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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) 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 (Philosophy Compass, Vol. 5, Issue 2,
164-185, 2010) 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 (Philosophical Studies,
forthcoming) - PDF Pejoratives are the class
of expressions that are meant to insult or disparage. They include swear words and
slurs. These words allow speakers
to convey emotional states beyond the truth-conditional contents that they
are normally taken to encode. The
puzzle arises because, although pejoratives seem to be a semantically unified
class, some of their occurrences are best accounted for truth-conditionally,
while others are 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 motivates a novel, semantic, analysis of pejorative language. 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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