Switch to: Citations

Add references

You must login to add references.
  1. Slurs and register: A case study in meaning pluralism.Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Chang Liu & Robert J. Stainton - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (2):156-182.
    Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Code Words in Political Discourse.Justin Khoo - 2017 - Philosophical Topics 45 (2):33-64.
    I argue that code words like “inner city” do not semantically encode hidden or implicit meanings, and offer an account of how they nonetheless manage to bring about the surprising effects discussed in Mendelberg 2001, White 2007, and Stanley 2015 (among others).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  • What is Hate Speech? Part 2: Family Resemblances.Alexander Brown - 2017 - Law and Philosophy 36 (5):561-613.
    The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term ‘hate speech’ itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt to understand the general (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • What is hate speech? Part 1: The Myth of Hate.Alexander Brown - 2017 - Law and Philosophy 36 (4):419-468.
    The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term ‘hate speech’ itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt to understand the general (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language.Jennifer Saul - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press. pp. 360–383.
    This essay explores the speech act of dogwhistling (sometimes referred to as ‘using coded language’). Dogwhistles may be overt or covert, and within each of these categories may be intentional or unintentional. Dogwhistles are a powerful form of political speech, allowing people to be manipulated in ways they would resist if the manipulation was carried outmore openly—often drawing on racist attitudes that are consciously rejected. If philosophers focus only on content expressed or otherwise consciously conveyed they may miss what is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   61 citations  
  • The semantics of slurs: A refutation of pure expressivism.Adam M. Croom - 2014 - Language Sciences 41:227-242.
    In several recent contributions to the growing literature on slurs, Hedger draws upon Kaplan's distinction between descriptive and expressive content to argue that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content. The distinction between descriptive and expressive content and the view that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content has been widely acknowledged in prior work, and Hedger aims to contribute to this tradition of scholarship by offering novel arguments in support of his "pure expressivist" account of slurs. But the account (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Slurring Perspectives.Elisabeth Camp - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):330-349.
    Slurs are rhetorically insidious and theoretically interesting because they communicate something above and beyond the truth-conditional predication of group membership, something which typically though not always projects across 'blocking' constructions like negation, conditionals, and indirect quotation, and which is exceptionally resistant to direct challenge. I argue that neither pure expressivism nor straightforward truth-conditionalism can account for the sort of commitment that speakers undertake by using slurs. Instead, I claim, users of slurs endorse a denigrating perspective on the targeted group.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   130 citations  
  • The semantics of racial slurs: Using kaplan’s framework to provide a theory of the meaning of derogatory epithets.Joseph A. Hedger - 2012 - Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 11:74-84.
    In this paper I adopt Kaplan’s framework for distinguishing between descriptive and expressive content. Racial slurs are an especially difficult challenge for truth-conditional semantics because of their projection behaviors. That is to say, the offensive content of slurs “scopes out” of logical operators. I argue that racial slurs express contempt and lack descriptive content, so that many sentences containing slurs are not truth apt. My theory accounts for the intuition of the ordinary speaker who refuses to assent to the truth (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • (3 other versions)Derogatory Terms: Racism, Sexism and the Inferential Role Theory of Meaning.Lynne Tirrell - 1999 - In Kelly Oliver & Christina Hendricks (eds.), Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy, and Language. SUNY Press.
    Derogatory terms (racist, sexist, ethnic, and homophobic epithets) are bully words with ontological force: they serve to establish and maintain a corrupt social system fuelled by distinctions designed to justify relations of dominance and subordination. No wonder they have occasioned public outcry and legal response. The inferential role analysis developed here helps move us away from thinking of the harms as being located in connotation (representing mere speaker bias) or denotation (holding that the terms fail to refer due to inaccurate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • The meaning of ouch and oops: Explorations in the theory of meaning as use.David Kaplan - 1999 - .
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump.Jennifer M. Saul - 2017 - Philosophical Topics 45 (2):97-116.
    The rise to power of Donald Trump has been shocking in many ways. One of these was that it disrupted the preexisting consensus that overt racism would be death to a national political campaign. In this paper, I argue that Trump made use of what I call “racial figleaves”—additional utterances that provide just enough cover to give reassurance to voters who are racially resentful but don’t wish to see themselves as racist. These figleaves also, I argue, play a key role (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  • Slurs and Stereotypes.Robin Jeshion - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):314-329.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  • Slurring Words.Luvell Anderson & Ernie Lepore - 2011 - Noûs 47 (1):25-48.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   127 citations  
  • Pejoratives.Christopher Hom - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (2):164-185.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   70 citations  
  • The expressive dimension.Christopher Potts - 2007 - Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2):165-198.
    Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   150 citations  
  • What is Happening to Our Norms Against Racist Speech?Jennifer Saul - 2019 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1):1-23.
    Until recently, the accepted wisdom in the US was that overt racism would doom a national political campaign. This led to the use of covert messaging strategies like dogwhistles. Recent political events have called this wisdom into question. In this paper, I explore what has happened in recent years to our norms against racist speech, and to the ways that they are applied. I describe several mechanisms that seem to have contributed to the changes that I outline.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Political Hypocrisy and the Role of Professionals.Lawrence Quill - 2010 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (2):197-210.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations