This is a post by Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona).
Consider how ordinary speakers argue about words like charnego, gitano, or negrito. In some contexts their use is taken to be straightforwardly degrading; in others it is defended as neutral, affectionate, or at least nonderogatory. These disagreements are familiar and often heated. They pose a natural philosophical question: what, exactly, makes a term derogatory, and how should we understand cases in which competent speakers sincerely disagree about whether a word counts as a slur at all?
This question is the starting point of two recent papers in which I defend a unified account of derogatory language and of some of the disagreements it gives rise to. The first focuses on what speakers do, in a precise illocutionary sense, when they use a slur; the second examines whether controversies about contested slurs undermine semantic theories of derogatory meaning. My central claim, across both papers, is that they do not.
Let us begin with a simple contrast. When a speaker uses a slur, it is common to think that what matters most is the effect on the hearer: whether offence is taken, whether harm is caused, whether someone feels attacked or alienated. These effects are undeniably important, but they are not what make an expression derogatory, I argue. A slur can derogate even when nobody hears it, when its target does not understand it, or when no offence is felt. What is essential is not what happens to the audience, but what the speaker conventionally does by using that word.
In the first paper, I argue that slurs are associated, by linguistic convention, with a specific illocutionary function: the act of derogating. To derogate, in the relevant sense, is to position an individual or group as unworthy, inferior, or lacking standing. This is not merely to describe them negatively, nor merely to express a transient emotion. It is to enact a normative appraisal through language. I develop this idea within an Austinian framework, treating slurs as use-conditional expressives whose derogatory force is part of their conventional role in speech.
On this view, slurs conventionally express and presuppose contempt for a socially salient group. Contempt, as I understand it, is not a passing feeling but a relatively stable evaluative stance: a way of seeing its target as beneath consideration or respect. When a speaker uses a slur literally and sincerely, she conveys this stance as if it is already shared. The utterance presupposes contempt as part of the conversational background, rather than asserting that the speaker feels contempt, or that the speaker and her interlocutors share contempt for the target.
An example helps make this clear. Consider the Spanish slur charnego. When someone says ‘Juan is a charnego’, the point is not simply to classify Juan as a non Catalan Spaniard living in Catalonia. Rather, the speaker talks as if the negative evaluative perspective historically associated with that category (contempt for internal migrants to Catalonia) were already common ground. In doing so, she attempts to upgrade a private appraisal into a shared one, unless the presupposition is explicitly resisted.
This presuppositional structure also explains a familiar but theoretically puzzling phenomenon: repetition. Repeating a descriptive claim usually adds nothing to a conversation. The problem is not merely that nothing new is added when a descriptive claim is already common ground. Repetition is redundant and infelicitous. Like declaratives, the repetition of directives (i.e., requests, commands, etc.) is also infelicitous. In contrast, repeating an expressive intensifies its force. The same is true of slurs, which suggests that slurs are expressives, consistently with the presuppositional-expressive view I advocate. Their repeated use reinforces contempt. If their use is accepted, they also collectivize contempt. Their repetition presses a derogatory appraisal further into the common ground through sheer reiteration.
The second paper turns to a different worry. Some philosophers have argued that disagreements about whether a term is derogatory show that derogatory force cannot be semantic. I contend there with arguments by Renée Jorgensen Bolinger; other authors who argue that derogation is not semantic include Geoff Nunberg, and Una Stojnić and Ernest Lepore. If competent speakers disagree about whether a word is a slur, Jorgensen Bolinger argues, then meaning must depend on uptake, group norms, or audience reactions. I argue that this conclusion is unwarranted. Once we look carefully at the kinds of disagreement involved, they turn out to be both familiar and theoretically unproblematic.
I distinguish three main types of cases. First, there are intra-linguistic, cross-dialectal disagreements, in which a term has developed a derogatory sense in one dialect of a language but not in another. This is a routine case of polysemy and metalinguistic negotiation, no different in kind from disputes about whether a racehorse counts as an athlete. Polysemy is nonetheless a semantic phenomenon. Second, there are cross-linguistic misunderstandings, such as the well-known Uruguayan footballer Cavani case, where a term that is affectionate in the Spanish of La Plata is treated as offensive to English speakers’ ears, because it resembles an English slur. These cases illustrate the danger of imposing one community’s semantic norms on another—a form of linguistic chauvinism—but they do not show that derogation is a matter of uptake rather than semantic content.
Finally, there are ethnonyms like ‘gitano’ in Spanish or ‘țigan’ in Romanian, which are often used derogatorily but are also used neutrally (‘gitano’) or self-referentially (‘țigan’) by members of the relevant groups. A purely uptake-centric approach risks collapsing this distinction, classifying any use of a term that ever offends as a slur. A presuppositional expressive account, by contrast, allows us to separate derogatory meaning from offense.
Taken together, the two papers defend a picture on which slurs are derogatory in virtue of their conventional illocutionary role, and disputes about them reflect ordinary linguistic variation rather than the perlocutionary effects of their uptake by an audience. By distinguishing derogatory force from its possible effects, and by showing how evaluative attitudes like contempt can enter the common ground, the account preserves what is most intuitive about slurs while giving a principled explanation of their immediacy and their unsettling power.
To read more about this, check out my article,“The Constitutive Function of Derogation” which appeared this year in Topoi, and also “Disagreement About Contested Slurs” which came out last year in the Asian Journal of Philosophy. Both articles are available open access.
Teresa Marques is an Associate Professor (Profesora Agregada) at the University of Barcelona. She is a philosopher of language, and has interests in metaethics, epistemology, and feminist and social philosophy. In recent years, she has been working on disagreement and retraction, conceptual engineering, evaluative language, and the expression of emotions in language.
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