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International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context

CONTEXT 2017: Modeling and Using Context pp 15–24Cite as

Pejoratives, Contexts and Presuppositions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10257))

Abstract

Kaplan started a fruitful debate on the meaning of pejoratives. He suggests that a dimension of expressive meaning is required, separated from the straightforward “at issue” content. To account for this, writers have elaborated on this suggestion, by arguing that the separated expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is instead either a conventional or conversational implicatures, or a presupposition. I myself prefer a presuppositional account; however, in order to deflate a very serious objection that has been raised against accounts of that kind, it is on the one hand essential that we take what is presupposed to be genuinely expressive, and, related, it is also essential that we adopt a more complex view than the one usually assumed on the nature of the context relative to which speech acts make their contributions.

Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2016-80588-R; and through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2013, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya, and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 675415, Diaphora. Thanks to three reviewers for this journal for their comments, which led to several improvements, and to Michael Maudsley for his grammatical revision.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Williamson [45] argues for a similar view. He classifies the expressive contents he proposes as conventional implicatures, but he understands that category in a traditional way, wider than the one I assume following Potts’s work (ibid., 151, 153). I take his view to be compatible with the presuppositional account assumed here as much as with Potts’s view. All these proposals can be viewer as different ways to elaborate on Kaplan’s view that pejoratives should be account for by adding a “use-conditional” layer of meaning.

  2. 2.

    In the case of presuppositions, Stalnaker and other writers dispute this; [11] defends it, for constructions such as the one just given for illustration.

  3. 3.

    As I have pointed out elsewhere ([10], 45–47), in spite of its title [1] in fact does not show that conventional implicatures (or presuppositions, for that matter), as understood here following Potts, are a “myth”. Bach only shows that they are not part of “what is said” in his “illocutionary” sense, which is just to say that they are not part of the “at issue” content of declaratives. Rather they are, according to him, part of “what is said” in his “locutionary” sense. But this just means that they are conventional, semantic in the sense that they need to be grasped for full competent understanding. This is part of current standard views on conventional implicatures, such as Potts’s. Hom ([15], 424–426; [17], 391–392) appears to have been misled by Bach’s suggestions in his criticisms of the conventional implicature view. Similarly, in his defense of a Conventional Implicature account Whiting ([44], 274–275) fails to properly take this point into consideration.

  4. 4.

    Ascriptions of propositional attitudes and speech acts are notoriously context-dependent; this explains the existential quantifications. In his interesting discussion of hybrid theories of evaluative terms, modeled on the views on pejoratives I am discussing, Schroeder [38, 39] places a strong emphasis on a distinction between hybrid expressions whose expressive content project even in attitude ascriptions, and those that do not. But, as [14] points out, these are not properties of expressions themselves: we can only trace tendencies here. Slurs tend to project in ascriptions, but, as the examples by Schlenker and others show, they do not always do so. Such tendencies are orthogonal to the divide between conventional implicatures and presuppositions. Quoting [1] (a work that he, unlike Hom – see previous fn. –appraises properly, cf. op. cit., 287–288, fn. 19), Schroeder shows that ‘but’ might well not project in some ascriptions; but, following [31], I am taking non-restrictive wh-clauses as paradigm cases of conventional implicatures, and they do typically project in attitude ascriptions: John said that Peter, who will be coming soon, is welcome to the party.

  5. 5.

    This is formally modeled as the “context set” – the set of possible worlds compatible with the presumed common knowledge of the participants. For present purposes, I take Lewis’ [25] model as a variant of the Stalnakerian model.

  6. 6.

    [2] provides a hybrid account of pejoratives and evaluative terms in the framework of “success” semantics, along the lines of the Davidsonian proposals in [22, 26]. This is compatible with the main claims I am making here. However, like Schlenker and Potts, Boisvert assumes a psychological expressivist, non-normative account of the non-declarative additional speech acts that his account posits, which make it in my view similarly inadequate. To illustrate: there clearly is a semantic tension between uttering ‘thank you for p!’ together with ‘shame on you for p!’, but this cannot be adequately captured by an account on which the sentences merely indicate that the utterer actually feels grateful and disappointed regarding p; for, of course, there is no inconsistency in having such feelings regarding the same situation ([2], 34). In contrast, an account on which the sentences indicate acts subject to norms such that for them to be correct the same situation is to be both worthy of gratitude and of indignation does capture the tension.

  7. 7.

    Likewise, [28] poses as the expressive presupposition of ‘chink’ that speakers in the context are willing to treat Chinese people with a certain kind of contempt, on account of being Chinese. This is better than Schlenker’s and Potts’ subjectivist proposals, but is still objectionable along the lines that I develop in the main text.

  8. 8.

    [36] offers a clear, short presentation of the idea.

  9. 9.

    It is a particularly revealing one, because it occurs in a paper that is otherwise admirably clear about the distinction between contents and forces; Schroeder’s ([39], 278–280) toy formal model is as clear as [12] when it comes to the proper articulation of meanings that, like expressive contents in my view, are propositions-cum-illocutionary forces.

  10. 10.

    The same can intuitively obtain in the opposite direction: the non-cognitive attitude/act (the command or the derogation) can occur, without the cognitive one (the belief/assertion that the command or the derogation takes place) taking place, because the thinker/speaker lacks the conceptual resources to describe the non-cognitive state/act. Hom deals with this apparent necessity-failure of his account by appealing to semantic externalism: semantically the equivalence obtains, even if ordinary speakers lack the resources to appreciate it.

  11. 11.

    The semantic externalism to which Hom appeals to deal with the apparent necessity-failure (see previous fn.) puts a strain on his appeal to conversational implicature to deal with this sufficiency-failure, because implicatures are supposed to be derivable. It is difficult to understand how ordinary speakers intuiting the allegedly implicatured condition – in our cases, the derogation of Chinese people, which is what everybody perceives in utterances of ‘there are too many Chinks in our neighborhood’ – can make the inferences, if they themselves lack the resources to articulate the content of Hom’s truth-conditional analysis.

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  1. LOGOS-Departament de Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Manuel García-Carpintero

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  1. Pierre and Marie Curie University , Paris, France

    Patrick Brézillon

  2. University of Maine , Orono, Maine, USA

    Roy Turner

  3. University of Genoa , Genoa, Italy

    Carlo Penco

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García-Carpintero, M. (2017). Pejoratives, Contexts and Presuppositions. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_2

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