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 speakers' moral perspectives, but also contribute to promoting their evaluative stance. She focuses on slurs-the prototypical example of hate speech, including racial and homophobic epithets-and so-called thick terms, that is, those expressions, much discussed in metaethics, that mix description and evaluation such as "lewd," "chaste," "generous," or "selfish." 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.



Autorentext

Bianca Cepollaro is research fellow of philosophy at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Milan).



Inhalt
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I. The Presuppositional Account of Hybrid Evaluatives

Chapter 1. Hybrid Evaluatives: a New Class

Chapter 2. The Semantics of Hybrid Evaluatives

Chapter 3. The Dynamics of Hybrid Evaluatives: Complicity, Propaganda, Rejection, Negotiation

Chapter 4. Defending a Uniform Presuppositional Account of Slurs and Thick Terms

Chapter 5. Non-standard Uses of Hybrid Evaluatives

Part II. Rival Theories

Chapter 6. Truth-conditional Theories: It's Just a Matter of Semantics

Chapter 7. Deflationary Theories: It's Just a Matter of Pragmatics

Chapter 8. An alternative Hybrid Theory: Conventional Implicature

Conclusion
Titel
Slurs and Thick Terms
Untertitel
When Language Encodes Values
EAN
9781793610539
Format
E-Book (epub)
Veröffentlichung
31.08.2020
Digitaler Kopierschutz
Adobe-DRM
Dateigrösse
0.87 MB
Anzahl Seiten
184