Why do slurs offend even when you’re not using them to insult anyone, and what does that reveal about how meaning, context, and social norms actually work in language?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Ernest Lepore is a philosopher and cognitive scientist and a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.
2. Interview Summary
Ernest Lepore opens by framing his book project as (mostly) about slurs and the puzzle of why they’re offensive in a way that seems resistant to tidy semantic explanation. He surveys familiar families of views: semantic accounts that try to locate the offense in conventional meaning (via things like presupposition- or expressivist-style mechanisms), and non-semantic accounts that treat the offense as grounded in broader social norms—e.g., “prohibition” approaches or association-based stories where two expressions can pick out the same thing while one carries a toxic social “tone.”
He then motivates a central distinction between what a speaker expresses and what they articulate—the idea that certain phonetic or graphic presentations can be offensive even when the speaker isn’t using, endorsing, or even mentioning the slur’s meaning. A key data point is that even “inert” meaning-attributions can still offend (e.g., trying to state what a slur “means”), and he emphasizes cases where people are offended by the mere production of a sound-pattern that matches a slur despite the speaker’s intent and despite the word’s being from another language (including a classroom example involving a Mandarin filler word at University of Southern California). He extends the point with analogies: expressions that merely resemble taboo slurs, and symbols whose form can trigger condemnation regardless of etymology or original use.
In the latter part of the interview, Lepore zooms out to broader metasemantic and metaphysical issues about language, including what words and expressions are supposed to be. He describes how work on quotation pushed him to revisit the “shape theory” tradition associated with figures like Donald Davidson and Alfred Tarski, and how David Kaplan’s critique both convinced him something was wrong and yet didn’t supply a satisfying alternative. He connects these issues to puzzles about reference-change (the “Madagascar” case), and to a larger theme he returns to near the end: post-1970s lessons from Saul Kripke / Hilary Putnam-style externalism suggesting we often don’t know what our words mean in the way philosophers once assumed—prompting interest in views on negotiation/amelioration (e.g., Sally Haslanger and others) where speakers can coordinate meaning “on the fly.”
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:50 - Pejoratives
08:39 - Framing the problem
13:59 - Pejoratives as not cancellable=
17:30 - Articulation account
21:43 - Pejoratives as entirely audience-dependent
25:02 - Too many pejoratives?
28:30 - Benefits of articulations account
34:12 - What about intentions?
37:02 - Relation to other features of language
39:36 - More general account?
44:44 - Language differences
46:26 - On Words
52:11 - Tolerance
54:37 - Abstracta articulations
57:29 - Gaps in philosophical literature and communication
1:05:17 - Stage-continuant view
1:10:25 - Shape-theory
1:12:50 - Semantic externalism and deference
1:17:37 - Using words without knowing the content
1:20:39 - Nathan Salmon’s view
1:25:29 - Scott Soames’ view
1:26:26 - Skepticism about the disagreement
1:29:18 - Rule-following
1:30:36 - Two-dimensionalism
1:32:14 - Propositions
1:33:57 - Taking things for granted
1:38:40 - Upcoming book on deference and communication
1:42:25 - Evolution of language
1:44:15 - Conclusion
