How do Slurs Mean?

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, in part at least, 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 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”, 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.

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

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Right?

1. Some time back I floated a proposal about this.2 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 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,

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

2 Richard (2008), Chapter 1.

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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 in 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 work3, both sorts of content may be associated

with phrases. 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

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 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.4 In later work, Potts develops the idea that

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.”5

3 In particular Potts (2005).4 Potts took not at issue content to sometimes be a comment on at issue content, sometimes a proposition about the speaker’s affective state, so that the not at-issue content of a use by Hilary of O below is something along the lines of the proposition that Hilary has negative affect towards Republicans.5 Potts (2007), 167.

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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 --one that Elisabeth Camp has discussed in unpublished work --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.6

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

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

6 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 the distancing one. Aspects of use determine whether the assertive act or the distaincing act performed by a use of a sentence like K are at issue.

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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.7 We can start 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.

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 strictly and literally said” --what

proposition is expressed -- by a use of a sentence. Sometimes it is assumed that these are

7 Compare Austin (1975), 91.

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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. 8 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. If w is

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

claim that cousins are parents’ siblings’ progeny, since this is presupposed by users,

expected by 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

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

8 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.

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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 associated with the term; C above is an example.9 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

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. There are several ways of being

related to interpretive common ground that suffice for understanding.10 An obvious way

to be a competent user of a word w is to make all the presuppositions --first and higher 9 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 a more lengthy discussion in Chapter 3 of Richard (ms.).10 Suffice, that is, when coupled with various 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.

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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 cousins11; but if he recognizes that normal users of

‘cousin’ presuppose that cousins are any progeny of parents’ siblings’, expects 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.12

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, and its 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

compenent: 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 --

contempt and denigration aren’t higher order attitudes, after all -while failing to make

11 Here I allude to the “sofa fanatics” in Burge 1988.12 An alternative account of competence would be one on which competence with a term w is achieved either by presupposing its basis or by presupposing, of the basis, that users of the term expect one to recognize that they make those presuppositions and that one will invoke that fact in interpreting them. On this way of thinking of matters, making whatever higher order presuppositions are required (beyond those just mentioned) determine that something is common ground in a population has nothing to with competence; rather, these higher order presuppositions are the glue that determines what (first and second order) presuppositions constitute meaning.

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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.

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

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 and truth 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 cum meaning is in a fairly clear sense a kind of

meaning associated with a sentence by 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 is said in the sense just isolated. What a speaker 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

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

presupposing.13 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

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

13 And what, you may be wondering, is it for the speaker to have “rudimentary semantic knowledge” that ‘cousin’ refers to cousins and ‘French’ applies to things French? Sufficient for knowing this sort of thing is …well, being a competent speaker, someone who has mastered the language in a way that allows her to communicate with others. One way to be such a person, of course, is to accept those sentences which express in the language the basis of its terms ICG, for those sentences to have “the right kind” of functional role in one’s mental economy, and to have dispositions that warrant our saying that she makes the higher order presuppositions that complete this common ground.

There are presumably many ways to have the relevant semantic knowledge, of course. One can, for example, acquire it piecemeal by know that ‘cousin’ in English applies to what phrase X applies to in one’s own. It is not clear to me what point there could be in looking for (the presumably wildly disjunctive) necessary and sufficient conditions for having semantic knowledge.

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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 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

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, even if related, things.

4. I began with a number of puzzles and issues about sentences like J and K and

the phrases ‘Jew’ and ‘Kike’. One was a puzzle about illocutionary facts and their

relations to meaning: while it seems “part of the meaning” of the slur that it is a device

whose purpose is to display contempt and denigrate, people do not make a linguistic

mistake if they use the term without feeling contempt for or denigrating Jews.

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 the term that it is used in a

certain way, since competent speakers presuppose 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

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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; there are thus theoretically useful notions of

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

different things.14

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. Imagine that Robert offers

Rachele the paella he made, full of chicken and chorizo, saffron and clams. Rachele says

‘Robert, you expect me eat this trayf? You know we kikes don’t do pork and shrmp!’

Rachele 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 Rachele may well be

offended, even if they recognize that Rachele isn’t being contemptuous of herself or

anyone else. Why?

What happens when Robin interprets Rachele’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,

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 utterer 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

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

Rachele to speak. Recognizing that Rachele 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

14This explanation goes through 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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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 Rachele’s remark to Robert? Well, the

hypothesis I’ve been developing is that Robin begins by situating Rachele 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 Rachele was doing. And

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

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

the United States.15 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 Rachele’s utterance as an act

of displaying contempt for and denigration of Jews. She milliseconds later corrects the 15 A speaker is always part of many populations: Rachele, after all, is a speaker of US English, an American Jew, a resident of California, Robert’s sister-in-law, etc. So it is something of an idealization to say that Robin places Rachele 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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interpretation, taking Rachele 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 Rachele 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 Rachele 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 was caused, and the physiological and

psychological effects of witnessing the act occurred: 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

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

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

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

long friendship with Robert. Still Rachele 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. Rachele 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 idioms of the various groups she is a

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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.16

Mark RichardHarvard University

16 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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