Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Course Review [Anthony Baker]
I found the unit on slurs to have changed the way I think about language, specifically slurs, the most. I knew that there was something inexplicable about the pejorative nature of slurs, and how exactly they function/are used in the world, but I hadn't put much thought into how it could be explained. After looking at different theories behind as to what this derogatory force is, and how it comes into being, I can't say that my understanding of slurs is now more easily explained, but rather it's broadened to account for them in new ways. I particularly like Hom's account of semantic externalism, because it gives a nice account as to how is meant by an utterance can be broken down into both what is said and what is implicated all while maintaining the idea that pejorative content is built into each word.
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Yeah, I like Hom's account too, but I feel like it doesn't really account for a slur's origin, at least not as well as the perspectivalism view. It seems that some point a word that might not have been a slur beforehand becomes a slur, and that prior to the word becoming a slur, it couldn't have meant a large system of racist ideology as such a system hadn't existed yet; perhaps at some point the derogatory ideology gets rubbed off on the word, which might help explain the slur's content. I wonder if a person has to stand in causal relationship to an ideology in order for a slur to be derogatory; does the N- word still carry force if uttered by a mongolian in mongolia towards a black person? My intuition tells me no.
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