomena to be explained by semantic and metasemantic theories—what the orthographic and phonetic sequences that correspond to L’s expressions mean and why they mean what they do—are contingent, empirical features of the actual world in these reserved senses; there are worlds considered as actual in which they mean a variety of different things and worlds considered as counterfactual in which they mean nothing at all. Had the actual world differed in relevant respects, the ability of speakers to use the signs they in fact do to coordinate, and what explained whether and why they have that ability, would itself have been different. The features of our world that support communication and coordination with natural languages are features that distinguish our world from others.  This suffices to guarantee that those features are contingent and empirical.  And that the phenomena to be explained by semantic and metasemantic theories are contingent and empirical suffices to make those theories contingent and empirical as well.

It’s perhaps easiest to see that this must be so in the case of semantic theories. First, recall the CCC semantics constraint, according to which the meaning assignments for a semantic theory for L must be capable of figuring in explanations of how it is L-competent speakers are able to communicate, coordinate, and collect information. To satisfy that constraint, a theory will need to be ‘cut down to human size’; that is, it will need to be one that reflects human cognitive and conative limitations, in particular, our limitations at the young age at which humans standardly learn their first language.  Moreover, a theory that meets that constraint will need to reflect the environmental conditions under which humans learn that language.

This means that whether a semantic theory meets the CCC constraint is not a question that can be answered from the armchair (or by surveys that can be performed from many individual armchairs). This makes semantic theories more like other contingent, empirical theories–biological or psychological theories, for example–than like traditional philosophical theories about the nature of knowledge or morality.  The former, though, are justified not by derivation from a priori principles, but by inference to the best explanation of the phenomena its central posits are posited to explain.

And that, I suggest, means that semantic notions, such as that of a meaning or of a semantic value, are theoretical notions, like the notion of a biological process as it figures in biological theorizing.  Which semantic notions will figure in our best semantic theory for a natural language such as English will be determined by which ones figure in our best explanations of the phenomena it is the job of a semantic theory to partly explain, such as our ability to communicate, coordinate, and collect information.  To make the connection between these ideas and the question with which I began clear: Deciding between hypotheses about what types of entities should serve as meanings in our best semantic theory’s meaning assignments will require taking into account the relevant human cognitive and conative limitations, as well as environmental conditions, that constrain what sort of entities could plausibly figure in explanations of human linguistic communication.

It’s perhaps less obvious that metasemantic theories are contingent and empirical in an important sense.  An analogy with the debate in the philosophy of mind between physicalists of different stripes may be helpful for understanding the way in which I’m suggesting that this is so. Let a minimal physical duplicate of a world w be any world w’ that is an exact physical duplicate of w and has no additional features. A physicalist about the mental is committed to a certain necessary truth about the actual world, namely, that every world that is its minimal physical duplicate is a mental duplicate. But she is not committed to saying that the physical features that ground the mental properties instantiated at the actual world ground them at every world, whether considered as actual or counterfactual.  For example, she is happy to allow that there are such worlds containing Lewisian Martians, who feel pain when fluid inflates their foot cavities.  Such worlds differ from the actual world in containing physical features the actual world does not contain. On plausible empirical and metaphysical assumptions about what types of physical properties are possible, a world containing Lewisian Martians is a way the actual world could have been or even a way the actual world could turn out to be.  This makes it an empirical and contingent matter which physical features of the actual world are the features that ground its mental truths. This part of the physicalist’s overall program, the task of settling the debate among physicalists about which are plausible candidate grounds for mental states and properties, is straightforwardly empirical.  Moreover, as observed above, those candidate grounds will not be plausible candidate grounds in all ways the world could have been.  For these reasons, the identification of candidate grounds will be largely the fruit of empirical investigation by neuroscientists into which contingent features the actual world has.

How do these observations help improve our understanding of the nature of metasemantic theories? Let S be the best such semantic theory for some natural language L. Metasemantic hypotheses for L are hypotheses about what grounds the meanings S assigns L’s expressions.  Given the CCC Metasemantics Constraint, which grounds are plausible candidate grounds will depend in part on facts about human biology and psychology.  Just as the entities a plausible semantic theory may assign as meanings to L’s expressions are constrained by human cognitive and conative limits, so too must the grounds of those meanings.  (Slightly less abstractly: a meaning is an entity human beings are capable of communicating in part thanks to.  Being a candidate grounds for such an entity must fit with this fact.)