The semantics of racial epithets

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 105, Issue 8, 2008, Pages 416-440

  Hom, Christopher ^a  

^a TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249270666     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2008105834     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. The New Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford, 2001), p. 1157.
2. th Circuit, Judge Stephen Reinhardt.
3. On my understanding, similar views are presented in these talks: Mark Richard, "Epithets and Attitudes" (April, 2005) given at the Syntax and Semantics with Attitude Workshop, University of Southern California, and David Kaplan, "The Meaning of 'Oops' and 'Ouch'" (August 2004) given for the Howison Lectures in Philosophy Series at the University of California, Berkeley.
4. Hornsby, "Meaning and Uselessness: How to Think about Derogatory Words," in Peter French and Howard Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 25 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 128-41 at pp. 140-41.
5. To be clear, I distinguish radical contextualism as a specific theory about epithets from Radical Contextualism as a general theory of all linguistic expressions. For a succinct summary of the latter view, see Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), chapters 1 and 2.
6. Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 43.
7. See Frege, "On Sense and Reference" (1892), in Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1952), pp. 56-78 at p. 61
8. and Frege, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," Mind, LXV (1956): 289-311, at p. 295. I follow Michael Dummett's convention of using 'tone' to refer to what Frege refers to as 'coloring' or 'shading'.
9. See Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981), p. 84 and following.
10. Frege, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," p. 295.
11. Frege, "On Sense and Reference," p. 61, italics added for author's emphasis.
12. Timothy Williamson, "Reference, Inference and the Semantics of Pejoratives," in Joseph Almog and Paolo Leonardi, eds., Festschrift for David Kaplan (New York: Oxford, forthcoming), see pp. 18-26, accessed at 〈http://www.ub.edu/grc_logos/bw/abstracts/timwilliamson.doc〉.
13. Examples (1) and (2) from Kent Bach, "The Myth of Conventional Implicature," Linguistics & Philosophy, XXII, 4 (1999): 327-66, at p. 327.
14. For example, a white, Arkansas teacher who was exasperated over the poor behavior of her sixth grade class told the students, all of whom were black: "I think you're trying to make me think you're a bunch of poor, dumb niggers, and I don't think that." The students told their parents about the remark, and she was promptly fired by the school district. Interestingly, she was reinstated after a petition of support was presented to the school board by the students at her school. For more details, see "Black Students Forgive Teacher's Mistaken Slur," New York Times (October 17, 1988).
15. While appropriation is a well documented phenomenon in sociolinguistics (in particular, see Robin Brontsema, "A Queer Revolution: Reconceptualizing the Debate over Linguistic Reclamation," Colorado Research in Linguistics, XVII (2004): 1-17), the point is that any adequate semantic theory ought to be able to accommodate this central feature of epithets.
16. In particular, see Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard, 1972);
17. and Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," in Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge, 1975), pp. 215-71;
18. and David Kaplan, "Demonstratives" (1977)
19. in Almog, John Perry, and Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan (New York: Oxford, 1989), pp. 481-563. There are certainly dissenting views, but I will not rehearse those arguments here either.
20. th ed.), pp. 171-81.
21. For example, while it is felicitous to say: 'Some of the students went to the party, and, in fact, they all did', where the second conjunct cancels the implicature that some of the students did not go to the party, it is infelicitous to say: 'He's a nigger, but I don't mean anything derogatory by that', where the second conjunct is intended to cancel the derogatory force that was implicated by the first conjunct. Second, an extension of Robert Stalnaker's notion of presupposition fails, in part, for the same reason. See Stalnaker, "Presuppositions," Journal of Philosophical Logic, II (1977): 447-56.
22. Presuppositions ought to be cancelable by the hearer, but the explicit rejection of a racist claim does not thereby cancel the derogatory force of the racist claim. As Mark Richard has rightly pointed out, presupposition is a feature of a cooperative, communicative effort, while derogation is explicitly not. Third, an extension of John Searle's notion of speech acts fails to account for the wide scope reading of the derogatory force of epithets because speech acts are not typically performed when the relevant expressions occur under embedding. See Searle, Speech Acts (New York: Cambridge, 1969). For example, while I can perform the expressive speech act of apologizing by uttering the sentence: 'I am sorry for P', I do not perform the speech act when I utter the sentences: 'I am not sorry for P', 'If I am sorry for P, then Q', or 'Am I sorry for P?'. The problem is that, under the wide scope reading for derogatory force, utterances of sentences like: 'There are no chinks in my class', 'If there are chinks in my class, then Q', or 'Are there chinks in my class?' still express derogatory content.
23. For arguments against appealing to modes of presentation in intensional contexts, see Stephen Schiffer, "The Mode-of-Presentation Problem," in C. Anthony Anderson and Joseph Owens, eds., Propositional Attitudes: The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind (Stanford: CSLI, 1990), pp. 249-68.
24. MacFarlane, "Epistemic Modals Are Assessment-Sensitive," in Brian Weatherson and Andy Egan, eds., Epistemic Modality (New York: Oxford, forthcoming), p. 18, accessed at 〈http://johnmacfarlane.net/epistmod. pdf〉. MacFarlane is specifically addressing the priority of a semantic analysis for epistemic modal claims, but his point holds generally.