Hornsby's conclusion about language being a "mechanical affair" without speakers proved his point about words and their connotations to me more than any of his other arguments. Words can have meanings of their own, but only because of what we attribute to them as speakers and audience members ourselves.
Hornsby's account of how these words are 'useless' and the reason why certain viewpoints cannot account for them seems lacking to me. The examples were just a little weak.
I'm not sure I completely understand what Hornsby means by calling derogatory terms 'useless,' but if it means that the word itself is not necessary for speech (because of alternative terms or what have you) then I would have to argue that a lot of words are 'useless' based on the same logic.
I agree with you that Hornsby could benefit from being clearer about what she means when she calls derogatory words useless. I don't think she considers them useless merely because there are alternative terms, otherwise as you say, there would be lots of words which aren't derogatory but which are useless. I think what she primarily has in mind when calling derogatory words 'useless' is that because we do not endorse the use of derogatory words, they have no usefulness to us. If a derogatory word is a constituent in some statement which purports to be true or false, we do not argue either way, rather we choose not to engage with it, condemn its use, or something of the sort (Hornsby 2001, 2-3) Even under this notion of uselessness though, I agree that her arguments are underwhelming. She treats it as virtually a priori that any morally decent person recognizes the uselessness of derogatory words, and not only is there no compelling reason in my mind to accept this, but her definition of 'useless' is not as clear as I would like it to be.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this explanation for the most part. Hornsby can't possibly just be pointing out that there are neutral alternatives for derogatory words. I could be wrong about this, but it sound like there's some sort of combination in Hornsby of the assumptions that language is defined by use and that the descriptive theorists, in some sense, were still right to define things in terms of truth values. Therefore, since derogatory words express something like a gesture rather than something truth-evaluative, they don't make sense within the truth-evaluative model and are useless to anyone attempting to produce a successful speech act.
DeleteI agree with your point about words deriving their meaning from what the speaker attributes to them. If that is the case, I also disagree with Hornsby labeling derogatory words as useless since we can attribute properties to these terms.
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