Cepollaro skillfully bridges two otherwise distinct subfields of philosophy; she brings work on slur terms from the philosophy of language into direct contact with meta-ethical debates about thick evaluative terms. The result is more than just an enhancement of each subfield; it is a testament to the fruitfulness of such inter-subfield exploration. Cepollaro offers us a nuanced, beautifully-defended unified account of hybrid evaluatives. The book is clear, detailed, empirically-informed, and thorough; it also provides insight into such hot topics as propaganda, hate speech, and reclamation; this book rewards its reader throughout.

Mary Kate McGowan, Wellesley College

In recent years, philosophy of language has taken a pragmatic turn, focusing on communication in political and socially significant contexts, and generally on the semantics and pragmatics of moral, aesthetic, and broadly evaluative discourse. Bianca Cepollaro’s remarkable book, Slurs and Thick Terms: When Language Encodes Values, is an important contribution to this growing literature in applied philosophy of language. This book offers a robust defense of an account of a subclass of evaluatives: slurs and thick terms. On the hybrid semantic account offered, these evaluative terms have a descriptive truth-conditional content, and presuppose values as if they were common ground. Cepollaro gives a meticulous analysis of the presuppositional behavior of these expressions with respect to projection and rejection, while illustrating the dynamics of their use in concrete contexts of propaganda and hate speech. She also convincingly shows that the hybrid evaluative semantic theory she develops is preferable to truth-conditional and to deflationary accounts of slurs and thick terms.

Teresa Marques, University of Barcelona