Slurs, Pejoratives, and Hate Speech

Abstract

Conditional Semantic Accounts: Critique of Truth-Conditional Accounts) allow that sentences containing slurs can be true.Hom 2008 and Hom and May 2013 claim that they are always false.Saka 2007 and Richard 2008 argue they are neither true nor false.The underlying question is whether responding "true" or "false" to slurring utterances makes one complicit in bigotry. Truth-Conditional Semantic AccountsHom 2008 and Hom 2012 provide a truth-conditional semantics that captures the derogatory content of slur terms as a property of the contemptibility of targets.This framework is later developed in Hom and May 2013, Hom and May 2014, and Hom and May 2018, which consider the role of oppressive ideologies in the semantics of slurs.The key hypothesis here is that slurs work like fictional terms.This explains the distinction from neutral counterparts: slurs and neutral counterparts target the same individuals but do not refer to the same individuals.They differ in extension and thus differ in meaning.The motivation for a distinction in meaning comes from the fact that moral facts falsify the predication of a slur: no one deserves to be subject to negative moral evaluation merely because of one's group membership, thus the utterance is always false.The derogatory content exhausts the truth-conditional contribution made by a slur term.Diaz-Leon 2019 develops an inferentialist truth-conditional account in response to critiques to Hom-style semantics.Other accounts provide different arguments for the distinction between slurs and neutral counterparts.For example, DiFranco 2015 argues that compound slurs raise difficulties for semantic accounts that take slurs and neutral counterparts to be equivalent, whereas Caso and Lo Gercio 2016 argues that these cases can in fact be accommodated.Other accounts focus on the truth-aptness features of slurs.Picardi 2006 argues that slurs and pejoratives contribute the derogatory content as part of what speakers are saying.Miščević 2011 argues that slurs are truth-apt and explains their semantics as containing stereotypical properties.Neufeld 2019 develops an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs and shows that this view receives robust empirical support from cognitive psychology.

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