Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words; across uses; and across audience members. These types of variability aren’t elegantly explained by extant theories of slurs, , although they leave room for such explanations. This is, I claim, because  those theories are linguistic, and variable offence falls outside the explanatory scope of linguistic mechanisms. Instead, variable offence is largely determined by sociological facts. I propose a mechanism that explains variable offence in terms of the sociological phenomenon of social power. The mechanism is based on the notion that some slurs implicate a low power role for the target, thus seeking to create a power imbalance between speaker and target. The result of this is that the degree of offence is largely proportional to the extent of the power imbalance attempted. The speaker implicates information about the level of power associated with a social role they regard the target as filling. In so doing they also assign an equivalent discourse role. This discourse role carries with it a commensurate level of power in the discourse. Thus, during direct uses a slurring utterance is a discourse move that alters the discourse role of the target. I finally show how this single mechanism elegantly explains three types of variable offence. It also explains two other effects of slurring utterances: silencing and reclamation.