A drawback for substitutional arguments

Competing theories on the semantics of group pejorative terms (also known as‘slurs’)comprise both advocates and opponents to the Identity Thesis (IT), according to whichthese terms and their neutral counterparts do not differ in semantic value. In the oppo-nents’camp, Christopher Hom has offered an argument based on substitution of slurs andneutral counterparts that both supports his semanticist approach and cast doubts on all IT-based approaches to slurs. We aim to point to a dilemma triggered by this argument based on evidence showing that substitution of some words (including but not restricted to slurs)for non-problematically co-referential pairs may fail to preserve truth-values in some linguistics contexts

Embedding if and only if

Abstract: Compounds of indicative conditionals present some puzzling phenomena. Perhaps most striking, some nested indicative conditionals are uninterpretable. Proponents of NTV hold that indicative conditionals do not have truth values, and they use this to explain why nested indicative conditionals are sometimes uninterpretable: the embedded conditional does not provide the truth conditions needed by the embedding conditional. Cases where nested conditionals are interpretable are then explained away as ad hoc, pragmatic interpretation. We challenge the NTV explanation for why nested conditionals are sometimes interpretable, sometimes not. The standard reasons for NTV about indicative conditionals — triviality results, Gibbardian standoffs, etc. — extend naturally to NTV about biconditionals. So NTVers about conditionals should also be NTVers about biconditionals. But biconditionals embed much more freely than conditionals. If NTV explains why some nested conditionals are uninterpretable, why do biconditionals embed successfully in the very contexts where conditionals do not embed? 1