1.
I agree with Hornsby in that I don’t think a
derogatory term user is necessarily committed to a huge web of racist ideology.
But I don’t know if one can have a negative attitude towards something without
said ideology, as she seems to implicitly state. It seems that they are committed
to at least part of the ideology, i.e., unless they also have the corresponding
intention to use the term in its prescribed way.
2-3.
I don’t know if I completely agree with Hornsby’s criticism
of Brandom (although, I will say that the paper was kind of a slog for me using
a lot of terms I don’t know). It seems to me that derogatory words are simply expressions
such as ‘that A is bad_ (insert derogatory term here)’, with bad and good both being
somewhat indefinable and based upon the speaker’s ideology; and derogatory
words being confined to certain social groups within said ideology. I don’t
know if someone has to commit to a bunch of ideological principles other than
stating that ‘A is bad (or at the very least, doesn’t conform to my view of the
world)’ within a certain ideological framework. In this sense, it would seem
derogatory terms do two things state a principle within the framework and
enforce the ideology onto the external world, which also seems to disprove Hornsby’s
statement that Derogatory words are useless as a term such as ‘terrorist’ or 'extremist' could
be derogatory, while also having a fairly agreed upon use.
The way I understood Hornsby was that, yes, there is a 'huge web of racist ideology' so to speak, but it isn't necessarily fixed entity that everyone has access to in the same way. So one doesn't need to be entirely familiar with the whole ideology of each word they use, rather, whatever ideology one has in using the word is a part of the complex 'web.' The uselessness aspect is confusing for me too, even after lecture, but I think the part about how it's impossible to be fully familiar with any derogatory word might be show that they're useless insofar as everyone's access to each word has the potential to be so different.
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