A drawback for substitutional arguments

Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Adam Sennet
2021 Language Sciences  
Competing theories on the semantics of group pejorative terms (also known as 'slurs') comprise both advocates and opponents to the Identity Thesis (IT), according to which these terms and their neutral counterparts do not differ in semantic value. In the opponents' camp, Christopher Hom has offered an argument based on substitution of slurs and neutral counterparts that both supports his semanticist approach and cast doubts on all ITbased approaches to slurs. We aim to point to a dilemma
more » ... ed by this argument based on evidence showing that substitution of some words (including but not restricted to slurs) for non-problematically co-referential pairs may fail to preserve truth-values in some linguistics contexts.
doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101431 fatcat:n5gqynfvyrfdlogrtlvd3vttye