Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox
News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about …

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work that fixes its subject matter using
the terms 'fake news' and 'post-truth'. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to …

Conceptual engineering is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with assessing
representational devices such as concepts and words. Conceptual engineers looks for the …

Notice: This PDF version was distributed by request to members of the Friends of the SEP
Society and by courtesy to SEP content contributors. It is solely for their fair use …

We wear two hats when we talk about slurs, as engaged citizens and as scholars of
language. The words had very little theoretical interest for philosophy or linguistic semantics …

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness
behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In …

Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of
race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an …

On April 12, 2011, upon being issued a technical by referee Bennie Adams, Kobe Bryant lost
his cool and, on national television, called Adams a “fucking faggot”. The media brouhaha …

The US government conducts a population census every 10 years, adds up the counts by
geographic location, and uses the resulting numbers in formulas to allocate seats in the …

Are racial slurs always offensive and are racial stereotypes always negative? How, if at all,
are racial slurs and stereotypes different and unequal for members of different races …