美国哲学家Ernest Lepore教授
Acting Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS)

时间：9月4日下午17：40

地点：北京大学老化学楼227教室

Title: On Slurring, Perspective, and Indeterminacy

Abstract The problem of slurs is in part the problem of how words can hurt.  We cannot expect to catalogue such effects in general—language is too varied, emotions too unpredictable, and evil too insidious.  But many claim that a slur, by virtue of what it means, is offensive; that is, slur terms express contents that are objectionable because of how they characterize the group they target. I find this claim absurd, as I will try to convince you. Nevertheless, I think there is an insight behind it that needs to be captured, namely, that slurs are associated with negative ways of thinking about their targets, and consequently, those who use slurs often take negative perspectives on a target group that can cause hurt. This alone gives us special reasons to refrain from using them. My goal in this paper is to build upon a number of prior investigations, particularly, Anderson and Lepore (2011), in an effort to parse the workings of these effects.

I begin on a cautionary note. Our community has banded together to lessen the harm that slurs can exact by prohibiting their use.  This is a reasonable strategy, and since I accept that I am subject to it, this has been a difficult paper to write.  I have tried to refrain, wherever possible, from exhibiting slurs, instead speaking allusively, especially for the racial slurs of American English, whose power we are in no position as philosophers and critics to defuse.  Where I need concrete examples, I proceed not in the spirit of neutral scientific curiosity but rather with the sense of having chosen the lesser of two evils. As I have already noted, the standard view about why slurs are offensive is that they express objectionable contents in one way or another.   Anderson and Lepore (2013) argued against all such views, offering in their place a view they dubbed Prohibitionism  -- the view that once relevant authorities catalogue a word as a slur it becomes one, and from then on its usage is prohibited, and so, its violations are offensive.  Critics have found this view unsatisfactory because of questions it leaves open: e.g., it provides no story about why slurs are prohibited in the first place?  Nor does it explain how slurs differ from other banished terms, e.g., profanities? Nor, as have most felt, does it account for the varying degrees of force of the offense with which different slurring events are received. However, nothing in the view per se commits to there being simple or uniform answers to these questions. Indeed, I believe that the critics have failed to appreciate the range of available options that remain open once content theories have been rejected. For example, according to me, slurs are often associated with negative perspectives, but not as a matter of content, at least not as that notion has been traditionally understood.  The story I want to tell about their perniciousness I hope will better motivate Prohibitionism. Accordingly, I will proceed as follows: first, I quickly review arguments against content theories; then amplify on Prohibitionism, and rebut some of the more pressing concerns others have raised; I then explore two under-appreciated aspects of slurring: its open-ended interpretability and its perspective-taking nature.  The existence of both features reinforces the challenge to content theories of slurs, and points to an explanation of their power to offend without having to assign them offensive contents