About

Robin Jeshion is a Professor of Philosophy at USC Dornsife. She is a faculty member whose contact information includes her email jeshion@usc.edu, office location STO 228, and office phone (213) 740-0083. Her academic role involves teaching and research within the Department of Philosophy, contributing to the university's broader intellectual community. The university's philosophy faculty, including Professor Jeshion, are part of a diverse and extensive academic environment that encompasses numerous departments, centers, and institutes dedicated to various fields of study.

Research topics

• History
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Environmental science
• Archaeology
• Law

Selected publications

• Slurs, Inflammatory Language, and the Specificity Problem

  Croatian Journal of Philosophy · 2026-01-13

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  In Inflammatory Language, Una Stojnić and Ernie Lepore argue that no extant theory of slurs can explain slurs’ hyperprojectivity, emphasizing their difficulties in accounting for acoustic and phonological resemblance cases in which a word merely sounds like a slur. Further, all content theories confront the Specificity Problem, the charge that the content view’s content, whatever it is, is too specific to encompass the full range of competent weapon uses of slurs. One half of this paper concerns hyperprojectivity. I argue that there is a gap in Inflammatory Language’s overarching dialectic that results from excluding a range of theories. Some theories of slurs are what I call single mechanism views: they aim to explain all the phenomena with a single explanatory mechanism. Multiple mechanism views exploit more than one. Within Inflammatory Language, multiple mechanism theories are bypassed. Yet multiple mechanism theories possess resources to explain slurs’ hyperprojectivity. The other half of this paper addresses the Specificity Problem. I argue that a view I have developed in previous writings, Identity Expressivism, does not succumb to the problem. I craft a version of the Specificity Problem tailor-made for the theory and rooted in Stojnić and Lepore case against other expressivist theories. Identity Expressivism is, I argue, uncompromised by the Specificity Problem.

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• How Vocatives Illuminate Slurs

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23 · 2 citations

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  Abstract In contemporary research on slurs, vocatives are largely ignored. This chapter argues that the interaction between slurs and vocatives offers surprising, novel data that calls out for explanation. In vocatives, slurs and their neutral counterparts diverge; that is, slurs occur freely as vocatives, while neutral counterparts do not. The chapter details the data distinguishing slur and neutral counterpart availability within vocatives and explicate why this data is important for a full account of slurs. Finally, it argues that an expressivist semantics of slurs offers a compelling explanation for this divergence between slurs and their neutral counterparts within vocatives.

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• Provocative Vocatives: Slurs as Expressives

  Philosophical Perspectives · 2024-12-01 · 1 citations

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  ABSTRACT Fifty years ago, Zwicky demonstrated the slur‐neutral counterpart vocative divergence thesis (SNCVD):Slurs occur freely as vocatives. Neutral counterparts do not. In this article, I craft a novel problem for theories of slurs. The Vocatives Problem is the challenge to explain the SNCVD. I argue that there are two strong solutions. One construes slurs as encoding non‐expressive pejorative evaluation. Another construes them as expressives, as tools for expressing speaker‐contempt. I advance further rationales for treating slurs as expressives as a best solution. I argue that four alternative accounts, none of which place restrictions on slurs’ semantics, fail to explain SNCVD. Finally, I show how the Vocatives Problem presents a formidable challenge to leading analyses of slurs that explain slurs’ derogatory force exclusively via appeal to pragmatics, socio‐linguistic rules like prohibitions, or articulations.

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• The Truth about Slurs

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024

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  • History

  Abstract Linguistic theories of slurs confront a problem about truth. Identity theories are theories on which slurs and neutral counterparts are co-designating, and sentences containing them are truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences where the slur is replaced by its neutral counterpart. Identity theories immediately lead to disturbing consequences about truth. If slur S designates what its neutral counterpart NC designates, then since ‘there are NCs’ is true, so too is ‘there are Ss’. Pre-theoretically, this consequence appears unacceptable. To many, it appears to manifest bigotry and as such must get the facts wrong. Such consequences are one impetus for non-identity theories: Null extension non-identity theories, like those of Hom and May, on which slurs have an empty extension, and an alternative non-identity theory due to Richard, on which utterances with slurs lack truth value. This chapter offers novel arguments that non-identity theories are not superior accounts of slurs. It advances four conditions on a theory of slurs and argues that null extension non-identity theories are, in principle, unable to satisfy one of them, the Compositionality Condition. It shows why Richard’s rationale for denying truth to slur-containing utterances is unconvincing. Finally, it defends identity theories, especially expressivist versions, from the charge that they cannot accommodate data about Frege’s puzzle, conceivability, and a version of the Frege-Geach puzzle.

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• The Pure and the Practical

  The Philosophers Magazine · 2021-01-01

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• Varieties of Pejoratives

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Environmental science

  In her chapter, “Pejoratives”, Robin Jeshion distinguishes pejorative lexical items (including slurs like the n-word and suffixes like -tard) from pejorative uses of words (like boy used to refer to an African-American man) and pejorative speech acts, which may occur independently of an utterance of a pejorative lexical items or any words used pejoratively at all (as in Trump’s comment about Megyn Kelly: “blood coming out of her wherever”).

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• Pride and Prejudiced

  Grazer Philosophische Studien · 2020 · 67 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The reclamation of slurs raises a host of important questions. Some are linguistic: What are the linguistic conventions governing the slur post-reclamation and how are they related to the conventions governing it pre-reclamation? What mechanisms engender the shift? Others bend toward the social: Why do a slur’s targets have a special privilege in initiating its reclamation? Is there a systematic explanation why prohibitions on out-group use of reclaimed slurs vary from slur to slur? And how does reclamation contribute to shaping social identities and reversing oppressive social norms and stigma? Most analyses of slur reclamation advance a single model to answer these questions. The author argues that there are different varieties of reclamation. Two predominate, what she calls pride reclamation and insular reclamation . While many features unite pride and insular reclamation, they differ with respect to the purpose of the reclamatory act, the linguistic mechanisms reclaimers employ to execute the linguistic change, and the social and grammatical roles of the reclaimed slur. By distinguishing these two types of reclamation and offering a fine-grained characterization of their properties, the author argues that we gain deeper insight into the reasons why slurs may in principle only be ignited by the target group and why pride- but not insular-reclaimed slurs become available for use by out-group members.

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• Slur Creation, Bigotry Formation: the Power of Expressivism

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2019-10-23 · 20 citations

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  Theories of slurs aim to explain how – via semantics, pragmatics, or other mechanisms – speakers who use slurs convey that targets are inferior persons. I present two novel problems. The Slur Creation Problem: How do terms come to be slurs? An expression ‘e’ is introduced into the language. What are the mechanisms by which ‘e’ comes to possess properties distinctive of slurs? The Bigotry Formation Problem: Speakers’ uses of slurs are a prime mechanism of bigotry formation, not solely bigotry perpetuation. With a use of a slur, how are speakers able to introduce new bigoted attitudes and actions toward targets? I argue that expressivism offers powerful resources to solve the problems.

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• Katherine and the Katherine: On the syntactic distribution of names and count nouns

  THEORIA An International Journal for Theory History and Foundations of Science · 2018-11-06 · 11 citations

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  Names are referring expressions and interact with the determiner system only exceptionally, in stark contrast with count nouns. The-predicativists like Sloat, Matushansky, and Fara claim otherwise, maintaining that syntactic data offers indicates that names belong to a special syntactic category which differs from common count nouns only in how they interact with ‘the’. I argue that the-predicativists have incorrectly discerned the syntactic facts. They have bypassed a large range of important syntactic data and misconstrued a critical data point on which they ground the-predicativism. The right data offers new compelling syntactic grounds for referentialism.

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• Slurs, Dehumanization, and the Expression of Contempt

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-08-22 · 48 citations

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  A theory of slurring terms must explain how and why uses of slurs function to dehumanize. On extant expressivist views, speakers express contempt for targets on account of being in the group. This chapter argues that explaining how slurs dehumanize requires more than encoding the speaker’s contempt toward the target and group. It requires appreciating the intricate moral-psychological structure of contempt, in particular that contempt, as a moral emotion, involves taking those properties that are the basis for regarding the target contemptuously as fundamental to the targets’ <italic>identity as a person</italic>. This feature of contempt is reflected in slurs’ semantics. Understanding contempt is also needed to defend expressivism from important objections.

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Frequent coauthors

• Savas L. Tsohatzidis

  1 shared