A Non-Expressivist Conventional Implicature View of Slurs

Felka Katharina (Universität Konstanz)

The Slovak-Austrian Philosophy of Language Network (https://danzeman.weebly.com/slovak-austrian-cooperation.html) announces an online talk by Katharina Felka (University of Graz), entitled "A Non-Expressivist Conventional Implicature View of Slurs".  The talk is on Monday, JUNE 28, 11.00 CEST and is hosted by the Slovak Academy of Sciences, as part of the regular seminar of the Department of Analytic Philosophy. Please write to [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to participate.

Here is the abstract of the talk:

The talk develops an intermediate conventional implicature view of slurs that integrates two separate claims found in the literature, namely (i) Bach’s (2018) claim that slurs contribute their derogative content in the manner of asides and (ii) Potts’s (2005) claim that asides conventionally implicate their content. The resulting view is a non-expressivist variant of a conventional implicature view of slurs: derogation performed by using a slur results from conveying descriptive content rather than from expressing a derogative attitude toward the target group. It is argued that this is a decisive advantage of the proposed view, since it can account for features of slurs that are mysterious from an expressivist point of view.