Abstract
In virtue of what does a linguistic act count as an insult? I discuss five main approaches to this question, according to which an insult is determined by (i) the semantic properties of the expression used; (ii) the insulter, her intention, or attitudes; (iii) the addressee and her personal standard; (iv) the features of the speech act performed; and (v) the standard of the relevant social group. I endorse the last, objectivist account, according to which an act x counts as an insult if and only if x is assessed as demeaning when addressed at A by the standard of the relevant social group at t.
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Notes
Some theorists use “insult” to refer to a property of terms. Thus, Hom (2010), DiFranco (2014), and Bolinger (2015), among others, consider insults to be a subset of pejoratives, reserving “offense” to describe a property of acts. Such a distinction is not always used consistently. As I will focus entirely on the property of act, I will use “insult” and “offense” interchangeably, as well as the related verb phrases and adjectives.
See Neu 2008: pp. 6–10. In Bolinger’s terminology (2015: p. 3), the relevant distinction is between the actual and the warranted offense, respectively.
Commonly, the subject expresses when being in such a state, although nothing here hinges on it.
See Ryle 1949: pp. 130, 149–153.
The name he is generally referred to by the literary critics.
There is a remaining possibility that Zverkov took an insult but did not express it due to his higher social standing. In order to draw the relevant distinction, I leave this possibility aside.
For Hom, “chink” expresses a complex property, such as “ought to be subject to higher college admissions standards, and ought to be subject to exclusion from advancement to managerial positions, and…, because of being slanty-eyed, and devious, and good-at-laundering, and…, all because of being Chinese” (Hom 2010: p. 180).
Again, I do not assume that Hom or other semantic theorists had this intention. Instead, I discuss Hom’s proposal as a starting point in building an otherwise plausible candidate for a theory of insult.
Arguably, not every ignorance is excusable: one may insist that there are contexts in which the speaker should know that certain act would be deemed insulting (cf. Bolinger 2015: p. 11).
Jeshion (2013: p. 331 n. 15) remarks that not even all slurs have neutral counterparts, citing “Gook,” used to refer to Korean and Vietnamese people, as one such example.
This notion of standard does a double duty: it tells us both whether an act x satisfies the sufficient degree to be called insulting in the first place, as well as whether x is more insulting than another act y.
On this analysis, [[insulting]]j,w = (λx. [λx. x appears insulting for the agent j in w). Note, however, that the subjectivist is not committed to the relativist twist concerning changes within intra-personal assessment. For example, if one finds x tasty at t1 but changes her mind at t2, the relativist insist that the relevant assessment is the latter one, obliging the subject to retract her original assertion (MacFarlane 2014: pp. 108–111, 306). In my opinion, the subjectivist about insults has sufficient argumentative maneuvers to avoid the relativist dictum here.
Thanks to the anonymous referee who suggested this maneuver to me.
For further sources on linking insults to natural selection, see Progovac and Locke (2009).
I leave the possibility that some insulting acts may be considered as speech acts of their own, such as slurring (Anderson and Lepore 2013: pp. 351–352).
Searle (1979, ix) only mentions this in passing, without actually advocating this view. In fact, he speaks of insinuation and hinting, rather than insults. I am here only taking his reference to construct a possible approach. I opted for this name in analogy with a view concerning perceptual content.
I read Anderson and Lepore’s (2013) prohibitionism as advancing an objectivist proposal: since slurs and other pejoratives are prohibited words in a given society, by using them one violates the prohibition and thus generates offense.
For the purposes of the paper, I do not wish to commit myself to any view concerning group beliefs, although the proposal resembles the inflationist view advocated by Schmitt (1994).
Although it is possible to use slurs in a non-demeaning way, I here presuppose a typical case of slurring.
Austin (1970:133) held that “to say that you are a cuckold may be to insult you, but it is also and at the same time to make a statement which is true or false” (see also Neu (2008: pp. 17–18)).
Although this might be suggested by the phrase “demeaning to the addressee,” we are not interested in whether the addressee finds herself demeaned by the act. Instead, the stress is on “socially considered.”
The example is adapted from Scorsese’s Goodfellas.
See: https://web.archive.org/web/20110221124434/http://current.com/news-and-politics/88877763_dutch-man-jailed-for-insulting-the-queen.htm. Accessed on April 5, 2018.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Manuel García-Carpintero, Javier González de Prado Salas, Anton Markoč, Neri Marsili, Mihaela Popa, and David Rey for their comments on earlier versions of the paper.
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Milić, I. “What Counts as an Insult?”. Acta Anal 33, 539–552 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0353-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0353-8