Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A (...) slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created. (shrink)

The paper argues that colouring is a conventional ingredient of literal meaning characterized by a considerable degree of semantic under-determination and a high degree of context-sensitivity. The positive, though tentative, suggestion made in the paper is that whereas in the case of words such as "but" and "damn" we are dealing with words lacking in specificity, in the case of pejoratives in general, and racist jargon in particular, we are dealing with words that express concepts that purport to describe the (...) world as being in a certain way. The circumstance that in certain contexts of utterance colouring can be cancelled out, does not show that it forms a detachable part of a word's literal meaning. It only shows that to account for the interplay between context, literal meaning and assertoric content is much trickier than meets the eye. (shrink)

There are at least three well-known accounts of value and evaluations which assign a central role to emotions. There is first of all the emotivist view, according to which evaluations express or manifest emotional states or attitudes but have no truth values. Second is the dispositionalist view, according to which to possess a value or axiological property is to be capable of provoking or to be likely to provoke emotional responses in subjects characterised in certain ways. Third, there is an (...) epistemology of values that is sometimes invoked by the naïve realist. If the naïve realist is one for whom evaluations are made true by the possession by objects of monadic, mind-independent axiological properties, then one natural question is: What sort of cognitive access do we have to such properties? These value properties, the realist may say, are properties we come to know of by virtue of our emotions. Emotions, he may say, present value properties to us. One variant of this view is the claim that values are the "formal objects" of emotions. Closely related to these claims is the view that our emotions are appropriate to value properties, or not. Indignation and injustice, it is sometimes said, are related in one or more of these three ways. (shrink)

I here present two different models of oppressive speech. My interest is not in how speech can cause oppression, but in how speech can actually be an act of oppression. As we shall see, a particular type of speech act, the exercitive, enacts permissibility facts. Since oppressive speech enacts permissibility facts that oppress, speech must be exercitive in order for it to be an act of oppression. In what follows, I distinguish between two sorts of exercitive speech acts (the standard (...) exercitive and the covert exercitive) and I argue that each such exercitive affords a distinct model of oppressive speech. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new (i.e., previously overlooked) breed of exercitive speech act (the conversational exercitive). I establish that any conversational contribution that invokes a rule of accommodation changes the bounds of conversational permissibility and is therefore an (indirect) exercitive speech act. Such utterances enact permissibility facts without expressing the content of such facts, without the speaker intending to be enacting such facts and without the hearer recognizing that it is so. Because of the peculiar nature ofthe rules (...) of accommodation that generate them, conversational exercitives have importantly different felicity conditions and therefore constitute a new breed ofexercitive speech act. (shrink)

Williams explains why there might have been some point to a linguistic approach in ethics. I suggest that there might be some point to paying attention to an ethical dimension in philosophy of language. I shall consider words that I label ‘derogatory’, and questions they raise about linguistic meaning.

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism. CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, (...) the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection. (shrink)

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...) the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)

There are various proposals for a general characterization of holism1. In this paper I propose the following: a variety of holism is the view that every X of an appropriate kind, which is part of a relevant whole W, cannot be legitimately separated or taken in isolation from W. Then, I distinguish two general kinds of holism, depending on two different reasons which can debar us from taking X in isolation from W. One reason can be that separating X from (...) W always amounts to transforming X into something else. Correspondingly, a strong holism is the view that if the whole W is modified anywhere, X ceases to be X and becomes something else. Another reason why it may be illegitimate to consider X in isolation from W can be that if we separate X from W, nothing that we know entitles us to exclude that X might be transformed into something else. Correspondingly, virtual holism is the view that if the whole W is modified anywhere, we can never rule out that X ceases to be X and becomes something else. (shrink)

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is..

Two opposing tendencies in the philosophy of language go by the names of ‘referentialism’ and ‘inferentialism’ respectively. In the crudest version of the contrast, the referentialist account of meaning gives centre stage to the referential semantics for a language, which is then used to explain the inference rules for the language, perhaps as those which preserve truth on that semantics (since a referential semantics for a language determines the truth-conditions of its sentences). By contrast, the inferentialist account of meaning gives (...) centre stage to the inference rules for the language, which are then used to explain its referential semantics, perhaps as the semantics on which the rules preserve truth. On pain of circularity, we cannot combine both directions of explanation. (shrink)

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum (...) disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker explores the contexts in which speech takes place, the ways we represent them, and the roles they play in explaining the interpretation and dynamics of speech. His central thesis is the autonomy of pragmatics: the independence of theory about structure and function of discourse from theory about mechanisms serving those functions.

This paper argues that racist speech in public places ought to be regulable even with teh strict free speech protections of the First Amendment. McGowan argues that the same justification for regulating the hanging of a 'Whites Only' sign applies to racist utterances in public spaces.

Abstract In the last fifteen years philosophers and linguists have turned their attention to slurs: derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. This interest is due to the fact that, on the one hand, slurs possess puzzling linguistic properties; on the other hand, the questions they pose are related to other crucial issues, such as the descriptivism/expressivism divide, the semantics/pragmatics divide and, generally speaking, the theory of meaning. Despite these (...) recent investigations about pejoratives, there is no widely accepted explanation of slurs:in my paper I consider the intuitions we have about slurs and I assess the difficulties that the main theories encounter in explaining how these terms work in order to identify the phenomena that a satisfactory account of slurs needs to explain. Then, I focus on the pragmatic theories that deal with the notions of conventional implicature and pragmatic presupposition: I assess the objections that have been raised and I propose two ways of defending the presuppositional account, taking into consideration the notion of cancellability. I will claim that the reason why most pragmatic strategies seem to fail to account for slurs is that they assume a rigid divide between conventional implicatures and presuppositions that should not be taken for granted. Reconsidering the relationship between these two notions gives a hint about how a pragmatic account of slurs should look like. Finally, I assess the problem of which presupposition slurs in fact trigger. (shrink)

This chapter considers whether ordinary instances of racist hate speech can be authoritative, thereby constituting the subordination of people of color. It is often said that ordinary speakers cannot subordinate because they lack authority. Here it is argued that there are more ways in which speakers can come to have authority than have been generally recognized. In part, this is because authority has been taken to be too closely tied to social position. This chapter presents a series of examples which (...) show that speaker authority needn’t derive from social position at all. Moreover, these examples also show that a speaker can come to have authority even when they lack it prior to speaking. After distinguishing these different ways in which speakers can come to have authority, it is argued that there is ample reason to think that even producers of ordinary instances of racist hate speech can sometimes have authority in these ways. (shrink)

Keith Donnellan wrote his paper on definite descriptions in 1966 at Cornell University, an environment where nearly everybody was discussing Wittgenstein’s ideas of meaning as use. However, his idea of different uses of definite descriptions became one of the fundamental tenets against descriptivism, which was considered one of the main legacies of the Frege–Russell– Wittgenstein view; and I wonder whether a more Wittgensteinian interpretation of Donnellan’s work is possible.