Slurs and expressive commitments

Most accounts of the derogatory meaning of slurs are semantic. Recently, Nunberg (2018) proposed a purely pragmatic account offering a compelling picture of the relation between derogatory content and social context. Nunberg posits that the semantic content of slurs is identical to that of neutral counterparts, and that derogation is a result of the association of slur use with linguistic conventions of bigoted speakers. The mechanism responsible for it is a special kind of conversational implicature. However, this paper argues that Nunberg’s proposal suffers from technical and conceptual problems regarding the application of the concepts of implicature and convention. It is proposed that the implicature mechanism should be replaced by expressive commitment attribution (developed for expressives in Hess Journal of Pragmatics, 129,13-33 2018, 2019). The account advocated here preserves crucial insights of Nunberg’s analysis (and incorporates elements of other pragmatic accounts, cf. Anderson and Lepore Noûs 47(1), 25-48, 2013a, Analytic Philosophy 54(3), 350-363, 2013b; Bolinger Nous, 51(3), 439-462, 2017), giving them a firmer conceptual basis. It supports a distinction between derogation and offensiveness of slurs that improves on the one proposed by Hom and May (Analytic Philosophy 54(3), 293-313 2013), and sheds light on puzzling borderline cases: the use of slurs by ignorant speakers and controversies surrounding the status of some words as potentially slurs.