Robert May

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328 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2015 last heard Jun 2015

Robert May’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 72: Robert May discusses pejorative expressions · 25 Jun 2015 podcast

And if you take the same sentence and just substitute kike for Jew, it could be false.

So when we try to say whether a given sentence is true that contains one of these words, that there is moral content, there's a moral evaluative dimension to saying whether it is true or false.

Oh, I think there's all sorts of words in our language that are morally charged.

Um and you know, we can go to the classic discussions of good and bad.

I mean, whether those have moral content or not.

But these I think the whole point about sort of the exercise that we're that my co-author and I, Chris Hom, have undertaken, is to try and stake out a particular semantic space which these words occupy.

So yeah, so there is a particular type of meaning that'll go along with pejoratives.

And it's the one which I gave a moment ago as x ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation all because of being a member

of a certain group.

Now, I mean one of the things you said, I I think you were implying, correct me if I'm wrong, is an issue about what's the notion of being a group here.

And I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about what constitutes a group, and maybe we'll come back to that in a moment.

Okay.

If we have a sentence which contains a pejorative word.

that word has this meaning and that meaning presumably determines some reference.

So if we take it to mean X ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation all because of being a Jew, that concept has a null extension.

There's nobody who ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation just because they belong to a group.

That's just not something which is morally evaluable.

Those terms, the pejarov, the classic, or pejard terms in general, like kaike, nigger, queer, whatever they might be, there's no one who are those such things.

So we have a view which is called the view of moral innocence.

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