Slurs

Edited by Chang Liu (Shanghai JiaoTong University)
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  1. "Y'all are just too sensitive": A computational ethics approach to understanding how prejudice against marginalized communities becomes epistemic belief.Johannah Sprinz - manuscript
    Members of marginalized communities are often accused of being "too sensitive" when subjected to supposedly harmless acts of microaggression. This paper explores a simulated society consisting of marginalized and non-marginalized agents who interact and may, based on their individually held convictions, commit acts of microaggressions. Agents witnessing a microaggression might condone, ignore or condemn such microaggressions, thus potentially influencing a perpetrator's conviction. A prototype model has been implemented in NetLogo, and possible applications are briefly discussed.
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  2. ‘A lack of trust’: How deepfakes and AI could rattle the US elections.Hilary Beaumont - forthcoming - Al Jazeera.
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  3. Quotation.Herman Cappelen, Ernest Lepore & Matthew McKeever - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  4. How Quotation Modulates, but Does not Eliminate, the Derogatory Content of Slur Utterances.David Miguel Gray - forthcoming - Frontiers in Communication.
    The need for new insights to understand the effects of quoting slurs in linguistic communication has been evident over the past several years. Slurs seem to be capable of offending even when embedded in quotations or mentioned. This ability of the derogatory force of slurs to project out of embeddings like quotations is an instance of what I will call the ‘projectible force’ of slurs. This force is taken to be a particularly serious problem for content-based semantic theories, which claim (...)
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  5. Lying with Slurs and Other Evaluative Terms.Brian Haas - forthcoming - Analysis.
    Are slurring statements, when applied to members of the slurred group, true, false, or a little bit of both? Intuitions are mixed. And investigating more truth-value judgments is unlikely to cure the stalemate we find ourselves in. Truth-value judgments are just not up to the task. In their place, I propose we look to judgments of lying instead. This change in focus provides a new and better tool for understanding the complex semantics and pragmatics of slurs. As I argue, it (...)
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  6. Curtail free speech? ‘Oh yes we can’.Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert - forthcoming - le Monde Diplomatique.
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  7. Meaning and Racial Slurs: Derogatory Epithets and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface.Joseph A. Hedger - forthcoming - Language and Communication.
    The semantics of racial slurs has recently become a locus of debate amongst philosophers. While everyone agrees that slurs are offensive, there is disagreement about the linguistic mechanism responsible for this offensiveness. This paper places the debate about racial slurs into the context of a larger issue concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and argues that even on minimalist assumptions, the offensiveness of slur words is more plausibly due to their semantic content rather than any pragmatic mechanism. Finally, I (...)
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  8. The Sound of Slurs: Bad Sounds for Bad Words.Eric Mandelbaum & Steven Young - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.
    An analysis of a valenced corpus of English words revealed that words that rhyme with slurs are rated more poorly than their synonyms. What at first might seem like a bizarre coincidence turns out to be a robust feature of slurs, one arising from their phonetic structure. We report novel data on phonaesthetic preferences, showing that a particular class of phonemes are both particularly disliked, and overrepresented in slurs. We argue that phonaesthetic associations have been an overlooked source of some (...)
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  9. Neopragmatist Inferentialism and the Meaning of Derogatory Terms – A Defence.Deborah Mühlebach - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Inferentialism seems to be an unpopular theory where derogatory terms are concerned. Contrary to most theorists in the debate on the meaning of derogatory terms, I think that inferentialism constitutes a promising theory to account for a broad range of aspects of derogatory language use. In order to make good on that promise, however, inferentialism must overcome four main objections that are usually raised against Michael Dummett's and Robert Brandom's inferentialist explanations of derogatory terms. This paper aims at debunking these (...)
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  10. 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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  11. What a jerk!Thorsten Sander - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that (...)
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  12. Theories of Meaning.Jeff Speaks - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  13. Slur Reclamation and the polysemy/homonymy distinction.Tomasz Zyglewicz - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Reclamation of a slur involves the creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, it is far from clear whether the view can explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, therefore, (...)
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  14. (1 other version)The Wrongness of Slurs: Harm, Disrespect, and Discord.Thaddeus Metz - 2025 - In Wilfred Lajul (ed.), Philosophy, Language, and Literature in an African Context. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 13-32.
    Reprint of an article appearing in a special issue of Daimon devoted to 'Expressing Hatred'.
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  15. Doxastic and Epistemic Sources of Offense for Slurring Terms.David Miguel Gray - 2024 - Acta Analytica.
    Existing analyses of slurs emphasize how linguistic mechanisms make slurs derogatory. I will argue that, in addition to linguistic mechanisms, there are overlooked doxastic and epistemic features of standard slurring utterances that can be sources of offense. Additionally, I argue that the doxastic feature that distinguishes slurring utterances from other negatively valenced utterances is fundamental to understanding slurring terms. Clinical Trial Registration: Not applicable.
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  16. Covert Mixed Quotation.Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - 2024 - Semantics and Pragmatics 17 (5):1-52.
    The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...)
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  17. 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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  18. The Sound of Slurs: Bad Sounds for Bad Words.Eric Mandelbaum, Jennifer Ware & Steve Young - 2024 - In Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5. Oxford University Press.
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  19. How slurs enact norms, and how to retract them.Teresa Marques - 2024 - Synthese 203 (174):1-21.
    The present paper considers controversial utterances that were erroneously taken as derogatory. These examples are puzzling because, despite the audiences’ error, many speakers retract and even apologise for what they didn’t say and didn’t do. In recent years, intuitions about retractions have been used to test semantic theories. The cases discussed here test the predictive power of theories of derogatory language and help us better understand what is required to retract a slur. The paper seeks to answer three questions: are (...)
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  20. Local Conceptual Engineering in a Linguistic Subgroup and the Implementation Problem.Takaaki Matsui - 2024 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues. Brill.
    In this chapter, I examine Max Deutsch’s dilemma for the implementation of newly engineered concepts. In the debate over this dilemma, the goal of conceptual engineering tends to be set either too high or too low. As a result, implementation tends to be seen as either very unlikely to succeed or too easily achievable. This chaper aims to offer a way out of this dilemma. I argue that the success conditions for implementation can be better understood if we distinguish between (...)
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  21. 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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  22. The successes of reclamation.Dan López de Sa & Bianca Cepollaro - 2023 - Synthese 202 (6):1-19.
    In this paper we distinguish two dimensions in which the reclamation of slurs can succeed (or fail). By reclamation we refer to the linguistic practice whereby certain speakers employ slurs in order to express pride, foster camaraderie, manifest solidarity, subvert extant structures of discrimination, and so on. Reclamation can succeed, we propose, in at least two senses: in terms of felicity, insofar as a certain use of a slur counts as a move within a reclamatory practice; and in terms of (...)
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  23. No Harm, Still Foul: On the Effect-Independent Wrongness of Slurring.Ralph Difranco & Andrew Morgan - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (3):471-489.
    Intuitively, a speaker who uses slurs to refer to people is doing something morally objectionable even if no one is measurably affected by their speech. Perhaps they are only talking to themselves, or they are speaking with bigots who are already as vicious as they can be. This paper distinguishes between slurring as an expressive act and slurring as the act of causing a psychological effect. It then develops an expression-focused ethical account in order to explain the intuition that slurring (...)
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  24. Busting the Ghost of Neutral Counterparts.Jen Foster - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (42):1187-1242.
    Slurs have been standardly assumed to bear a very direct, very distinctive semantic relationship to what philosophers have called “neutral counterpart” terms. I argue that this is mistaken: the general relationship between paradigmatic slurs and their “neutral counterparts” should be assumed to be the same one that obtains between ‘chick flick’ and ‘romantic comedy’, as well a huge number of other more prosaic pairs of derogatory and “less derogatory” expressions. The most plausible general relationship between these latter expressions — and (...)
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  25. Aspiration and Self-Realization: The Ameliorative Projects of Steve Biko.David Miguel Gray - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2):142-162.
    Work on the conceptual amelioration of race concepts is usually negative or critical: it uncovers social features that contribute to racial hierarchies. Much less focus has been placed on how ameliorative accounts contribute to positive change. Using an account of race developed by Steve Biko during South African apartheid, I will argue that we can extract a novel account of positive amelioration in which racial categories can have normative or aspirational force, contributing to positive change.
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  26. 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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  27. The expression of hate in hate speech.Teresa Marques - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 ((5)):769-78.
    In this paper, I argue that hate speech expresses hate, and answer some objections to expressivist views. First, I briefly comment on some limitations of pragmatic accounts of harmful speech. I then present an expressive-normative view of derogatory discourse according to which it is expressive of an affective state by presupposing it. A linguistic act expressive of an affective state inherits the normativity that is constitutive of that state, as directed to its intentional object. If the act is successful, it (...)
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  28. Hate Speech as Antithetical to Free Speech: The Real Polarity.Tiffany Elise Montoya - 2023 - Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Edited by Will Barnes.
    I claim that hate speech is actually antithetical to free speech. Nevertheless, this claim invokes the misconception that one would be jeopardizing free speech due to a phenomenon known as "false polarization" – a “tendency for disputants to overestimate the extent to which they disagree about whatever contested question is at hand.” The real polarity does not lie between hate speech (as protected free speech) vs. censorship. Rather, hate speech is censorship. It is the censorship of entire sectors of the (...)
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  29. Hate expressives institutionalized in Colombian political discourse. An analysis of ‘guerrillero’, ‘castrochavista’, ‘vándalo,’ and ‘gente de bien’.Angélica María Rodríguez Ortiz & Freddy Santamaría-Velasco - 2023 - Signo Y Pensamiento 42.
    This article conducts an analysis of the ways in which the use of slurs such as "Guerrillo", "Vándalo" and "Castrochavista", as well as the dogwhistles "Gente de bien", negatively transform social reality. The intentional use of these expressions leads to the institutionalization of practices of rejection, discrimination and hatred that mobilize the collectivity in decision making and the realization of political actions that end up attacking human dignity and are a direct affront to democracy. The institutionalization of these discursive practices (...)
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  30. Linguistic Mistakes.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2191-2206.
    Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...)
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  31. Ostension and the communicative function of natural language.Stavros Assimakopoulos - 2022 - Journal of Pragmatics 191:46-54.
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  32. The landscape of affective meaning.Víctor Carranza-Pinedo - 2022 - Dissertation, Institut Jean Nicod
    Swear words are highly colloquial expressions that have the capacity to signal the speaker's affective states, i.e., to display the speaker's feelings with respect to a certain stimulus. For this reason, swear words are often called 'expressives'. Which linguistic mechanisms allow swear words display affective states, and, more importantly, how can such 'affective content' be characterized in a theory of meaning? Even though research on expressive meaning has produced models that integrate the affective aspects of swear words in a compositional (...)
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  33. Why Social Constructionists Should Embrace Minimalist Race.Michael Hardimon - 2022 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1):37-53.
    My thesis is that social constructionists should embrace minimalist race. By this I mean they should accept the minimalist concept of race and the existence of minimalist races. They are likely to reject this suggestion because they are antirealists about biological race. But their antirealism about biological race is based on their identification of the biological concept of race with the racialist concept of race. The minimalist concept of race is free of the invidious features that make the racialist concept (...)
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  34. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.Randall Kennedy - 2022 - Pantheon.
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  35. What's at Stake in the Race Debate?Ron Mallon - 2022 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1):54-72.
    How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily (...)
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  36. Tackling Verbal Derogation: Linguistic Meaning, Social Meaning and Constructive Contestation.Deborah Mühlebach - 2022 - In David Bordonaba Plou, Víctor Fernández Castro & José Ramón Torices (eds.), The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 173-198.
    Our everyday practices are meaningful in several ways. In addition to the linguistic meanings of our terms and sentences, we attach social meanings to actions and statuses. Philosophy of language and public debates often focus on contesting morally and politically pernicious linguistic practices. My aim is to show that this is too little: even if we are only interested in morally and politically problematic terms, we must counteract a pernicious linguistic practice on many levels, especially on the level of its (...)
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  37. (1 other version)Epistemic Slurs: A Novel Explicandum and Adequacy Constraint for Slur Theories.Adam Patterson - 2022 - 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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  38. 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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  39. True Pejorative Sentences Beyond the Existential Core: On Some Unwelcome Implications of Hom and May’s Theory.Ludovic Soutif & André Pontes - 2022 - Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 63 (153):757-780.
    RESUMO O presente artigo contempla uma das tentativas mais significativas e controversas de explicar o significado de pejorativos como itens lexicais, a saber, a de Hom e May. Após apresentarmos em linhas gerais a teoria, identificamos conjuntos de sentenças pejorativas que saem verdadeiras nessa teoria e para as quais a questão da sua compatibilidade com a visão por eles defendida (a chamada Inocência Moral e Semântica) permanece em aberto. Explorando o arcabouço teórico padrão da teoria dos modelos em que Hom (...)
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  40. Actos de habla de la izquierda y de la derecha colombiana en el Paro Nacional de Colombia 2021: análisis de las publicaciones en Twitter de Álvaro Uribe Vélez y Gustavo Petro.Dora Alejandra Ramírez Vallejo & Freddy Santamaría Velasco - 2022 - Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Del Discurso 22 (2):103-131.
    The latest Colombian national strike started on the 28th\ of April 2021, the cause of which were social protests against some policies advanced by president Ivan Duque Marquez. These manifestations lasted months, during which, the most significant leaders of both left (Gustavo Petro) and right (Alvaro Uribe Velez), took advantage of the political scene to manifest themselves through their Twitter accounts. This article aims to analyse the speech acts performed by those political figures between April 27 and 29 of 2021, (...)
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  41. A rich-lexicon theory of slurs and their uses.Dan Zeman - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):942-966.
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I present data involving the use of the Romanian slur ‘țigan’, consideration of which leads to the postulation of a sui-generis, irreducible type of use of slurs. This type of use is potentially problematic for extant theories of slurs. In addition, together with other well-established uses, it shows that there is more variation in the use of slurs than previously acknowledged. I explain this variation by construing slurs as polysemous. To implement this idea, I appeal to (...)
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  42. The Language of Mental Illness.Renee Bolinger - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
    This paper surveys some philosophical issues with the language surrounding mental illness, but is especially focused on pejoratives relating to mental illness. I argue that though 'crazy' and similar mental illness-based epithets (MI-epithets) are not best understood as slurs, they do function to isolate, exclude, and marginalize members of the targeted group in ways similar to the harmfulness of slurs more generally. While they do not generally express the hate/contempt characteristic of weaponized uses of slurs, MI-epithets perpetuate epistemic injustice by (...)
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  43. 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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  44. Slurs, neutral counterparts, and what you could have said.Arianna Falbo - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (4):359-375.
    Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises (...)
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  45. Slur Reclamation – Polysemy, Echo, or Both?Zuzanna Jusińska - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 28 (3):689–707.
    This paper concerns the topic of slur reclamation. I start with presenting two seemingly opposing accounts of slur reclamation, Jeshion’s (2020) Polysemy view and Bianchi’s (2014) Echoic view. Then, using the data provided by linguists, I discuss the histories of the reclamation of the slur ‘queer’ and of the n-word, which bring me to presenting a view of reclamation that combines the Polysemy view and Echoic view. The Combined view of slur reclamation proposed in this paper postulates meaning change while (...)
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  46. 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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  47. Inferential patterns of emotive meaning.Fabrizio Macagno & Maria Grazia Rossi - 2021 - In Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Issues in Linguistics. Springer. pp. 83-110.
    This paper investigates the emotive (or expressive) meaning of words commonly referred to as “loaded” or “emotive,” which include slurs, derogative or pejorative words, and ethical terms. We claim that emotive meaning can be reinterpreted from a pragmatic and argumentative perspective, which can account for distinct aspects of ethical terms, including the possibility of being modified and its cancellability. Emotive meaning is explained as a defeasible and automatic or automatized evaluative and intended inference commonly associated with the use of specific (...)
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  48. Inferential Patterns of Emotive Meaning.Fabrizio Macagno & Maria Grazia Rossi - 2021 - In Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Issues in Linguistics. Springer. pp. 83-110.
    This paper investigates the emotive meaning of words commonly referred to as “loaded” or “emotive,” which include slurs, derogative or pejorative words, and ethical terms. We claim that emotive meaning can be analyzed from a argumentative perspective at distinct levels, which can forexplain some essential aspects of ethical terms, including the possibility of modifying and cancelling their “expressive force.” Emotive meaning is explained as a defeasible and automatic or automatized evaluative and intended inference commonly associated with the use of specific (...)
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  49. Pejoratives & Oughts.Teresa Marques - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (3):1109-1125.
    Chris Hom argued that slurs and pejoratives semantically express complex negative prescriptive properties, which are determined in virtue of standing in external causal relations to social ideologies and practices. He called this view Combinatorial Externalism. Additionally, he argued that Combinatorial Externalism entailed that slurs and pejoratives have null extensions. In this paper, I raise an objection that has not been raised in the literature so far. I argue that semantic theories like Hom’s are forced to choose between two alternatives: either (...)
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  50. 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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