| Summary: | Worse yet, as we shall see, while terms that resemble a standard articulation of a slur trigger a pejorative effect, not all articulations of the slur trigger one, or to the same extent. They attach to an articulation, not a slur, and thus, are triggered even when the slur is not used (or, in certain cases, as we shall see below, when the slur isn't even mentioned); second, their open-endedness makes them unsuitable to be communicated content. Instead, it is triggered by features of tokens of a slur - their articulations - which can be present even when the slur is not, and may not be present even when the slur is. Slurs carry a potential to offend that their neutral counterparts do not.[1] The predominant strategy for explaining this difference has been to hardwire these pejorative effects into I semantics i , though, typically, not as part of I truth-conditional i content.[2] The options are many, e.g., by way of conventional implicature,[3] presupposition,[4] or a specific, I sui generis i expressive type of conventionally encoded meaning.[5] All these various I Pejorative Content Accounts i are committed to slurs having the potential to offend ultimately because of contents they encode; they diverge over the mechanisms of implementation.[7] Critics of Pejorative Content Accounts have settled on non-content, word-based accounts. Nor will an appeal to meaning explain its absence in certain articulations of a slur, and the possible variation in the offensive effect across different articulations of a slur, more on which below.
|
|---|