conceptual

Warning: the following post mentions racial slurs, and even though I am convinced such mentions are not offensive, they might nevertheless be triggering to survivors. One of the phenomena that a linguistic theory of slurs must account for is the fact that even though both the following assertions are offensive unacceptable, they seem prima facie to be unacceptable in different senses: Selena Quintanilla was a spic. John Wayne was a spic. This difference manifests in the fact that even though some people (who, presumably, hold certain negative attitudes towards some other people, including Selena Quintanilla but not John Wayne) would find (1) acceptable, no competent speaker would find (2) acceptable. The deep question, of course, is what does “unacceptable” means here and what is the difference between these two cases. Many philosophers have tried to explain this phenomena in terms of truth, and so we have two broad camps regarding this issue: Elminativist accounts of slu...

Professor Anderson is having a conversation with his wife, Dr. Marion. He tells her he wants to organise a dinner for a couple of recent graduates, John and Mary. His wife asks him why he wants to do so. He argues that he wants to celebrate their graduation and maybe give them some advice on their future careers that might be of help for their navigating the current job market. Dr. Marion thinks that Profr. Anderson helping recent graduates with professional advice is a great idea and also agrees with him that celebrating the graduation of one’s students is also a good enough reason for organising a dinner. However, she is dissatisfied with Profr. Anderson’s justification. “Ok, but what about Ezekiel? He also just recently graduated and could use some advice as well, right?” Very little has been written about this sort of argumentative exchanges in the specialised literature on argumentation theorem but according to ti, Dr. Marion’s reply commits some kind of tu quoque fallacy (also ...