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Assistant Professor in
Philosophy Texas Tech University Papers Department of Philosophy Texas Tech University Box 43092 Lubbock, TX 79409-3092 |
christopher.hom@ttu.edu 806.742.0373 (Ext. 335) 265D Philosophy |
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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. |
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