Schedule 74. StuTS

Slurs can be, as those who have been at the receiving end of them may attest, strong at causing serious offense, humour, and even damage to the social standing of the speaker themselves.
Slurs have an offense-causing effect in many situations – many of which some competing accounts cannot account for. However, some social situations (such as the ‘innocent’ use of slurs) cause them to not unfold this effect, which is another obstacle for any account seeking to explain how slurs come to cause offense. In my talk, I will assess some of the shortcomings of those accounts relying on expressive meaning, conventional implicature, or prohibition face in the light of this social contextuality.
Finally, I will propose a view taking them into account, utilising the theory of speech acts.

Slurs can be, as those who have been at the receiving end of them may attest, strong at causing serious offense, humour, and even damage to the social standing of the speaker themselves.
Many of the views seeking to explain them may fall short at either explaining effects that occur in specific social environment such as the "innocent use" of slurs, which means either the use of a slur in what may be called a bigoted environment, leading to the slur not being perceived as offensive, or the use of a slur used by someone part of the group of people the slur describes, which may just as well lead to the same result. On the other end, most views also fail to account for the fact that the mere mention of a slur may also cause offense.
I will compare competing views such as the descriptivist, expressivist, presuppositional and prohibitionist one and outline a view that is able to deal with the problems mentioned above, utilising speech acts as well as a sense of common ground.

References:
Anderson, Luvell; Lepore, Ernie (2013): What Did You Call Me? Slurs as Prohibited Words. In Analytic Philosophy 54 (3), pp. 350–363. DOI: 10.1111/phib.12023.
Cappelen, Herman; Dever, Josh (2019): Bad language. First Edition. Oxford, New York, NY: Oxford University Press (Contemporary introductions to philosophy of language).
DIFRANCO, RALPH; MORGAN, ANDREW (2023): No Harm, Still Foul: On the Effect-Independent Wrongness of Slurring. In J. of the Am. Philos. Assoc., pp. 1–19. DOI: 10.1017/apa.2022.18.
Falbo, Arianna (2021): Slurs, neutral counterparts, and what you could have said. In Philosophical Books 62 (4), pp. 359–375. DOI: 10.1111/phib.12217.
Hom, Christopher; May, Robert (2013): Moral and Semantic Innocence. In Analytic Philosophy 54 (3), pp. 293–313. DOI: 10.1111/phib.12020.
Whiting, Daniel (2013): It's Not What You Said, It's the Way You Said It: Slurs and Conventional Implicatures. In Analytic Philosophy 54 (3), pp. 364–377. DOI: 10.1111/phib.12024.

Info

Day: 2023-10-27
Start time: 12:00
Duration: 00:25
Room: Hofburg Raum 2
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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