Hom vs Camp [Hui Yang]

Hom prefers semantic strategy to explain slurs, which means slurs are bad words in every context of utterance. He first rejects three plausible formulations of the pragmatic strategy, seemingly believing they are too vague to be a principled analysis. He then tries to prove in his paper that words like “nigger” themselves contain bad meaning in all possible contexts. 

In Camp’s point of view, slurs contain two parts: the objects they point out, and the perspectives from a certain group of people’s towards such objects. She points out, notably, ones cannot reject the slurs without accepting the designated meaning of them at the first place. That is probably why, before she starts her explanation, she first apologizes for using plenty of slurs in her paper that may offend some readers. 

I prefer Camp’s view, although I am not completely on her side. I disagree with Hom’s rejection of the pragmatic strategy for they cannot provide a principled analysis, and how he believes words like “nigger” has to be offensive in all utterances (considering the examples I gave last week about how “nigger” is used in a positive way in the black/color communities). I do not think something can be wrong only because it cannot provide a principled analysis, because I do not believe there must be a principled analysis for everything, and in order to make such claim, you need to first prove why there has to be a principled analysis for the things we are talking about.