Do Racists Speak Truly? On the Truth-Conditional Content of Slurs

Abstract

Slurs denigrate individuals qua members of certain groups, such as race or sexual orientation. Most theorists hold that each slur has a neutral counterpart, i.e., a term that references the slur's target group without denigrating them. According to a widely accepted view, which I call ‘Neutral Counterpart Theory’, the truth‐conditional content of a slur is identical to the truth‐conditional content of its neutral counterpart (so, e.g., ‘Jew’ and ‘kike’ are truth‐conditionally the same, yet the latter is an objectionable or derogatory way of referring to a person's ethnic background). My aim is to challenge this view. I argue that the view fails with respect to slurs that encode truth‐conditional content which does more than merely classify someone as a member of the target group (such as ‘slanty‐eyed’, ‘curry muncher’, ‘camel jockey’, and ‘Jewish American Princess’), as well as slurs that denigrate by virtue of their iconicity (‘ching chong’).

Una aproximación lexicográfica a los insultos de grupo en Uruguay

“…Implica que hagamos decisiones adecuadas cuando utilizamos la lengua en distintas situaciones comunicativas que dependen de las normas sociales vigentes. Si dichas máximas (o submáximas) no son consideradas, las implicaturas surgen 6 . Nunberg considera que la diferencia entre redskin (piel roja) e indian (indio) está en la prescripción de las convenciones de un grupo cuyos miembros tienen actitudes derogatorias sobre los indios americanos.…”

“…DiFranco, 2015, p. 29; Nunberg, 2018, p. 262 y Orlando y Saab, 2019) 5. Por críticas a esta aproximación, ver DiFranco (2015) 6. Aunque esta propuesta presenta ciertos problemas (ver Neufeld, 2019) tiene la ventaja de dar cuenta de los datos y por ello nuestra preferencia por ella en este trabajo.…”

Multiculturalism, Autonomy, and Language Preservation

“…20 So, for example, anyone who says 'bigly' in 2018, to use Nunberg's apt locution, "materially obtrudes" Donald Trump into the context, whether the speech act involved is ironic satire or 19. For alternative accounts compare Potts (2007), Hom (2008), Richard (2008), Jeshion (2013), DiFranco (2015), and others.…”

What Bigots Do Say: A Reply to DiFranco

“…Neutral Counterpart Theories of slurs (NC theories, for short) hold that slurs have neutral counterparts—that is, for each slur there is a term with the same extension but without the slur's derogatory potential—, and that the truth‐conditional contribution of a slur is the same as the truth‐conditional contribution of its neutral counterpart. In (), DiFranco argues that these theses, even if plausible for single‐word slurs like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’, are not suitable for complex slurs such as ‘slanty‐eyed’ and ‘curry muncher’, figurative slurs like ‘Jewish American Princess’, or iconic slurring expressions which do not seem to encode any truth‐conditional content at all, like ‘ching chong’. In this paper, we argue that, pace DiFranco, these expressions do not amount to genuine counterexamples to NC theories.…”

“…In (), DiFranco poses a new problem for NC theories: his contention is that they cannot handle the semantic analysis of a number of expressions that should fall under the scope of (NC) and (SC) but that, were they to do so, would turn into counterexamples to those same theses. Thus, NC theories would be, at best, only partial and, at worst, wrong‐headed theories of slurs.…”