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Christopher Hom

Assistant Professor in Philosophy

Texas Tech University

 

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Department of Philosophy

Texas Tech University

Box 43092

Lubbock, TX 79409-3092

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

christopher.hom@ttu.edu

806.742.0373 (Ext. 335)

265D Philosophy

 

 

The Semantics of Racial Epithets (Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 105, 416-440, 2008) – PDF

 

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets.  But what do they actually mean, if anything?  While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory.  I call this view Combinatorial Externalism (CE).  CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions.  Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components.  The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection.

 

 

 

Pejoratives (forthcoming, Philosophy Compass, updated 11/5/09) – PDF

 

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive.  Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes.  Because these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis.  The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena, and provide a preliminary assessment of the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis.

 

 

 

A Puzzle About Pejoratives (draft) – PDF

 

Pejoratives are the class of expressions that includes swear words, insults, and slurs.  These words allow speakers to convey emotional states beyond the content that they are normally taken to truth-conditionally encode.  The puzzle arises because, although pejoratives are a semantically unified class, some of their occurrences seem to be best accounted for truth-conditionally, while others seem to be best accounted for non-truth-conditionally.  Where current, non-truth-conditional, views in the literature fail to provide a unified solution for the puzzle, this paper proposes a novel, semantic, analysis of pejorative language that succeeds.  The significance of the proposed solution is not only linguistic in nature, but also, philosophical, as it both provides a new argument for, and sheds further light on, the nature of semantic externalism.