Slurs, Inflammatory Language, and the Specificity Problem

In Inflammatory Language, Una Stojnić and Ernie Lepore argue that no extant theory of slurs can explain slurs’ hyperprojectivity, emphasizing their difficulties in accounting for acoustic and phonological resemblance cases in which a word merely sounds like a slur. Further, all content theories confront the Specificity Problem, the charge that the content view’s content, whatever it is, is too specific to encompass the full range of competent weapon uses of slurs. One half of this paper concerns hyperprojectivity. I argue that there is a gap in Inflammatory Language’s overarching dialectic that results from excluding a range of theories. Some theories of slurs are what I call single mechanism views: they aim to explain all the phenomena with a single explanatory mechanism. Multiple mechanism views exploit more than one. Within Inflammatory Language, multiple mechanism theories are bypassed. Yet multiple mechanism theories possess resources to explain slurs’ hyperprojectivity. The other half of this paper addresses the Specificity Problem. I argue that a view I have developed in previous writings, Identity Expressivism, does not succumb to the problem. I craft a version of the Specificity Problem tailor-made for the theory and rooted in Stojnić and Lepore case against other expressivist theories. Identity Expressivism is, I argue, uncompromised by the Specificity Problem.