How do Slurs Mean?

Mark Richard

Suppose that Peter is asked about Robert’s religion. He recalls hearing Robert say

something about his temple. And so Peter utters

J. Robert is a Jew.

thereby saying what he thinks. Suppose Rene is asked about Robert’s religion. Knowing

that Robert is Jewish, Rene utters

K. Robert is a Kike.

expressing contempt for Robert and Jews generally, and thereby saying what he thinks.

Peter said that Robert is a Jew; Rene said that Robert is a Kike. 1

I want to discuss some issues about Peter and Rene’s utterances and the meanings

of the sentences uttered. One thinks that Peter did not say what Rene said. One thinks

that the difference in what was said is to be explained at least in part in terms of what the

sentences they used mean: ‘Kike’ and ‘Jew’ don’t mean the same thing, so J and K

don’t, and this explains why Peter didn’t say what Rene did. And one thinks that the

difference in meaning has something to do with illocution. It seems “part of the

meaning” of the slur that it is a device whose purpose is to display contempt and

denigrate.

But that’s just a metaphor, right? The fact that people use the word in that way

can’t literally be part of the word’s meaning, right? And even if such facts could be parts

of meanings, the illocutionary ‘fact’ isn’t a fact. While some people use the word to

express contempt or denigrate, others use it, making no linguistic mistake, in a jocular

way, or use it without animus as interchangeable with ‘Jew.’ And even if the

illocutionary fact was a fact and such facts were in some sense “part of meaning”,

1 Henceforth I often abbreviate the slur with ‘S’.

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there’re not part of meaning in any sense that’s relevant to what Peter and Rene said,

right? They are no more relevant to what’s said than the difference between ‘horse’ and

‘nag’ is relevant to “what is said” by uses of

H. Robert rode in on a horse.

N. Robert rode in on a nag.

Right?

1. Some time back I floated a proposal about this. (Richard (2008)) I said that

the expressive and performative aspects of slurring utterances do contribute to what's said

by their use. I claimed that slurring typically involves thinking of a group in a

contemptuous way; it displays this attitude as grounded simply in the identity of the

group. Thus, what one thinks, in thinking what is said when slurring, misrepresents the

group. This is because showing contempt or hostility for someone is inter alia

representing them as deserving of one's hostility.

The sort of representation involved here, I said, is of a different sort than the sort

of representation involved when one uses a garden-variety noun phrase. Using the phrase

‘is 32 years old’ does not in itself saddle one with a particular representational

commitment; I can use the phrase in ‘I’m not 32 years old’ without representing anything

as being 32 years old. But not so for a contemptuous use of ‘S’: to use the word

contemptuously is to be contemptuous of Jews, and waving a negation sign at one’s

contemptuous use of the word does nothing to get rid of the contempt and the consequent

misrepresentation. The upshot, I said, was that the thought expressed by a contemptuous

use of K essentially involves (mis)representation not involved in the thought normally

expressed by J.

This proposal tries to explain the difference in state of mind expressed and

assertion made by uses of J and K in terms of illocution and expressive properties. If

sense is what determines what a sentence says, what thought it expresses, then the

proposal was that the illocutionary is part of sense. I was, in making this proposal,

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intentionally vague as to how the meanings of J and K differed, in part because the

explanation of the differences in state of mind, thought, and offensiveness associated with

the use of J and K seemed to me explained by illocution; no need to commit to a

particular picture of exactly how the meanings of the two differ.

Many philosophers and linguists agree that intuitions that uses of J and K “say

different things” are to be explained in broadly illocutionary terms, but want to theorize

things differently than I did. You might want to theorize things differently if you begin

with the idea that what is asserted when a sentence is uttered is what an account of truth

conditions assigns to the sentence. There are many stories that have been floated about

the truth conditions of utterances of things like J and K, and I don’t propose to review

them here. But one plausible story is that the semantic content of the slur ‘S’ --the

contribution the phrase makes to determining truth conditions --is identical with the

semantic content of ‘Jew’: as far as semantics goes, each is simply a way to single out a

group with a particular religious heritage. If so, then what a proper semantics associates

with sentence K, and thus what is “strictly and literally said” by its utterance, is the same

as what is associated with J.

Whence, then, the difference between uses of J and K? One answer is that there is

more than one sort of “content”. One way of developing this idea, popularized in the

work of the linguist Chris Potts, identifies two sorts of content, at-issue and not-at-issue

content. As the idea is developed in Potts’ early work (Potts (2005)), both sorts of

content may be associated with a phrase. Both are determined compositionally, so that

‘damn Republicans’ has both at-issue and not-at-issue contents which are determined

systematically on the basis of the at-issue and not-at-issue contents of ‘damn’ and

‘Republicans.’ The at-issue content of a declarative sentence corresponds roughly to

what Grice had in mind when he spoke of what is “strictly and literally said” by a

sentence use. Not-at-issue content is not what is asserted, but it is projected to utterance

level --it is part of the ‘speaker’s commitments’ in uttering a sentence. In Potts’ original

development, a sentence’s not-at-issue content is of the same sort as the at-issue content

of a declarative sentence, so it’s a proposition.2 In later work, Potts develops the idea that

2 Potts (2005) takes not-at-issue content to sometimes be a comment on at-issue content, sometimes a proposition about the speaker’s affective state. In the latter case, the not-at-issue content of a use of sentence O below is something along the lines of the proposition

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some not-at-issue content, including that associated with expressives like the slur S, acts

directly on the context. According to Potts, the use of an expressive is like a

performative utterance: “expressives”, Potts writes, “achieve their intended effect simply

by being uttered; they do not offer content so much as inflict it.” (Potts (2007), 167)

There are many ways to implement this last idea. Potts suggested that contexts in

one way or another register the affective attitudes of participants, and that an expressive’s

use directly changes the attitudinal register of the context. Uttering

O. Obama gave the damn Republicans everything they wanted

in some sense “raises the temperature” of the context: it increases the amount of negative

affect towards Republicans manifest in the context simply by being uttered. A

generalization that Elisabeth Camp (2017) develops has it that the use of a slur both

makes a contribution to truth conditions and involves “endorsing a distancing

perspective” on the targets of the slur.3

I think that both my original proposal and the at-issue/not-at-issue content

framework are missing something. When Rene utters K, or when someone else utters it

with the intention of slurring Robert, they express a certain state of mind. We are

inclined to think that the kind of state of mind expressed is, at some interesting level of

abstraction, the same across speakers. We are inclined to think that the sentence K is in

some important sense a conventional means to express this state of mind. That state of

mind is something that we --as human beings at least --can and do evaluate. We think it

is wrong, not correct, odious, incorrectly grounded, a manifestation of prejudice, etc., etc.

I don’t think Potts really manages to capture this. ‘Kike’ is not merely a means to

“raise the temperature of the conversation,” as Potts would have it. There is some aspect

of its meaning, an aspect that reflects the assumptions and attitudes of those who slur,

that contributes a special sort of offense that distinguishes the meaning of a sentence like

K from that of the sentence

that the speaker has negative affect towards Republicans.3 Camp’s proposal takes the unembeded use of a slur to invariably (‘non-defeasibly’, as she puts it) involve two acts, a predicative act of the sort accompanying any predicative expression and a distancing one. Aspects of use determine whether the assertive act or the distancing act performed by a use of a sentence like K are at-issue.

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A. Robert is a damned asshole.

Somehow, I doubt that the difference is to be measured simply by using a thermometer.

Neither do I find what’s missing either in the proposal that I made or in Camp’s

proposal. There is indeed some connection between acts, like displaying contempt and

endorsing a distancing perspective on a group, and the conventional meaning of slurs.

But slurs can be used with their literal meaning without performing such acts. Someone

without negative affect towards minorities may truly say ‘I’m no racist --I date Kikes,

Chinks, and Spics’, using the slurs with their literal meaning. What’s said is tasteless and

offensive. But it is not the expression of negative affect that the speaker in any case

doesn’t have. Neither is it endorsing a negative perspective that the speaker’s social life

obviously doesn’t reflect. One thinks that the meaning of a slur directly determines the

offensiveness of using it. It is not clear, on either Camp’s or my proposal, how this can

be.

2. Perhaps it is time to make a fresh start on the problem.4 We can begin with the

obvious. Slurs are emblematic of prejudice and disrespect. Their central linguistic use --

at least we all believe that their central linguistic use --is one that makes prejudice and

disrespect manifest. Not only do we presuppose this, we expect that others presuppose it

and that they will bring this presupposition to the fore if called upon to interpret a slur’s

use. Slurs are typically --not invariably, but typically --used to express contempt or

derogation of their targets. This generic claim --that slurs are used to express contempt

for or denigrate --is something that we all presuppose, something that we all expect that

auditors of these terms will presuppose. All this --the generic claims about what users of

slurs presuppose and about how they use them, that we presuppose these claims about

users and that users expect us to invoke these presuppositions in interpreting the use of a

slur --all this is common knowledge among competent speakers. I think this sort of

common knowledge constitutes an important kind of linguistic meaning.

4 Compare Austin (1975), 91.

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When a philosopher talks about meaning, the first thing you need to do is ask him

what, exactly, he means. Some talk about linguistic meaning is talk about (what

determines) the input to the compositional processes determining reference and truth.

Some talk about meaning is talk about whatever it is that one needs to be in cognitive

contact with in order to qualify as a competent speaker. And some talk about meaning is

talk about whatever it is that determines “what is said” --what proposition is expressed --

by a use of a sentence. Sometimes it is assumed that these are really three ways of

talking about the same thing. I do not assume this. When I say that the sort of common

ground I invoked just now--interpretive common ground, to give it a label --is a kind of

meaning, I mean in the first instance that it is what a speaker has to be in cognitive

contact with in order to qualify as competent.

Take a word w and a population P of speakers. 5 Consider the set S of those

claims q such that the following (generic) claims are true:

1. Members of P who use w presuppose q.

2. Members of P who use w expect their audience to recognize that in using w

they presuppose q and expect the audience to use that fact in interpreting their use

of w.

3. (1) and (2) are common knowledge among Ps.

To a first approximation, S is w’s interpretive common ground --its ICG --in P.6 If w is

the word ‘cousin’ and P is the set of adult English speakers, S contains such things as the

claims that cousins are parents’ siblings’ progeny and that English speakers call cousins

‘cousins’, since these are presupposed by users, expected by those users to be recognized

as presupposed, and so on.

Because of the iterative nature of ICG, it typically contains not only first order

claims, like the claim

5 at a particular time --this qualification always needs to be attached to talk of interpretive common ground. But I will usually suppress it. Indeed, I will often suppress reference to a population.6 To a first approximation; I am ignoring some subtleties that are irrelevant for present purposes. A more exact characterization of the notion of ICG is given in Chapter 2 of (Richard (Ms.)).

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C. Cousins are parents’ siblings’ progeny,

but ‘higher order’ claims, such as the claim

S. Adult speakers who use ‘cousin’ expect their audience to recognize that in

using the word they presuppose C.

S as well as C is in interpretive common ground because the instances of (1) through (3)

formed from each are true. Now, there is a fairly clear sense in which S is in ‘cousin’ ‘s

ICG because C is. It is useful to have a term that isolates the ‘first order’ claims in ICG

which “generate” the whole, in the way that the fact that C’s being in ICG makes it the

case that S is as well. Let us say that the claims that play such a generative role for the

ICG of a word are its basis.

Some of the basis of the interpretive common ground of a term is made up

‘descriptive’ presuppositions like C.7 Some of it is made up what one knows --that is,

presupposes --about a term’s use. So it goes with slurs. As noted above, claims like the

claim that users of ‘Kike’ use it to insult and denigrate Jews satisfy (1) though (3), and

thus are part of the term’s ICG. It is in this way that (facts about) illocution enter into the

slur’s ICG and thus, as ICG constitutes the term’s meaning, into the meaning of the term.

In the case of many slurs, there will also be descriptive presuppositions in ICG.

Users of ‘Kike’ assume that Jews are a group one ought to think negatively of; they

assume that it is quite all right to display disrespect for them, and that an especially good

way to express contempt for Jews is by calling them Kikes. It may be that substantive

stereotypes enter into the ICG surrounding the term, at least in certain cultures at certain

times. These presuppositions, like all presuppositions in ICG, are generic. What we all

7 I use ‘presupposition’ in roughly the way Stalnaker uses it. A presupposition is something that is made for a particular purpose; to presuppose p for purposes X is to be disposed to behave, in Xing, in ways in which someone whose X behavior was in part controlled by her belief that p. As such, presuppositions need not be beliefs; neither need they be mentally articulated or even accessible to consciousness.

Here and throughout this section I am summarizing aspects of the discussion in Chapter 2 of Richard (Ms.).

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know/presuppose is that the norm is that users of the slur assume Jews merit disrespect

for being Jewish and so forth; the multi-ethnic-dater mentioned before does not falsify

such generics.

ICG, I have said, constitutes a body of information with which someone needs to

be in cognitive contact in order to understand the term as it is used in a particular

population. There are several ways of being related to interpretive common ground that

suffice for understanding.8 An obvious way to be a competent user of a word w is to

make all the presuppositions --first and higher order --that constitute w’s interpretive

common ground. For ‘cousin’ this is a matter of presupposing:

C and the other claims in the term’s basis;

that users of the term presuppose and expect these presuppositions to be invoked

in interpretation;

whatever additional higher order presuppositions make these common ground.

But this is not the only way to understand the term. A “cousin fanatic” might be

convinced that in fact only men can be cousins9; but if he recognizes that normal users of

‘cousin’ presuppose that cousins are any progeny of parents’ siblings’, expect this to be

recognized, and so on, the fanatic qualifies as competent. A third way to be competent --

the way in which those who are competent speakers but who are unable to have higher

order attitudes are competent --is to simply make the relevant first order presuppositions.

This is the route to competence that would be taken by, for example, linguistically

competent autists, if they are indeed unable to make higher order presuppositions.

So there are three ways to be a competent user of ‘cousin’: simply make the first

order assumptions in its ICG; simply make the second order assumptions therein; make

‘em all. The last is presumably the norm for those who use the word ‘cousin’, and its 8 Suffice, that is, when coupled with syntactic, phonetic, and other linguistic knowledge and abilities, along with rudimentary semantic knowledge --the sort of thing one knows when one knows that ‘cousin’ is a noun, and so is something that one predicates of objects, and thus is a candidate for being true or false of an object.9 Here I allude to the “sofa fanatics” in Burge (1986).

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being the norm among those who use the term is what makes the term’s ICG its meaning

in a population. Something similar is true of slurs and other words whose meaning has a

non-descriptive, illocutionary component: there are three ways to understand such terms.

One can use the term as it’s generally presupposed it’s used, make any descriptive

presuppositions in the term’s basis, and presuppose that users generally take auditors to

recognize this. Or one can be aware of the facts about how the term is used while neither

using it nor making the relevant first order presuppositions one’s self. Or (perhaps) one

can recognize how the term is used –recognizing contempt and denigration doesn’t

require a higher order attitude, after all -while failing to make higher order assumptions

about users. Again, what gives the term the meaning it has in a population is the normal

mental state of users, who share a collection of first and higher order attitudes. But one

can be a competent user or auditor of the term without indulging in the full range of

attitudes that constitute its meaning.10

3. Interpretive common ground is first and foremost a kind of meaning because

grasping it determines linguistic competence. It does not determine semantic value --that 10 This is what it is to be a competent speaker. One might well wonder about the flip side. There certainly is such a thing as making a ‘linguistic mistake’ –one does so if, for example, one calls Prince Charles a frog, thinking that ‘frog’ is an unflattering term for the British. What, exactly, is it to make a linguistic mistake?

It would surely be wrong to say that making a linguistic mistake in using a term is a matter of not making the sort of assumptions in its ICG, or using the term in a way that is at variance with the assumptions in ICG about how it is normally used. The sofa fanatic is mistaken, but given that he recognizes the norms for using ‘cousin’ and speaks in a way that shows that he recognizes them, it does not seem that he is making a linguistic mistake. The multi-ethnic dater is not following the ‘norms of denigration’ that populate the ICG of the slurs she uses, but (especially given that she correctly expects her audience to pick up on the irony of her use, given the terms’ ICG) she is not displaying linguistic incompetence. Neither is one making a linguistic mistake if one uses a term metaphorically, in way that is at variance with ICG but comprehensible because of relations of the use to ICG.

If one thinks that grasping the meaning of a term is a matter of grasping rules for using the term, one may think that making a linguistic mistake is a matter of one’s use flouting those rules. Such a ‘rule following’ view of competence is not really in the spirit of the proposal I’m making in this essay. If pressed for an elucidation of the notion of linguistic mistake, I would say something like this: Relative to a population of speakers, a use of a term displays competence (and so is neither incompetent nor linguistically mistaken) to the extent that the use is one that is accompanied by and in some sense displays a recognition of the norms for the term’s use.

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is, the input to the processes that determine reference, satisfaction and truth. It is relevant

to the determination of semantic value, as it encodes information about what users take a

term to apply to, and actual application is of course relevant to correct application. But

one can’t read the satisfaction conditions of a predicate off of ICG; indeed, there is no

reason to think --or want --satisfaction conditions to be determined by ICG.

Those of us interested in meaning often assume that (abstracting from the context

sensitivity of indexicals and the like) convention associates with a sentence something

that its use “strictly and literally” says. Assuming this, we assume that serious utterance

is often an attempt to assert what convention thus associates with the sentence uttered,

and that interpretation typically proceeds by recovering what convention associates with

what’s uttered. ICG is a kind of meaning associated with a sentence by something like

convention. What relation does this sort of meaning have to what a sentence “strictly and

literally” says?

What a sentence says --typically at least, and ignoring delicate issues associated

with “expressivist” accounts of discourse --is something that is true or false. So it is not

open to us to identify what a sentence says with one or another construction from the ICG

surrounding its words, since this cannot be relied upon to determine truth conditions.

Still ICG is surely relevant to what we say when we speak. What an auditor does --at

least to begin with --in understanding what another says is to interpret her words using

ICG, adding to this rudimentary semantic knowledge and knowledge of the context of

use. To understand an utterance of ‘many cousins are French’ one takes one’s knowledge

of the semantics of the frame many As are Bs --that its instances are true just if many of

the As are Bs -- and one’s knowledge of referential facts --in this case, that ‘cousin’

refers to cousins and ‘French’ applies to things French --and combines this with what one

knows a user of ‘cousin’ and ‘French’ presupposes and expects to be seen as

presupposing. Doing this, the auditor arrives at an understanding of the utterance: She

understands it as one in which she is invited to think, using the relevant presuppositions,

of cousins and the French, and, thinking of them in that way, represent that many of the

former are the latter.

As I said, one notion of “what is said” is the notion of what is in some sense

associated by convention with a sentence-as-used-in-a-particular-sort-of situation; what is

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said in this sense is what the competent interpreter brings to the table in trying to

understand what another is doing in speaking. It is the default interpretation, the

interpretation that the competent speaker will expect the auditor to begin with (if nothing

signals that another interpretation should be sought) and that the competent auditor will

begin by assigning (again, if nothing signals that another interpretation is to be sought).

“What is said” in this sense is what one gets if one assumes that a speaker is speaking as

a member of a particular population and combines the ICG in that population of the

words used with the relevant semantics in the way just outlined. It is a reification of what

one entertains if asked, outside of particular contexts of use, to think about what a

sentence says. If there is such a thing as literal meaning, this is it.

A second, related use for the notion of “what is said” is as a notion of what is or

should be recovered in successful communication. This notion can be fleshed out in

much the same way as the first notion just was. When a speaker speaks, she uses a

sentence made up various parts, put together in a semantically significant way. She uses

her words making certain presuppositions that she expects or at least hopes the audience

will recognize; her syntax has a particular semantic significance. Success in

communication is a matter of the audience more or less correctly recognizing the

presuppositions made and the significance of syntax; “what is said” is again a reification

of what happens when the auditor interprets, recognizing what the speaker wanted

recognized. The difference between the two notions is simply that the first is relatively

context independent, as it’s attached to a sentence by the sort of convention ICG

enforces; the second is not.

The two notions of “what is said” just mentioned are broadly Gricean. But the

notion of “what is said” is protean in the extreme. In one sense, “what is said” is what we

say is said when someone speaks. If Odile utters ‘my cousin is French’, what Odile said

is that her cousin is French --that is, what she said is whatever we pick out with the

complement ‘that her cousin is French’. It is clear that in uttering Odile said that T, the

speaker may convey various things about Odile’s speech act; often we are best

understood as ascribing to Odile a saying that is not a saying of anything very closely

related to what I just called the literal meaning of T. I will not digress to discuss how the

complement that T contributes to determining the truth conditions of the sentence Odile

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said that T. But I do insist that there’s little reason to think that the semantic value of the

complement must be closely related to “what T strictly and literally says.” There are a

variety of uses for the notion of “what is said” or “the proposition expressed” by an

utterance. Each has its role; only confusion can result if we don’t keep in mind that the

different notions are different and pick out different things.

4. I’ve suggested that meanings are constituted by certain sorts of common

ground among speakers, and thus it really is “part of the meaning” of a slur that it is used

in a certain way, since it is common ground that (it is the norm for) users of the slur to

use it to express contempt and for those users to expect their audience to recognize that

they presuppose this, and to expect that their audience will make use of this

presupposition in interpreting them. Given this view of meaning, it is indeed the case

that sentences J and K differ in meaning. Furthermore, there are theoretically useful

notions of “what is said” and “the proposition expressed” on which the sentences say and

express different things.11

I take it that all this goes some way to explaining what many have thought needed

explaining about racial and ethnic slurs, which is the fact that their use, even their non-

slurring use, typically causes a distinctive sort of offense, one that the user is often held

responsible for even when his intentions in use are benign.

To see how an explanation goes, imagine that Robert offers Rachel the paella he

made, full of chicken and chorizo, saffron and clams. Rachel says ‘Robert, you expect

me eat this trayf? You know we kikes don’t do pork and shrmp!’ Rachel does not intend

to display contempt for herself and other Jews, and anyone who hears her will know that.

Still, someone --Robin, say --who hears Rachel may well be offended, even if they

recognize that Rachel isn’t being contemptuous of herself or anyone else. Why?

What happens when Robin interprets Rachel’s --or any other --utterance? Well,

she takes the speaker to be a member of a certain group: she takes her to be an adult

English speaker, or a member of her family, or a resident of Birmingham, Alabama,

11We can say this even if we decide that the semantic values of ‘Kike’ and ‘Jew’ as they occur in K and J are identical --they are both just devices for picking out the same group --so that K and J are necessarily equivalent.

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whatever. She has some sense of how the relevant group uses the words in the sentence

uttered. This sense of how the word is used informs her attempt at interpretation.

Making use of what she takes to be interpretive common ground for the utterance relative

to the group, she recovers what she takes to be literally said by the utterance. She may go

on to embellish or alter this interpretation if it seems that some interpretation other than

the default interpretation provided by ICG is called for. Robin thus begins by awarding

Rachel’s utterance its literal interpretation relative to the population in which she takes

Rachel to speak. Recognizing that Rachel is being friendly toward Robert, she then

amends her understanding, replacing it with another. Robin won’t (typically) be aware of

running through a variety of interpretations of an utterance: interpretation being for the

most part fast and outside of the purview of consciousness, all one is usually aware of is

its final result. But the default interpretation, on the picture I sketched above, is the

starting place for interpretation.

Now what happens when Robin generates this default interpretation? Well, this

depends on the common ground --that is, the meaning --that Robin uses in constructing it.

If someone utters something of the form As are Bs and the ICG of A includes the

presupposition that As are Cs, then Robin understands the speaker as having (inter alia)

said, inviting her to think of As as Cs, that As are Bs. If the common ground --that is, the

meaning --of the words used involves facts about illocution, Robin takes the speaker to

be performing the relevant illocution. If, for example, the speaker utters ‘hello’, Robin

will take the speaker to be greeting the addressee. This is so, even if subsequently --

several milliseconds later --Robin revises the interpretation, as she might do if a sentence

or two into the discourse she realizes that the speaker’s ‘hello’ wasn’t a greeting but an

attempt simply to get a daydreaming addressee to pay attention.

So what happens when Robin hears Rachel’s remark to Robert? Well, the

hypothesis I’ve been developing is that Robin begins by situating Rachel as a speaker

from a particular population that uses its words in a particular way, and then recovers,

using the ICG surrounding the words used (and rudimentary semantic knowledge and

facts about the utterance context), the default interpretation of the utterance. If there are

illocutionary or expressive facts in the meaning of some of the words used, Robin uses

those facts to construct a first understanding of what it was that Rachel was doing. And

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this explains why Robin may be offended, even deeply offended, by Rachel’s remark.

For suppose that Robin takes Rachel to be speaking --as she is --the language spoken in

the United States.12 Robin takes there to be a standard use among the speakers in United

States of words like ‘kike’, ‘pork’, ‘shrimp’ and so on. If she is like most of us, she will

take the standard use of ‘Kike’ to be one on which its use displays contempt for or

denigrates Jews. And so Robin, at least initially, interprets Rachel’s utterance as an act of

displaying contempt for and denigration of Jews. She milliseconds later corrects the

interpretation, taking Rachel to be speaking jocularly or to be honoring Robert by using

‘kike’ in an in-group way.

But the initial interpretation was made. And to make the initial interpretation,

given that the relevant ICG of ‘kike’ includes the generic claim that people use the word

to display contempt, is to understand Rachel as displaying contempt. And so to make the

initial interpretation is to be in a situation that is phenomenologically just like the

situation one is in when one witnesses someone using ‘Kike’ to display contempt for and

disparage Jews: to so interpret Rachel just is inter alia to see her as slurring Jews. Such

an act is offensive; witnessing such an act produces offense. Even though the interpreter

revises the interpretation, the offense is caused, and the physiological and psychological

effects of witnessing the act occur: the limbic system is activated, hormones causing

stress are released, associations the word triggers are made.

On the story I’m offering, offense is a function of where the interpreter situates

the speaker in the socio-semantic landscape. And so an interpreter may not feel offense at

Rachel’s remark. Robert may take himself to be a certain sort of friend of Rachel, and so

immediately understand himself as being honored by being addressed in a particular

register. If so, the meaning he initially assigns the utterance will not involve illocutionary

facts about other uses of the words uttered. Other interpreters --think of those who have

repeatedly witnessed second person slurring --may be unable to interpret any use of the

term in any way other than as a slur, even if they know that some use the term non-

slurringly. For them, the offense felt may be particularly intense.12 A speaker is always part of many populations: Rachel, after all, is a speaker of US English, an American Jew, a resident of Alabama, Robert’s sister-in-law, etc. So it is something of an idealization to say that Robin places Rachel in one particular population. Better, perhaps, to say several interpretive strategies may be activated, some more strongly than others. This doesn’t affect the point I’m pushing.

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I said that not only does the non-slurring use of a slur typically cause a distinctive

sort of offense, but that the user is often held responsible for such offense even when his

intentions in use are benign. Why the responsibility, when the user means no harm?

Return to Rachel’s utterance, and assume it was made at a dinner party. Assume that

Rachel meant to be speaking in a particular register, a somewhat intimate one due to her

long friendship with Robert. Still Rachel spoke, as we all speak, pretty much whenever

we speak, in public. And it is not really in our control in what register, as a part of what

group, we are taken to speak. Rachel is many things: an American, someone from

Alabama, a Jew, a friend of Robert’s. She can be interpreted as speaking the idiom --as

assuming the interpretive common ground --of the various groups she is a member of.

She has at least some responsibility to anticipate how she can be, or at least is likely to

be, interpreted. If her audience is likely to think of her in interpretation as simply another

American, or as a resident of Alabama, or as speaking as part of some other group whose

members, should they use ‘kike’, use it slurringly, then she has a reason to avoid the

term. To fail to do so is a kind of linguistic negligence.

To utter a sentence like K is to more or less force the audience to process what the

sentence means. What the sentence means --in many populations, in many registers --is

in part a record of illocution displaying prejudice and contempt. In some populations, in

some registers, the meaning of the sentence is literally made up of such things as the fact

that those who use the words that occur in it hold Jews in contempt and think it

acceptable to display such contempt. Understanding a use of K as being in such a

register --even if it is not, even if one corrects one’s understanding in microseconds --is

understanding it as --at a certain level it is no different from witnessing --a slurring act.13

Austin, J. L. 1975. How To Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press.

Burge, T. 1986. Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind. Journal of Philosophy 83,

697-720.

13 Thanks to audiences at the University of Connecticut and the University of Palermo for comments. Special thanks to Daniel Harris for discussion of topics in the last section.

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Camp, E. A Dual Act Analysis of Slurs. This volume.

Potts, C. 2005. The Logic of Conversational Implicatures. Oxford University Press.

Potts, C. 2007. The Expressive Dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33, 165-198.

Richard, M. 2008. When Truth Gives Out. Oxford University Press.

Richard, M. Ms. Meanings As Species. Posted at

https://markrichardphilosophy.wordpress.com/work-in-progress/

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