“Slurs and thick terms: When language encodes values”

Abstract

What is the relation between language, communication and values? This book explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language not only reflect speakers’ moral perspectives but also contribute to promote their evaluative stance. It focuses on slurs – the prototypical example of hate speech including racial and homophobic epithets – and so-called thick terms, i.e. those expressions, much discussed in metaethics, that mix description and evaluation such as ‘lewd’, ‘chaste’, ‘generous’ or ‘selfish’. The thesis that the book defends is that in employing such terms, speakers not only say something purely factual about people and things but also presuppose certain values, as if they were common ground among the conversation participants. This work illustrates how this linguistic mechanism is able to explain the pervasive social and moral effects of evaluative language. The approach of the book is multidisciplinary in that it tackles issues in philosophy of language, linguistics, ethics and metaethics. Moreover, the theoretical investigation takes into consideration and discusses empirical data from psychology and experimental philosophy.

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