What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms: When Language Encodes Values, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language not only reflect speakersâ moral perspectives, but also contribute to promoting their evaluative stance. She focuses on slursâ"the prototypical example of hate speech, including racial and homophobic epithetsâ"and so-called thick terms, that is, those expressions, much discussed in metaethics, that mix description and evaluation such as âlewd,â âchaste,â âgenerous,â or âselfish.â This book argues 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. Cepollaro illustrates how this linguistic mechanism effectively explains the pervasive social and moral effects of evaluative language. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she 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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Cepollaro skillfully bridges two otherwise distinct subfields of philosophy; she brings work on slur terms from the philosophy of language into direct contact with meta-ethical debates about thick evaluative terms. The result is more than just an enhancement of each subfield; it is a testament to the fruitfulness of such inter-subfield exploration. Cepollaro offers us a nuanced, beautifully-defended unified account of hybrid evaluatives. The book is clear, detailed, empirically-informed, and thorough; it also provides insight into such hot topics as propaganda, hate speech, and reclamation; this book rewards its reader throughout.
In recent years, philosophy of language has taken a pragmatic turn, focusing on communication in political and socially significant contexts, and generally on the semantics and pragmatics of moral, aesthetic, and broadly evaluative discourse. Bianca Cepollaro's remarkable book, Slurs and Thick Terms: When Language Encodes Values, is an important contribution to this growing literature in applied philosophy of language. This book offers a robust defense of an account of a subclass of evaluatives: slurs and thick terms. On the hybrid semantic account offered, these evaluative terms have a descriptive truth-conditional content, and presuppose values as if they were common ground. Cepollaro gives a meticulous analysis of the presuppositional behavior of these expressions with respect to projection and rejection, while illustrating the dynamics of their use in concrete contexts of propaganda and hate speech. She also convincingly shows that the hybrid evaluative semantic theory she develops is preferable to truth-conditional and to deflationary accounts of slurs and thick terms.
