In defence of a presuppositional account of slurs
Section snippets
Slurs and intuitions
In this section, I will present some examples1 to see what slurs are and how they work and I'll look at the intuitions we have about these terms.
Slurs are derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. Some examples of English slurs
Theories
In this section I would like to briefly outline the main theories4
Objections to the presuppositional account
Some objections have been raised against the presuppositional account. I will divide them into two groups, labeling them as “strong” and “weaker” objections. First, I will consider the “strong objection”, that deals with cancellability. This has often been viewed as the strongest objection to the presuppositional account,13 but I will argue that it doesn't necessarily constitute a knocking down problem for the theory. Then, I will
What kind of presupposition?
So far, I considered the objections against the presuppositional account and I tried to formulate some replies; yet, a presuppositional account must also specify what kind of presupposition slurs trigger.
In this section I would like to consider the two main options and discuss them.
Let's take “wop” as an example: a first intuitive hypothesis, very common in the literature26 and mentioned in Section 2, is that (23) triggers the presupposition (24):23.
Conclusions
In this paper I defended a presuppositional account of slurs. I suggested that cancellability should be thought of as a matter of grade, rather than the dividing feature between two different categories. Once we re-think the notion of cancellability, the main objections against the presuppositional account do not hold anymore. Apart from the labeling, the question that needs to be posed is what kind of phenomenon we are dealing with.
I find that the best explanation for how slurs work is to say
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Pier Marco Bertinetto, Nicola Spotorno, Isidora Stojanovic, Giuliano Torrengo, Sandro Zucchi and especially Claudia Bianchi for useful discussion. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the 6th International Conference of Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication, at the 8th ECAP and at the Names, Demonstratives and Expressives conference in Gargnano: I'm grateful to the
References (42)
Slurs and appropriation: an echoic account
J. Pragmat.
(2014)Slurs
Lang. Sci.
(2011)How to do things with slurs: studies in the way of derogatory words
Lang. Commun.
(2013)The semantics of slurs: a refutation of pure expressivism
Lang. Sci.
(2014)Meaning and racial slurs: derogatory epithets and the semantics/pragmatics interface
Lang. Commun.
(2013)- et al.
Slurring words
Nous
(2013) - et al.
What did you call me? Slurs as prohibited words
Anal. Philos.
(2013) The myth of conventional implicatures
Linguist. Philos.
(1999)- et al.
Presupposition
Slurs and expletives: a case against a general account of expressive meaning
Lang. Sci.
(2014)
A queer revolution: reconceptualizing the debate over linguistic reclamation
Colo. Res. Linguist.
Slurring Perspectives
Analytic Philosophy
Meaning and Grammar: an Introduction to Semantics
Slurs, stereotypes, and in-equality: a critical review of “How Epithets and Stereotypes are Racially Unequal”
Lang. Sci.
Spanish slurs and stereotypes for Mexican-Americans in the USA: a context-sensitive account of derogation and appropriation
Sociocult. Pragmat.
Diachronic variations of slurs and levels of derogation: on some regional, ethnic and racial slurs in Croatian
Lang. Sci.
The reappropriation of stigmatizing labels: implications for social identity
The reappropriation of stigmatizing labels: the reciprocal relationship between power and self-labeling
Psychol. Sci.
Presupposition projection and the semantics of attitude verbs
J. Semant.
The semantics of racial epithets
J. Philos.
Pejoratives
Philos. Compass
Cited by (44)
Are ableist insults secretly slurs?
2020, Language SciencesCitation Excerpt :A content-based account would locate this distinguishing quality in the content of slur terms, but not insults. Predelli (2010) and Cepollaro (2015) suggest that slurs (and not insults) target people based on their group membership. This would mean that ‘lefty’ and ‘mobster’ are slurs, but these do not seem to convey the kind of explosive derogatory force, or have the special badness, supposed to typify slurs.
A non-ideal approach to slurs
2023, SyntheseFocus on slurs
2023, Mind and LanguageAn integrated explicit and implicit offensive language taxonomy
2023, Lodz Papers in PragmaticsExperimentally-Informed Philosophy of Hate Speech
2023, Logic, Argumentation and Reasoning