Dan Zeman: Four Recent Issues in the Theory of Slurs

Tuesday May 12 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract

Slurs are expressions used to derogate people based on them belonging to a certain group, members of which are perceived to (essentially) possess negative traits. The main aim of a theory of slurs is to capture slurs’ derogatory potential, as well as to account for their different uses. However, despite not occupying a central place, various interesting issues have recently surfaced in the debate. In this talk, I address four of them. First, I investigate arguments against the usefulness of the notion of “neutral counterpart”, which has played an important role in several major accounts of slurs. I show that, despite the cogency of those arguments, a contextual, time-bound, notion can be recovered and that it can play the envisaged role. Second, I tackle the reclamation of slurs: the literature has mostly assumed that reclamation is a unitary phenomenon; yet, recently, several forms have been distinguished (prominently in the work of Jeshion (2020)). I claim that a distinction between two forms of reclamation made early on by Brontsema (2004) – that between processes of reclamation that get rid of the derogatory content of slurs and processes that preserve that content – remains largely unaccounted for by the main accounts of reclamation. Third, I consider a novel argument by Cepollaro & López de Sa (2022) against the entrenched idea that reclamation can only be initiated by members of the target group; while I agree with their counterexamples, I cast some doubts on their theoretical efficacy. Finally, I consider the vexed issue of banning any use of slurs: noting a change in the attitude towards uses that were once considered non-derogatory, I focus on a more general argument advising caution offered by Moreno & Pérez-Navarro (2021) and show that it has some problematic aspects.

Bio
Dan Zeman is Principal Investigator at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Porto and member of the MLAG. His research focuses on the semantics of “perspectival” expressions – predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms etc. He’s involved in the contemporary debate between contextualism and relativism about these expressions. He’s also interested in the semantics of knowledge ascriptions, epistemic modals and tense. Recently, he became interested in the semantics of slurs and gender terms, hate speech, propaganda.