Pejorative Discourse Is Not Fictional

Abstract

Hom and May (2015) argue that pejoratives mean negative prescriptive properties that externally depend on social ideologies, and that this entails a form of fictionalism: pejoratives have null extensions. There are relevant uses of fictional terms that are necessary to describe the content of fictions, and to make true statements about the world, that do not convey that speakers are committed to the fiction. This paper shows that the same constructions with pejoratives typically convey that the speaker is committed to racist ideologies, in contrast with fictional discourse that typically does not. The disanalogy undermines the plausibility of fictionalism about pejoratives. Moreover, the exceptions—uncommitted uses in embedded constructions—display features that conflict with Hom and May's explanation of committed uses as conversational implicatures.

Focus on slurs

“…This proposal for explaining variability is inextricable from the view that slurring expressions have null extensions. Given recent criticisms of this view (Cepollaro & Thommen, 2019; Marques, 2017; Sennet & Copp, 2015), many theorists would prefer an explanation of variability that does not presuppose it. The proposal that we develop in Section 4 is compatible with semantic and non‐semantic accounts.…”

True Pejorative Sentences Beyond the Existential Core: On Some Unwelcome Implications of Hom and May’s Theory*

“…2 In recent years it has been criticized in many ways and respects: as semantic theory (Sennet and Copp, 2015), as a special kind of semantic (viz. truth-conditional) theory (Cepollaro and Thommen, 2019), as fictionalist theory of pejorative discourse (Marques, 2017;Orlando, 2020), as a particular instance of normative realism (Orlando, 2020). Our aim in this paper is twofold.…”