Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T07:30:44.745Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Insults

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

HELEN L. DALY Open the ORCID record for HELEN L. DALY [Opens in a new window]
HELEN L. DALY*
Affiliation:
COLORADO [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Some bemoan the incivility of our times, while others complain that people have grown too quick to take offense. There is widespread disagreement about what counts as an insult and when it is appropriate to feel insulted. Here I propose a definition and a preliminary taxonomy of insults. Namely, I define insults as expressions of a lack of due regard. And I categorize insults by whether they are intended or unintended, acts or omissions, and whether they cause offense or not. Unintended insults are of particular concern since greater understanding may help us to avoid them. And insults by omission warrant special consideration because they suggest an interesting extension of Grice's theory of conversational implicature.

Keywords

impolitenesspragmaticsimplicatureomissionsmeaning
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , Winter 2018 , pp. 510 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am very grateful to all the participants in the 2015 ECOM workshop (Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning) at the University of Connecticut, and especially Mitch Green who insisted upon a point and was right, and Bianca Cepollaro whose insightful objection reshaped the project in its infancy. Thanks also, to my delightful, helpful audiences at the 2016 Colorado College Fall Conference, the 2016 Mountain Plains Philosophy Conference, and at my colloquium lectures at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and at Colorado College. I enjoyed your questions and your insults, and this paper is better for both. I am grateful to the Dean's Office and the HEC at Colorado College, which provided financial support for the project, and to my departmental colleagues for their unflagging encouragement and intellectual support. Finally, thanks to those friends and colleagues who have generously read drafts of this essay or otherwise thought deeply about insults with me: Laura Bernhardt, Jacob Daly, Jason Gutierrez, Nicole Hassoun, Paul Hurtado, Marc Johansen, Marjan Moshayedi, J. P. Rosensweig, Amanda Udis-Kessler, Jeff Watson, and Sam White. To anyone I have inadvertently left out, I am sorry for the slight.

References

Adams, Robert M. (1977) Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Aristotle., (1991) The Art of Rhetoric. Translated by Lawson-Tancred, H. C.. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Aristotle., (1984a) ‘Rhetoric’. Translated by Rhys Roberts, W.. In Barnes, Jonathan (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 2152–2269.Google Scholar
Aristotle., (1984b) ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. Translated by Ross, W. D. and Urmson, J. O.. In Barnes, Jonathan (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1729–1867.Google Scholar
Buss, Sarah. (1999) ‘Appearing Respectful: The Moral Significance of Manners’. Ethics, 109, 795–826.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Cheshire. (2000) ‘The Virtue of Civility’. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29, 251–75.Google Scholar
Camp, Elisabeth. (2017) ‘Why Metaphors Make Good Insults: Perspectives, Presuppositions, and Pragmatics’. Philosophical Studies, 174, 47–64.Google Scholar
Camp, Elisabeth. (2018) ‘Insinuation, Common Ground, and the Conversational Record’. In Fogal, D., Harris, D., and Moss, M. (eds.), New Work in Speech Acts (New York: Oxford University Press), 40–66.Google Scholar
Conley, Thomas. (2010) Toward a Rhetoric of Insult. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. (2011) Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, Haugh, Michael, and Kádár, Dániel Z., eds. (2017) The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Deonna, Julien A., Rodogno, Raffaele, and Teroni, Fabrice. (2012) In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. (1975) ‘Logic and Conversation’. In Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press), 41–58.Google Scholar
Herzberg, Max, ed. (1941) Insults: A Practical Anthology of Scathing Remarks and Acid Portraits. New York: Greystone Press.Google Scholar
Khader, Serene. (2011) Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Khader, Serene. (2012) ‘Must Theorizing about Adaptive Preferences Deny Women's Agency?’ Journal of Applied Philosophy, 29, 302–17.Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. (1973) ‘The Logic of Politeness; Or, Minding your Ps and Qs’. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1973, 292–305.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. (2014) The Pragmatics of Politeness. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Neu, Jerome. (2008) Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. ([1887] 2007) The Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Ansell-Pearson, Keith, translated by Diethe, Carol. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rosch, Elizabeth. (1973) ‘On the Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories’. In Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language (New York: Academic Press), 111–44.Google Scholar
Royal Shakespeare Company. (2013) Mr. William Shakespeare's Insult Generator. http://insult.dream40.org/. Accessed July 21, 2018.Google Scholar
Safian, Louis. (1983) The Giant Book of Insults. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books.Google Scholar
Sherman, Nancy. (2005) ‘Of Manners and Morals’. British Journal of Educational Studies, 53, 272–89.Google Scholar