Beyond the Conversation: The Pervasive Danger of Slurs Moreno Zurita, Alba Pérez Navarro, Eduardo Derogation Nonderogatory occurrences of slurs Normalization Slurs This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the research project "Disagreement in Attitudes: Normativity, Affective Polarization and Disagreement" (PID2019-109764RB-I00), by the Regional Government of Andalusia under the research projects "Public Disagreements, Affective Polarization and Immigration in Andalusia" (B-HUM-459-UGR18) and "The Inferential Identification of Propositions: A Reconsideration of Classical Dichotomies in Metaphysics, Semantics and Pragmatics" (P18-FR2907), and by the University of Granada under a "Contrato Puente" fellowship and the excellence unit FiloLab-UGR (UCE. PPP2017.04). The authors would also like to thank Alex Davies, Maria Jose Frapolli, Andres Soria, Neftali Villanueva, Dan Zeman, and two anonymous reviewers for Organon F, as well as audiences at EvalLang-2019, FiloLab International Summer School 2019, Epistemological and Cognitive Analyses of Cognition, Beliefs and Knowledge, and the IX Meeting of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy, for their helpful comments and suggestions. Document Although slurs are conventionally defined as derogatory words, it has been widely noted that not all of their occurrences are derogatory. This may lead us to think that there are “innocent” occur-rences of slurs, i.e., occurrences of slurs that are not harmful in any sense. The aim of this paper is to challenge this assumption. Our thesis is that slurs are always potentially harmful, even if some of their oc-currences are nonderogatory. Our argument is the following. Deroga-tory occurrences of slurs are not characterized by their sharing any specific linguistic form; instead, they are those that take place in what we call uncontrolled contexts, that is, contexts in which we do not have enough knowledge of our audience to predict what the uptake of the utterance will be. Slurs uttered in controlled contexts, by contrast, may lack derogatory character. However, although the kind of context at which the utterance of a slur takes place can make it nonderogatory, it cannot completely deprive it of its harmful potential. Utterances of slurs in controlled contexts still contribute to normalizing their utter-ances in uncontrolled contexts, which makes nonderogatory occur-rences of slurs potentially harmful too. 2021-10-22T08:55:20Z 2021-10-22T08:55:20Z 2021-08 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Moreno, A., Pérez-Navarro, E. (2021). Beyond the Conversation: The Pervasive Danger of Slurs. Organon F, 28(3), 708-725. 1335-0668. [https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28311] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/71044 10.31577/orgf.2021.28311 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial 3.0 España Publishing House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences