Felix Larsson: On Slurs

Abstract

I’ll say a little something about slurs. Philosophers of language have discussed why it is that slurs are (or using slurs is) offensive even in “embedded” contexts, where the speaker doesn’t strictly speaking ascribe the slur to anyone (like inside negations, belief reports, conditionals etc.). There’s been several more or sometimes less distinct explanations for this. But I think there’s been a tendency to treat slurs as a little too special. I’ll try to say something about them from a Hare style view of evaluative terms and utterances in general. (All this may very well be old hat, but then I guess people will let me know, and that’s good, too.)

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