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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that 'inner-city' is not genuinely ambiguous between a racial meaning and a geographic meaning

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Slurs and dog-whistles exhibit a distinct semantic profile from standard ambiguity, functioning as what Nunberg calls 'deferred reference' rather than lexical ambiguity.
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    • 2.A term can encode racial meaning through pragmatic enrichment rather than lexical ambiguity, meaning substitution tests designed for standard ambiguity are inapplicable.
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    • 3.The oddness of 'inner-city' in sentence (3.7) may reflect the covert, deniable nature of dog-whistle content rather than the absence of a racial meaning.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Lexical ambiguity is not the only mechanism by which a term can bear two distinct meanings; Recanati's work on 'meaning underdetermination' shows semantic content varies contextually without classical ambiguity.
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    • 2.If 'inner-city' conveys racial content through social-indexical meaning rather than dictionary senses, the substitution test presupposes a false model of how the racial meaning is encoded.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.If 'inner-city' were genuinely ambiguous between 'African American' and a geographic meaning, substituting it for 'funny' in sentence (3.7) should yield a coherent reading
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    • 2.Sentence (3.7) sounds odd or contradictory even when 'inner-city' is used in the purportedly racial sense
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    • 3.Genuine lexical ambiguity allows a term to be used in either sense without contradiction, as demonstrated by 'funny' in sentence (3.6)
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