Organon F
Volume 28, August 2021, Issue 3, Pages 708–725
ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)
Research Article | Special issue on Value in Language
Beyond the Conversation: The Pervasive Danger of Slurs
Alba Moreno – Eduardo Pérez-Navarro
https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28311
Although slurs are conventionally defined as derogatory words, it has been widely noted that not all of their occurrences are derogatory. This may lead us to think that there are “innocent” occurrences of slurs, i.e., occurrences of slurs that are not harmful in any sense. The aim of this paper is to challenge this assumption. Our thesis is that slurs are always potentially harmful, even if some of their occurrences are nonderogatory. Our argument is the following. Derogatory occurrences of slurs are not characterized by their sharing any specific linguistic form; instead, they are those that take place in what we call uncontrolled contexts, that is, contexts in which we do not have enough knowledge of our audience to predict what the uptake of the utterance will be. Slurs uttered in controlled contexts, by contrast, may lack derogatory character. However, although the kind of context at which the utterance of a slur takes place can make it nonderogatory, it cannot completely deprive it of its harmful potential. Utterances of slurs in controlled contexts still contribute to normalizing their utterances in uncontrolled contexts, which makes nonderogatory occurrences of slurs potentially harmful too.
Context; derogation; nonderogatory occurrences of slurs; normalization; slurs.
Author
Alba Moreno 
Affiliation
Universidad de Granada
Address
Facultad de Psicología, Despacho 256, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, s/n 18011, Granada, Spain
Author
Eduardo Pérez-Navarro
Affiliation
Universidad de Granada
Address
Facultad de Psicología, Despacho 256, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, s/n 18011, Granada, Spain
Received
3 December 2020
Accepted
9 August 2021
Published online
30 August 2021
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Moreno, A. and Pérez-Navarro, E. (2021). Beyond the Conversation: The Pervasive Danger of Slurs. Organon F, 28(3), 708–725. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28311
Chicago
Moreno, Alba and Pérez-Navarro, Eduardo. 2021. "Beyond the Conversation: The Pervasive Danger of Slurs." Organon F 28 (3): 708–725. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28311
Harvard
Moreno, A. and Pérez-Navarro, E. (2021). Beyond the Conversation: The Pervasive Danger of Slurs. Organon F, 28(3), pp. 708–725. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28311
© Alba Moreno and Eduardo Pérez-Navarro
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