Slurs and lexical presumption

•Presents a general view of pejorative language in terms of a species of conventional implicature called “lexical presumption.”•Argues that slurs are a special case of that general view.•Defends this account of slurs as an instance of what Hom and Croom call “pragmatic minimalism.”•Rebuts objections to pragmatic minimalism.•In particular, offers to explain non-offensive uses of slurs, in each of several ways.

Grice's cryptic notion of “conventional implicature” has been developed in a number of different ways. This paper deploys the simplest version, Lycan's (1984) notion of “lexical presumption,” and argues that slurs and other pejorative expressions have normal truth-conditional content plus the most obvious extra implicatures. The paper then addresses and rebuts objections to “conventional implicature” accounts that have been made in the literature, particularly those which focus on non-offensive uses of slurs.