Philosophical Studies 175 (11):2879-2906 (2018)
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Abstract |
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.
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Keywords | slurs social and discourse roles power oppression conversational exercitive conversational score accommodation silencing appropriation variable offence |
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Reprint years | 2017, 2018 |
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DOI | 10.1007/s11098-017-0986-2 |
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Citations of this work BETA
Slurs, Neutral Counterparts, and What You Could Have Said.Arianna Falbo - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (4):359-375.
Subject-Contextualism and the Meaning of Gender Terms.Dan Zeman - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (1):69-83.
Agency, Power, and Injustice in Metalinguistic Disagreement.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):1- 24.
A Rich-Lexicon Theory of Slurs and Their Uses.Dan Zeman - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):942-966.
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