Abstracts

Pejoratives: How the Analogy with Fiction Breaks Down

Teresa Marques University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona

In the Renaissance, Italian artists referred pejoratively to the art and architecture of the north of Europe as ‘Gothic’, i.e., as barbaric art worthy of contempt. ‘Gothic’ was still a pejorative for later French authors such as Molière and Rousseau. This paper uses ‘Gothic’ in the place of other current pejorative terms for ethnically salient groups. Using ‘Gothic’ allows us to focus on a word that apparently refers to the same things now as it did in the Renaissance (the same buildings, paintings, sculptures, etc.), which was then a pejorative, but has not been one for more than a century. It allows us also to be detached in our appreciation of theories of pejorative discourse.

This paper’s goal is to assess Hom and May (2013, 2015)’s theory of pejorative discourse. Hom & May claim that pejoratives express complex socially constructed, negative properties determined by causal external relations to racist institutions. A consequence of this semantic analysis, they believe, is that pejoratives have null extensions. Hom and May (2015) make an analogy with fictional discourse to illustrate the claim that pejoratives are empty. As they say,

Fictional terms are terms that have null extensions, and in this regard pejorative terms are a species of fictional terms: although there are Jews, there are no kikes. (Hom and May, 2015, 1)

‘Kikes’, they claim, are like ‘unicorn’ or ‘Sherlock Holmes’. As a result, declarative sentences containing fictional names are actually false, although they are meaningful. Fictional propositions, propositions expressed by sentences that contain fictional terms, are essentially inapt for material truth. However, Hom and May (2015)’s appeal to fiction is misleading.

Bonomi (2008) distinguishes between three kinds of fictional discourse:

Textual Sentences which are part of the text itself. E.g.: Sherlock Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with me. (Doyle (2008))

Paratextual Sentences by means of which we can state something true (or false) on the basis of the story narrated. E.g.: According to Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with Dr. Watson.

Metatextual Sentences used to make true statements in the context of the real world. E.g.: R. G. Collingwood believed that Hercule Poirot was a better detective than Sherlock Holmes (Peter Ghosh (2006))

The fictional analogy breaks down. Even if we regard ideologies analogously to fictions, it doesn’t follow that declarative sentences that use pejorative terms whose meanings are dependent on existing ideologies are like textual fictional sentences. If pejoratives have such a prescriptive character, as Hom & May claim, and if these characters externally depend on ideologies to yield semantic contents, sentences with pejoratives are like paratextual and metatextual fictional sentences: sentences by means of which we can state something true (or false) on the basis of a given social practice and ideology. Adopting an externalist ‘semantically innocent’ view of pejoratives does not entail that by their use one cannot state truths. This paper concludes with an exploration of possible ways in which social ideologies themselves can be thought of as textual fictional discourse.