Results for 'slurs'

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Bibliography: Slurs in Philosophy of Language
  1.  18
    Slurs and appropriation: an echoic account.Claudia Bianchi - 2014 - Journal of Pragmatics 66:35–44.
    Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an account of appropriated uses of slurs – i.e. uses by targeted groups of their own slurs for non-derogatory purposes, as in the appropriation of ‘nigger’ by the African-American community, or the appropriation of ‘queer’ by the homosexual community. In my proposal appropriated uses are conceived as echoic, in (...)
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  2. Slurs.Adam M. Croom - 2011 - Language Sciences 33 (3):343-358.
    Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur "nigger" is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act.. Indeed, the very taboo nature of these words makes discussion of them typically prohibited or frowned upon. Although it is true that the utterance of slurs is illegitimate and (...)
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  3. 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 (...)
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  4. Not all slurs are equal.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt - 2016 - Phenomenology and Mind 11:150-156.
    Slurs are typically defined as conveying contempt based on group-membership. However, here I argue that they are not a unitary group. First, I describe two dimensions of variation among derogatives: how targets are identified, and how offensive the term is. This supports the typical definition of slurs as opposed to other derogatives. I then highlight problems with this definition, mainly caused by variable offence across slur words. In the process I discuss how major theories of slurs can (...)
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  5. Slurs, roles and power.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt & Jeremy L. Wyatt - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 175 (11):2879-2906.
    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. (...)
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  6. 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 (...)
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  7.  9
    Slur reclamation, irony, and resilience.Luigi Pavone - forthcoming - Lodz Papers in Pragmatics.
    The process of slur reclamation is a linguistic phenomenon whereby members of a targeted group begin to employ their own slur as a means of self-labelling, expressing pride, fostering camaraderie, and reversing the derogatory perspective of the slur. This action is designed to deprive racist and bigoted institutions of a means of perpetuating social power imbalances. Some authors posit that slur reclamation entails a shift in meaning. The ambiguity thesis (AT) can be developed in a variety of ways depending on (...)
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  8.  99
    Slurs and Toxicity.Jesse Rappaport - 2020 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (1):177-202.
    Slurs are special. They can be so powerful and harmful that even mentioning them can be offensive. What explains this “toxicity” that many slurs display? Most discussions in the literature on slurs attempt to analyze the derogatory meaning of slurs, differing in where they locate this meaning – in the semantics, pragmatics, etc. In this article, the author argues that these content theories, despite their merits, are unable to account for toxicity. For a content-based approach to (...)
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  9. The Social Life of Slurs.Geoff Nunberg - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press. pp. 237–295.
    The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re (...)
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  10.  34
    Slurs, truth-value judgements, and context sensitivity.Roberto B. Sileo - 2018 - Human Affairs 28 (1):17-23.
    Cappelen and Lepore (2005) claim that the English language contains a basic and limited set of context-sensitive expressions, as only expressions within this set pass the truth-related tests that they propose to single out context-sensitive from context-insensitive words. In this paper, I argue that racial and ethnic slurs also pass Cappelen and Lepore’s context sensitivity tests and that, as a result, slurs should also be seen as context-sensitive expressions in a truth-related sense.
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  11.  90
    Abhorrent Slurs and Laudable Pejoratives: an Estonian Case Study of the Space Between.Alex Stewart Davies, Fred Gregor Rahuoja & Nikolai Shurakov - forthcoming - Topoi.
    Some pejoratives are slurs—they target people on the basis of protected characteristics. Other pejoratives are what we can call “cognitive-behavioural pejoratives”: they target contemptible conduct or character, not protected characteristics. These two classes of pejoratives are semantically similar, yet the ethical profiles of their use are radically different. There is an Estonian pejorative that targets people on the basis of a mixture of ethnicity (approximately: Russian) and a cognitive-behavioural trait (approximately: chauvinism). What is the ethical status of the use (...)
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  12.  55
    Slur creation, bigotry formation: the power of expressivism.Robin Jeshion - 2016 - Phenomenology and Mind 11:130-139.
    Theories of slurs aim to explain how – via semantics, pragmatics, or other mechanisms – speakers who use slurs convey that targets are inferior persons. I present two novel problems. The Slur Creation Problem: How do terms come to be slurs? An expression ‘e’ is introduced into the language. What are the mechanisms by which ‘e’ comes to possess properties distinctive of slurs? The Bigotry Formation Problem: Speakers’ uses of slurs are a prime mechanism of (...)
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  13. Gendered Slurs.Lauren Ashwell - 2016 - Social Theory and Practice 42 (2):228-239.
    Slurring language has had a lot of recent interest, but the focus has been almost exclusively on racial slurs. Gendered pejoratives, on the other hand—terms like “slut,” “bitch,” or “sissy”—do not fit into existing accounts of slurring terms, as these accounts require the existence of neutral correlates, which, I argue, these gendered pejoratives lack. Rather than showing that these terms are not slurs, I argue that this challenges the assumption that slurs must have neutral correlates, and so (...)
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  14.  65
    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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  15. Slurs as Illocutionary Force Indicators.Chang Liu - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (3):1051-1065.
    Slurs are derogatory words and they are used to derogate certain groups. Theories of slurs must explain why they are derogatory words, as well as other features like independence and descriptive ineffability. This paper proposes an illocutionary force indicator theory of slurs: they are derogatory terms because their use is to perform the illocutionary act of derogation, which is a declarative illocutionary act to enforce norms against the target. For instance, calling a Chinese person “chink” is an (...)
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  16. 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 (...)
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  17. The Pragmatics of Slurs.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2015 - Noûs 51 (3):439-462.
    I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints (...)
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  18.  22
    Slurring silences.A. G. Holdier - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Silence can be a communicative act. Tanesini (2018) demonstrates how “eloquent” silences can virtuously indicate resistance and dissent; in this paper, I outline one way silence can also be used viciously to cause discursive harm, specifically by slurring victims. By distinguishing between eloquent and “signaling” silences (two kinds of what I call “performative” silences), I show how “slurring” silences — fully quiet discursive moves that signal one's commitment to a slurring perspective — function in a manner that illuminates the pragmatic (...)
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  19. 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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  20. 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, (...)
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  21.  58
    Semantic Dimensions of Slurs.Arthur Sullivan - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (3):1479-1493.
    I plot accounts of slurs on a [semanticist – non-semanticist] spectrum, and then I give some original arguments in favor of semanticist approaches. Two core, related pro-semanticist considerations which animate this work are: first, that the pejorative dimension of a slur is non-cancellable; and, second, that ignorance of the pejorative dimension should be counted as ignorance of literal, linguistic meaning, as opposed to a mistake about conditions for appropriate usage. I bolster these considerations via cases in which slurs (...)
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  22. 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] (...)
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  23. Slurring individuals.Víctor Carranza-Pinedo - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper explores the derogatory uses of nicknames within closely-knit social settings such as villages, households, and schools. By examining ethnographic and psychological data on nicknaming practices, this paper contends that pejorative nicknames and slurs share structural and functional attributes. On the one hand, pejorative nicknames and slurs can elicit deep offence regardless of the speaker’s intentions or whether they occur within speech reports. On the other, pejorative nicknames can contribute to creating and reinforcing unjust intra-group hierarchies, hence (...)
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  24. What is a slur?Justina Diaz-Legaspe - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1399-1422.
    Although there seems to be an agreement on what slurs are, many authors diverge when it comes to classify some words as such. Hence, many debates would benefit from a technical definition of this term that would allow scholars to clearly distinguish what counts as a slur and what not. Although the paper offers different definitions of the term in order to allow the reader to choose her favorite, I claim that ‘slurs’ is the name given to a (...)
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  25.  25
    Asian slurs and stereotypes in the USA: A context-sensitive account of derogation and appropriation.Adam M. Croom - 2018 - Pragmatics and Society 9 (4):495-517.
    Slurs such as chink and gook are linguistic expressions that are primarily used to derogate certain group members for their descriptive attributes (such as their ethnicity) and are often considered the most offensive of expressions. Recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has illuminated several important facts regarding their meaning and use – including that slurs are commonly understood to felicitously apply towards some targets yet not others, that slurs are among the most potentially (...)
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  26. Contested Slurs.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2020 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (1):11-30.
    Sometimes speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, but which other members of that community do. Sometimes these speakers are ignorant or naïve, but not always. This article explores a puzzle raised when some speakers stubbornly maintain that a contested term t is not derogatory. Because the semantic content of a term depends on the language, to say that their use of t is semantically derogatory despite their claims and intentions, we (...)
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  27.  65
    Slurs, Synonymy, and Taboo.Y. Sandy Berkovski - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):423-439.
    The ‘prohibitionist’ idea that slurs have the same linguistic properties as their neutral counterparts hasn’t received much support in the literature. Here I offer a modified version of prohibitionism, according to which the taboo on using slurs is part of their conventional meaning. I conclude with explanations of the behaviour of slurs in embedded constructions.
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  28.  70
    Slurs: Departures from Genuine Uses and Derogation.Delia Belleri - 2020 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 62 (1):9-24.
    Some non-appropriated uses of slurs seem to be non–derogatory. In this paper, I argue that in a range of cases, the lack of derogation is owed to the term not being genuinely used. I first examine so–called pedagogical uses and show that they can be assimilated to what I call “distancing uses.” I then turn to a range of other apparently non–derogatory, non–appropriated uses of slurs – such as non–weapon uses, comedic uses – and argue that they can (...)
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  29. Slurs and the Type-Token Distinction of Their Derogatory Force.Chang Liu - 2019 - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 13 (2):63-72.
    Slurs are derogatory, and theories of slurs aim at explaining their “derogatory force”. This paper draws a distinction between the type derogatory force and the token derogatory force of slurs. To explain the type derogatory force is to explain why a slur is a derogatory word. By contrast, to explain the token derogatory force is to explain why an utterance of a slur is derogatory. This distinction will be defended by examples in which the type and the (...)
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  30. Slurring Words.Luvell Anderson & Ernie Lepore - 2011 - Noûs 47 (1):25-48.
  31. 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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  32.  13
    Slurs, stereotypes, and in-equality: A critical review of “How Epithets and Stereotypes Are Racially Unequal”.Adam M. Croom - 2015 - Language Sciences 52:139-154.
    Are racial slurs always offensive and are racial stereotypes always negative? How, if at all, are racial slurs and stereotypes different and unequal for members of different races? Questions like these and others about slurs and stereotypes have been the focus of much research and hot debate lately, and in a recent article Embrick and Henricks (2013) aimed to address some of the aforementioned questions by investigating the use of racial slurs and stereotypes in the workplace. (...)
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  33. 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 (...)
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  34.  67
    Slurs and Thick Terms: When Language Encodes Values.Bianca Cepollaro - 2020 - Lexington Books.
    What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language, such as slurs and so-called thick terms, not only reflect speakers’ moral perspectives, but also contribute to promote the speaker’s evaluative stance.
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  35. Normalizing Slurs and Out‐group Slurs: The Case of Referential Restriction.Justina Diaz Legaspe - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (2):234-255.
    The relation between slurs and their neutral counterparts has been put into question recently by the fact that some slurs can be used to refer to subsets of the referential classes determined by their associated counterparts. This paper aims to reinforce this relation by offering a way of explaining referential restriction that distinguishes between two kinds of slurs: those performing a normalizing role upon (some) individuals inside a class (mostly, a gender) and those used to derogate a (...)
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  36. 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 (...). But the account that PE offers is explanatorily inadequate, resting on suspect a priori intuitions which also commit one to denying many basic facts about slurs, such as that slurs largely display systematic differential application and that slurs can be used non-offensively between in-group speakers. In this article I provide clear reasons for rejecting PE, arguing particularly against Hedger as one of PE’s most explicit and recent proponents. In showing that PE is inadequate in at least 11 ways, I argue in favor of a mixed or hybrid approach. (shrink)
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  37.  63
    Slurs and Tone.Ernie Lepore & Matthew Stone - 2018 - In Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History. Londra, Regno Unito: Palgrave. pp. 205-217.
    Two claims that are hard to deny are that slurs can be offensive, and that not all uses of language are communicative. It’s therefore perplexing why no one has considered the possibility that slurs might be offensive not because of what they communicate but rather because of interpretive effects their uses might exact. In what follows, we intend to argue just that, namely, that confrontations with slurs can set in motion a kind of imaginative engagement that rouses (...)
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  38. Are Ableist Insults Secretly Slurs?Chris Cousens - 2020 - Language Sciences 77.
    Philosophers often treat racist and sexist slurs as a special sort of puzzle. What is the difference between a slur and its correlates? In attempting to answer this question, a second distinction has been overlooked: that between slurs and insults. What makes a term count as a slur? This is not an unnecessary taxonomical question as long as ableist terms such as ‘moron’ are dismissed as mere insults. Attempts to resolve the insult/slur distinction by considering the communicative content (...)
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  39.  29
    Slurs and Redundancy.Y. Sandy Berkovski - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (4):1607-1622.
    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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  40.  80
    Slurs and lexical presumption.William G. Lycan - 2015 - Language Sciences 52:3-11.
    Grice's cryptic notion of “conventional implicature” has been developed in a number of different ways. This paper deploys the simplest version, Lycan's (1984) notion of “lexical presumption,” and argues that slurs and other pejorative expressions have normal truth-conditional content plus the most obvious extra implicatures. The paper then addresses and rebuts objections to “conventional implicature” accounts that have been made in the literature, particularly those which focus on non-offensive uses of slurs.
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  41. The semantics of slurs: A refutation of coreferentialism.Adam M. Croom - 2015 - Ampersand: An International Journal of General and Applied Linguistics 2:30-38.
    Coreferentialism refers to the common assumption in the literature that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. For instance, Vallee recently writes that “If S is an ethnic slur in language L, then there is a non-derogatory expression G in L such that G and S have the same extension”. The non-derogatory expression G is commonly considered the nonpejorative correlate of the slur expression S and it is widely thought that every S has a coreferring (...)
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  42. Slurs & Thick Concepts-is the New Expressivism Tenable?Nenad Miščević - 2011 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (2):159-182.
    Mark Richard in his book offers a new and challenging expressivist theory of the use and semantics of slurs (pejoratives). The paper argues that in contrast, the central and standard uses of slurs are cognitive. It does so from the role of stereotypes in slurring, from fi gurative slurs and from the need for cognitive effort (or simple of knowledge of relevant presumed properties of the target). Since cognition has to do with truth and falsity, and since (...)
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  43. Slurs, Stereotypes and Insults.Eleonora Orlando & Andrés Saab - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (4):599-621.
    This paper is about paradigmatic slurs, i.e. expressions that are prima facie associated with the expression of a contemptuous attitude concerning a group of people identified in terms of its origin or descent, race, sexual orientation, ethnia or religion, gender, etc. Our purpose is twofold: explaining their expressive meaning dimension in terms of a version of stereotype semantics and analysing their original and most typical uses as insults, which will be called with a neologism ‘insultive’, in terms of a (...)
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  44. 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 (...)
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  45.  98
    Slurs and Expressive Commitments.Leopold Hess - 2020 - Acta Analytica 36 (2):263-290.
    Most accounts of the derogatory meaning of slurs are semantic. Recently, Nunberg proposed a purely pragmatic account offering a compelling picture of the relation between derogatory content and social context. Nunberg posits that the semantic content of slurs is identical to that of neutral counterparts, and that derogation is a result of the association of slur use with linguistic conventions of bigoted speakers. The mechanism responsible for it is a special kind of conversational implicature. However, this paper argues (...)
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  46. Slurs as the Shortcut of Discrimination.Bianca Cepollaro - 2017 - Rivista di Estetica 64:53-65.
    The last decade saw a growing interest for hate speech and the ways in which language reflects and perpetuates discrimination, with two main focuses of interest: a linguistic-oriented question about how slurs encode evaluation on the one hand, and a philosophical and psychological question about the effects elicited by slurs. In this paper, I show how the two questions are deeply related by illustrating how a certain linguistic analysis of derogatory epithets – the presuppositional one – can shed (...)
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  47. Slurs as ballistic speech.Richard P. Stillman - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6827-6843.
    Slurs are words with a well-known tendency to conjure up painful memories and experiences in members of their target communities. Owing to this tendency, it’s widely agreed that one ought to exercise considerable care when even mentioning a slur, so as to avoid needlessly inflicting distressing associations on members of the relevant group. This paper argues that this tendency to evoke distressing associations is precisely what makes slurs impactful verbal weapons. According to the ballistic theory, slurs make (...)
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  48. Slurring and common knowledge of ordinary language.Richard Vallee - 2014 - Journal of Pragmatics 61:78-90.
    Ethnic slurs have recently raised interest in philosophy of language. Consider (1) Yao is Chinese and (2) Yao is a chink. A theory of meaning should take into account the fact that sentence (2) has the property of containing a slur, a feature plausibly motivating an utterance of (2) rather than (1), and conveys contempt because it contains that word. According to multipropositionalism, two utterances can have the same official truth conditions and the same truth-value but differ in cognitive (...)
     
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  49.  52
    Slurs and stereotypes for Italian Americans: A context-sensitive account of derogation and appropriation.Adam M. Croom - 2015 - Journal of Pragmatics 81:36-51.
    Recent research on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has offered insight into several important facts concerning their meaning and use. However, prior work has unfortunately been restricted primarily to considerations of slurs that typically target females, homosexuals, and African Americans. This is problematic because such a narrowly focused attention to slurs in prior work has left theorizing of how slurs generally function relatively uninformed by facts of actual language use. As a result, theoretical accounts of (...)
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  50. Racial epithets, characterizations, and slurs.Adam M. Croom - 2013 - Analysis and Metaphysics 12:11-24.
    Since at least 2008 linguists and philosophers of language have started paying more serious attention to issues concerning the meaning or use of racial epithets and slurs. In an influential article published in The Journal of Philosophy, for instance, Christopher Hom (2008) offered a semantic account of racial epithets called Combinatorial Externalism (CE) that advanced a novel argument for the exclusion of certain epithets from freedom of speech protection under the First Amendment (p. 435). Also in more recent work, (...)
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