The Social Life of Slurs

Abstract

We wear two hats when we talk about slurs, as engaged citizens and as scholars of language. The words had very little theoretical interest for philosophy or linguistic semantics before they took on a symbolic role in the culture wars that broke out in and around the academy in the 1980s. 1 But once scholars' attention was drawn to the topic, they began to discern connections to familiar problems in meta-ethics, semantics, and the philosophy of language. The apparent dual nature of the words-they seem both to describe and to evaluate or expressseemed to make them an excellent test bed for investigations of non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning, of certain types of moral language, of Fregean "coloring," and of hybrid or "thick" terms, among other things. There are some writers who take slurs purely as a topical jumping-off point for addressing those issues and don't make any explicit effort to bring their discussions back to the social questions that drew scholars' attention to the words in the first place. But most seem to feel that their research ought to have some significance beyond the confines of the common room.That double perspective can leave us a little wall-eyed, as we try to track slurs as both a social and linguistic phenomenon. The distinction between the two perspectives isn't always 1 That isn't to say that scholars have ignored the sorts of words we now describe as slurs. They've