Masters Thesis

A limit case to Camp's semantics of slurs

Bigots use slurs to derogate their targets, but the source of slurs' derogatory force remains in dispute among linguists and philosophers of language largely because existing theories have struggled to fully account for three observed aspects of slurs: slurs to tend resist canceling, project out of commitment quarantining constructions, and elicit conflicting intuitions about truth. Elisabeth Camp's livbrid-expressivism, which holds that slurs derive their derogatory force from an expressive semantic component, expressing the appropriateness of a derogating perspective toward the target group, does well addressing these problems. Despite this. I argue that Camp's semantic account becomes doubtful in cases where a bigoted speaker does know not the slur is in fact a slur. Such cases, I go on to argue, suggest that a pi tgmatic explanation of slurs' derogatory content is at work and that this presses Camp to provide an account for how slurs' derogatory component becomes conventionally semantic.

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