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Slurs and Redundancy

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Abstract

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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Notes

  1. Another early general statement to the same effect: Hornsby (2002: 134–135). A recent statement: Torrengo (2020:1626).

  2. In the useful terminology of Torrengo (2020:1618) this consensus cuts across the ‘strict content’ and ‘broad content’ approaches to slurs. Moreover, some objectivists adopt a pragmatic explanation of derogation (see below).

  3. To prevent a misunderstanding: I’m not claiming that the film director Quentin Tarantino has any special expertise in bigoted use, nor that any such expertise exists in the first place (Nunberg, 2018, 283). I am rather claiming that Tarantino has portrayed the repeated use fairly convincingly, and that we find this use entirely fluent and unproblematic.

  4. A similar ambiguity, I think, vitiates the perspectivalist ‘semantic’ account in Camp (2013), Camp (2018).

  5. See also Hom (2008:431).

  6. See Jeshion (2018:82–83, 100). Note that expression of attitudes is subject to the maxim of quantity. To obey this maxim we shouldn’t make our utterances more ‘informative’ than necessary, and to express an attitude is to communicate information. Maxim of quantity: Grice(1989:26).

  7. Gestures and slurs: Hornsby (2002:140).

  8. See Horn (2004:3). The reader is invited to test other instances on the list in Potts(2015:188).

  9. Concise summary: Brown (2000). Further details: Tannen (2007), Schegloff (1996).

  10. Review of the debate: Davies and Arnold (2019). Further details: e.g., Rubio-Fernandez (2019), Engelhardt et al. (2006).

  11. See Fox (2014).

  12. As Arkes (1974) notes, Murphy’s definition was later adopted nearly verbatim in several influential rulings.

  13. ADL tracker: https://bit.ly/2M84W7R ADL 2019 audit: https://www.adl.org/audit2019

  14. Nexis Uni: http://www.nexisuni.com/

    Table 1 Nexis Uni data
    Full size table

  15. Prohibitionism: Anderson and Lepore (2013), Lepore and Stone (2018).

  16. See Croom (2015), Neufeld (2019), Falbo (2021). See Hom and May (2013) for another version of this complaint. Generally, it is directed not only at prohibitionism, but against all so-called ‘identity theories’ that treat slurs and their neutral correlates as co-extensive.

  17. See Neufeld (2019) and references therein.

  18. See Sennet and Copp (2020), Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt (2018) for this line of argument.

  19. The same applies to the use of diminutives and slang, as I explain in the companion paper.

  20. (4) is adapted from Croom (2015:32). The present author witnessed just this sort of use on a couple of occasions.

  21. Metaphor and classification: Goodman (1968:68ff), Black (1962:38ff), Stern (2000:153ff), Camp(2015:50–53).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey

    Y. Sandy Berkovski

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Berkovski, Y.S. Slurs and Redundancy. Philosophia 50, 1607–1622 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00484-1

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