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Slurring Words

Noûs 47 (1):25-48 (2011)

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  1. Slurring Perspectives.Elisabeth Camp - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):330-349.
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  • Slurs and Stereotypes.Robin Jeshion - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):314-329.
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  • Remarks on The Semantics of Racial Slurs.Adam M. Croom - 2014 - Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 13:11-32.
    In “The Semantics of Racial Slurs,” an article recently published in Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, Hedger draws upon Kaplan’s distinction between descriptive and expressive content to argue that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content. Here I review the key considerations presented by Hedger in support of his purely expressive account of slurs and provide clear reasons for why it must ultimately be rejected. After reviewing the key cases Hedger offers for consideration in support of his view that slurs are (...)
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  • Reference, Truth, and Biological Kinds.Marcel Weber - 2014 - In: J. Dutant, D. Fassio and A. Meylan (Eds.) Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel.
    This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...)
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  • It’s Not What You Said, It’s the Way You Said It: Slurs and Conventional Implicatures.Daniel Whiting - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):364-377.
    In this paper, I defend against a number of criticisms an account of slurs, according to which the same semantic content is expressed in the use of a slur as is expressed in the use of its neutral counterpart, while in addition the use of a slur conventionally implicates a negative, derogatory attitude. Along the way, I criticise competing accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of slurs, namely, Hom's 'combinatorial externalism' and Anderson and Lepore's 'prohibitionism'.
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  • Slurs.Adam M. Croom - 2011 - Language Sciences 33:343-358.
    Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur "nigger" is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act.. Indeed, the very taboo nature of these words makes discussion of them typically prohibited or frowned upon. Although it is true that the utterance of slurs is illegitimate and derogatory in (...)
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  • Paving the road to hell: The Spanish word menas as a case study.José Ramón Torices & David Bordonaba - 2021 - Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 84:47-62.
    Menas is a term that has attracted a great deal of attention on the political scene in Spain at present. Although the term had a neutral usage originally, being an acronym for unaccompanied foreign minors, it has recently evolved into a term with clear negative connotations. This article explores what kind of term menas is today. Specifically, we will examine whether menas is a slur or an ESTI, an ethnic/social term used as an insult. First, we point out the most (...)
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  • Meaning in Derogatory Social Practices.Mühlebach Deborah - 2023 - Theoria 89 (4):495–515.
    Verbal derogation is not only a linguistic but also, and perhaps more importantly, a political phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that to do justice to the political relevance of derogatory terms, we must not neglect the social practices and structures in which the use of these terms is embedded. I aim to show that inferentialist semantics is especially helpful to account for this social embeddedness and, consequently, the political relevance of derogatory terms. I am concerned with specifying the linguistic (...)
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  • Rethinking Slurs: A Case Against Neutral Counterparts and the Introduction of Referential Flexibility.Alice Damirjian - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 28 (3):650-671.
    Slurs are pejorative expressions that derogate individuals or groups on the basis of their gender, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation and so forth. In the constantly growing literature on slurs, it has become customary to appeal to so-called “neutral counterparts” for explaining the extension and truth-conditional content of slurring terms. More precisely, it is commonly assumed that every slur shares its extension and literal content with a non-evaluative counterpart term. I think this assumption is unwarranted and, in this paper, I (...)
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  • A metapragmatic stereotype‐based account of reclamation.Nicolás Lo Guercio & Fernando Carranza - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    Group‐based slurs are words that express derogatory attitudes toward some group demarcated by a property that has historically caused social antagonism, for example, gender or ethnicity, among others. Reclamation, in turn, is the process whereby a slur starts being used non‐derogatorily by members of the target group to express a positive attitude. Some content‐based theories of slurs (which pin the derogatory force of such terms on their conventional meaning) account for reclamation by arguing that it involves a change in meaning (...)
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  • Reclamation and Authorization: Cepollaro and Lopez de Sa on in-group Restriction.Pasi Valtonen - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (2):463-473.
    It is generally thought that the reclamation of slurs is restricted to the in-group. Bianca Cepollaro and Dan Lopez de Sa challenge this assumption by presenting cases in which slurs are successfully reclaimed by members of out-groups. I agree with the idea that the out-groups often participate in reclamation. In this paper, I present a view which accommodates the fact that sometimes out-groups successfully reclaim slurs. At the same time, the view preserves the central role of the in-group in reclamation.
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  • The semantics of deadnames.Taylor Koles - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (4):715-739.
    Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic (...)
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  • El blanco y la extensión de los epítetos.Axel Arturo Barceló - manuscript
    Este breve ensayo se inscribe en la tradición de buscar similitudes entre los epítetos y otros fenómenos lingüísticos, tanto inofensivos como discriminatorios. En particular, trataré de motivar la introducción de una distinción entre el blanco de un epíteto y su extensión y mostraré cómo esta distinción nos sirve para ver similitudes entre el comportamiento de este tipo de expresiones y el del complemento “de verdad” en expresiones como “tacos de verdad”. De paso, trataré también de explorar si estas teorías, desarrolladas (...)
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  • Slurs in quarantine.Bianca Cepollaro, Simone Sulpizio, Claudia Bianchi & Isidora Stojanovic - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (3):381-396.
    We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the perceived offensiveness without removing it. For slurs, but not insults, indirect speech is perceived as more offensive than direct speech. Our (...)
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  • The Politics of Language.David Beaver & Jason Stanley - 2023 - Princeton University Press.
    A provocative case for the inherently political nature of language In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on (...)
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  • Slurs and thick terms: When language encodes values.Bianca Cepollaro - 2023 - Pragmatics and Cognition 30 (1):209-211.
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  • Slurs and the Fact/Value Divide.Rose Ryan Flinn - manuscript
    Theories of slurs mostly fall into two camps. According to conjunctivists, uses of slurs conventionally perform two distinct speech acts. The first is a non-derogatory act of referring to a kind, and the second is a non-referential act of derogation. The first act is also performed by their neutral counterparts. Minimalists, by contrast, think that uses of slurs conventionally perform the non-derogatory act of referring associated with their neutral counterparts, and that it all. I argue against both these approaches, by (...)
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  • The Spectrum of Particularistic Insults.Víctor Carranza-Pinedo - manuscript
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  • Slurs' variability, emotional dimensions, and game-theoretic pragmatics.Víctor Carranza-Pinedo - 2023 - In D. Bekki, K. Mineshima & E. McCready (eds.), Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics. LENLS 2022. Springer.
    Slurs’ meaning is highly unstable. A slurring utterance like ‘Hey, F, where have you been?’ (where F is a slur) may receive a wide array of interpretations depending on various contextual factors such as the speaker’s social identity, their relationship to the target group, tone of voice, and more. Standard semantic, pragmatic, and non-content theories of slurs have proposed different mechanisms to account for some or all types of variability observed, but without providing a unified framework that allows us to (...)
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  • Towards a Fregean psycholinguistics.Thorsten Sander - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.
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  • Offending by mentioning.Adam Sennet & David Copp - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    1. Anderson and Lepore (2013) argue that the offensiveness of slur terms can’t consist (merely?) in their having derogatory meanings because even quotation marks fail to prevent offence being cause...
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  • Virtue Ethics in Social Theory.J. L. A. Garcia - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4):329-340.
    Tommie Shelby has offered an influential, carefully stated, and well-argued set of objections to any volitional analysis of racism (VAR) as consisting centrally in certain forms of race-based disregard. Here I hope to defend aspects of VAR by analyzing, evaluating, and sometimes countering several of his major contentions, which have stood unchallenged in the literature over more than two decades. First, I sketch and respond to his Methodological objection to VAR, which criticizes VAR's reliance on language and linguistic intuitions; then (...)
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  • Sociolinguistic variation, slurs, and speech acts.Ethan Nowak - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances realized by means of (...)
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  • Logical mechanisms of tabooing discourse.Wojciech Krysztofiak - forthcoming - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics:1-25.
    The paper presents the semantic model of logical content processing in the environment of tabooed sentences. Such sentences occur both in academic and colloquial discourses. They can be interpreted as infected formulas with the value of an insult. The proposed model assumes that the inferential mechanism of argumentative activities realised in discourses in the environment of such formulas is based on Bochvar's logical matrices and Kripke’s possible worlds semantic structures. This mechanism is determined by semantic consequence operators of three types. (...)
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  • Meaning without content: on the metasemantics of register.Thorsten Sander - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...)
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  • Generic inferential rules for slurs and contrasting senses.Pasi Valtonen - 2022 - Theoria 88 (5):1037-1052.
    This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between slurring terms and their neutral counterparts with an inferentialist view of slurs. I argue that slurs and their counterparts are coextensional with contrasting senses. Crucially, the proposed inferentialist view overcomes the combination of two challenges: Kaplanian inferences and the substitution argument. The previous views cannot account for both of them.
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  • Inferentialist semantics for lexicalized social meanings.Leopold Hess - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-22.
    This paper offers a general model of the semantics of lexicalized social meanings, i.e. semiotic properties of certain expressions in a socio-political context. Examples include slurs, problematically charged expressions such as inner city, as well as terms such as mother, which also carry implicit ideological associations. Insofar as their linguistic properties are concerned, social meanings can be construed as context-structuring devices: without introducing specific at-issue contents, they evoke background assumptions which shape the context of conversation. An inferentialist model of discourse (...)
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  • Epistemic Slurs: A Novel Explicandum and Adequacy Constraint for Slur Theories.Adam Patterson - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):2029-2046.
    I argue that there are slurs that are distinctly derogatory insofar as they only derogate their target’s epistemic faculties or capacities qua group member. I call these slurs epistemic slurs. Given that slur theories should explain the derogatory nature of all slurs, any comprehensive slur theory should be able to explain the derogatory nature of the epistemic slurs. I argue, however, that two particular expressivist theories of slurs cannot explain their distinctive derogatory nature. The epistemic slurs thus constitute a novel (...)
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  • The Duality of Moral Language : On Hybrid Theories in Metaethics.Stina Björkholm - 2022 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    Moral language displays a characteristic duality. On the one hand, moral claims seem to be similar to descriptive claims: To say that an act is right seems to be a matter of making an assertion, thus indicating that the speaker has a moral belief about which she can be correct or mistaken. On the other hand, moral claims seem to be different from descriptive claims: There is a sense in which, by claiming that an act is right, a speaker indicates (...)
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  • Las filósofas que nos formaron: injusticias, retos y posibilidades en la filosofía.Aurora Georgina Bustos Arellano & Mayra Jocelin Martínez Martínez - 2022 - Monterrey, Nuevo León, México: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León.
    Este es un libro que nace de nuestro compromiso por señalar las contribuciones de las filósofas a partir de la pregunta vital: ¿Quiénes nos formaron? Como resultado, se presenta este diálogo a doce voces; reunidas para dialogar, desde distintos lugares en América Latina, sobre nuestra formación teórica, profesional y humana desde una plataforma equitativa y franca. Concebido, en medio de la pandemia por SARS-CoV-2, queremos construir un espacio abierto a nuevas ideas, propuestas e identidades en la Filosofía. Más aún, queremos (...)
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  • Objectionable Commemorations, Historical Value, and Repudiatory Honouring.Ten-Herng Lai - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (1):37-47.
    Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or (...)
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  • Focus on slurs.Poppy Mankowitz & Ashley Shaw - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):693-710.
    Slurring expressions display puzzling behaviour when embedded, such as under negation and in attitude and speech reports. They frequently appear to retain their characteristic qualities, like offensiveness and propensity to derogate. Yet it is sometimes possible to understand them as lacking these qualities. A theory of slurring expressions should explain this variability. We develop an explanation that deploys the linguistic notion of focus. Our proposal is that a speaker can conversationally implicate metalinguistic claims about the aptness of a focused slurring (...)
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  • Hate Speech.Luvell Anderson & Michael Randall Barnes - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    -/- Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does the ‘hate’ in (...)
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  • Slurs, Synonymy, and Taboo.Y. Sandy Berkovski - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):423-439.
    The ‘prohibitionist’ idea that slurs have the same linguistic properties as their neutral counterparts hasn’t received much support in the literature. Here I offer a modified version of prohibitionism, according to which the taboo on using slurs is part of their conventional meaning. I conclude with explanations of the behaviour of slurs in embedded constructions.
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  • Who Reclaims Slurs?Bianca Cepollaro & Dan López de Sa - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):606-619.
    Reclamation is usually taken to be the phenomenon wherein in-groups employ a slur to express pride, foster camaraderie, or subvert discriminatory structures. We provide data showing that, under some special circumstances, out-groups successfully reclaim slurs too. Thus, the mainstream restriction to in-groups is merely an approximation of the correct extension of the phenomenon – of who does actually reclaim slurs. Removing any such stipulative restriction opens a path towards further theorizing into the nature of reclamation.
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  • Slurs and Redundancy.Y. Sandy Berkovski - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (4):1607-1622.
    According to nearly all theorists writing on the subject, a certain derogatory content is regularly and systematically communicated by slurs. So united, the theorists disagree sharply on the elements of this content, on its provenance, and on its mechanism. I argue that the basic premiss of all these views, that there is any such derogatory content conveyed with the use of slurs, is highly dubious.
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  • The Derogatory Force and the Offensiveness of Slurs.Chang Liu - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 28 (3):626–649.
    Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...)
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  • Peyorativos de Grupo y Discurso de Odio.Nicolás Lo Guercio - 2021 - Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 62 (150):747-776.
    ABSTRACT The article advances a multidimensional semantics for slurs, according to which they express a standard at-issue content along with a conventional implicature. By contrast with existent conventional implicature accounts (McCready, 2010), it is argued that the not at-issue content of slurs is a property, instead of a proposition. When complemented with a dynamic pragmatic framework (Portner, 2004), the view implies that an utterance containing a slur carries two different discursive functions, that is, it updates two different components of context: (...)
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  • Of Witches and White Folks.Daniel Wodak - 2021 - Wiley: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):587-605.
    A central debate in philosophy of race is between eliminativists and conservationists about what we ought do with ‘race’ talk. ‘Eliminativism’ is often defined such that it’s committed to holding that (a) ‘race’ is vacuous and races don’t exist, so (b) we should eliminate the term ‘race’ from our vocabulary. As a stipulative definition, that’s fine. But as an account of one of the main theoretical options in the debate, it’s a serious mistake. I offer three arguments for why eliminativism (...)
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  • Semantic Dimensions of Slurs.Arthur Sullivan - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (3):1479-1493.
    I plot accounts of slurs on a [semanticist – non-semanticist] spectrum, and then I give some original arguments in favor of semanticist approaches. Two core, related pro-semanticist considerations which animate this work are: first, that the pejorative dimension of a slur is non-cancellable; and, second, that ignorance of the pejorative dimension should be counted as ignorance of literal, linguistic meaning, as opposed to a mistake about conditions for appropriate usage. I bolster these considerations via cases in which slurs are embedded (...)
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  • Words in Motion: Slurs in Indirect Report.Maria Paola Tenchini - 2021 - Gestalt Theory 43 (2):153-166.
    Summary Slurs are pejorative epithets that express negative attitudes toward a class of individuals sharing the same race, country of origin, sexual orientation, religion, and the like. The aim of this paper is to show what happens in communication when slurs are reported. It focuses on the derogatory content of such expressions and on the persistence of their performative effects in reported speech. In this respect, the question concerning the attribution of responsibility for the derogatory content conveyed by the slurs (...)
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  • Slurs under quotation.Stefan Rinner & Alexander Hieke - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1483-1494.
    Against content theories of slurs, according to which slurs have some kind of derogatory content, Anderson and Lepore have objected that they cannot explain that even slurs under quotation can cause offense. If slurs had some kind of derogatory content, the argument goes, quotation would render this content inert and, thus, quoted slurs should not be offensive. Following this, Anderson and Lepore propose that slurs are offensive because they are prohibited words. In this paper, we will show that, pace Anderson (...)
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  • Dynamic Expressivism about Deontic Modality.William B. Starr - 2016 - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 355-394.
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  • Exactly Why Are Slurs Wrong?Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 84:13-29.
    This article, part of a special issue on 'Expressing Hatred', seeks to provide a comprehensive and fundamental account of why racial epithets and similar slurs are immoral, whenever they are. It considers three major theories, roughly according to which they are immoral because they are harmful (welfarism), because they undermine autonomy (Kantianism), or because they are unfriendly (an under-considered, relational approach informed by ideas from the Global South). This article presents new objections to the former two theories, and concludes in (...)
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  • Slurs and Expressive Commitments.Leopold Hess - 2020 - Acta Analytica 36 (2):263-290.
    Most accounts of the derogatory meaning of slurs are semantic. Recently, Nunberg proposed a purely pragmatic account offering a compelling picture of the relation between derogatory content and social context. Nunberg posits that the semantic content of slurs is identical to that of neutral counterparts, and that derogation is a result of the association of slur use with linguistic conventions of bigoted speakers. The mechanism responsible for it is a special kind of conversational implicature. However, this paper argues that Nunberg’s (...)
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  • Meaning and Emotion: The Extended Gricean Model and What Emotional Signs Mean.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Geneva and University of Antwerp
    This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...)
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  • What’s wrong with dogwhistles.Carlos Santana - 2022 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (3):387-403.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 3, Page 387-403, Fall 2022.
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  • Slurs as ballistic speech.Richard P. Stillman - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6827-6843.
    Slurs are words with a well-known tendency to conjure up painful memories and experiences in members of their target communities. Owing to this tendency, it’s widely agreed that one ought to exercise considerable care when even mentioning a slur, so as to avoid needlessly inflicting distressing associations on members of the relevant group. This paper argues that this tendency to evoke distressing associations is precisely what makes slurs impactful verbal weapons. According to the ballistic theory, slurs make such potent insults (...)
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  • Linguistic Disobedience.David Miguel Gray & Benjamin Lennertz - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (21):1-16.
    There has recently been a flurry of activity in the philosophy of language on how to best account for the unique features of epithets. One of these features is that epithets can be appropriated (that is, the offense-grounding potential of a term can be removed). We argue that attempts to appropriate an epithet fundamentally involve a violation of language-governing rules. We suggest that the other conditions that make something an attempt at appropriation are the same conditions that characterize acts of (...)
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  • Conversational Disgust and Social Oppression.George Tsai - 2021 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 48 (1):89-104.
    In recent years, philosophers have begun to uncover the role played by verbal conduct in generating oppressive social structures. I examine the oppressive illocutionary uses, and perlocutionary effects, of expressives: speech acts that are not truth-apt, merely expressing attitudes, such as desires, preferences, and emotions. Focusing on expressions of disgust in conversation, I argue for two claims: that expressions of disgust can activate in the local, conversational context the oppressive power of the underlying structures of oppression; that conversational expressions of (...)
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