Robert May
speaker
328 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2015
last heard Jun 2015
Robert May’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's by members of the targeted group using this as their self-moniker, the attempt is to diffuse it to have a particular political effect and to take it from the category of a pejorative to the category of a non-pejorative.
We might want to have and we propose a particular semantics which will allow you to sort of see what the semantic change is.
But the dynamics, the social dynamics of that change.
Change, you know, is one which is a very complicated set of political activities, education, social, you know, engineering, all sorts of things.
We may set we want people to stop doing things as a mem as a societal norm, then we may put into place sanctions.
So for example, we have very strong sanctions against the use of hate speech.
Against this kind of speech, because you know we're trying to find methods, that's a very blunt method, it seems to me, to change attitudes, which is what we're trying to do.
The ultimate goal is to eradicate from the fiber of society and our cultures racism, anti-Semitism, and all these hate-based attitudes.
That's our goal.
And so a part of what is a somewhat effective strategy for trying to eradicate this is a
appropriation of pejorative terms to make them non-pejorative.
But how that actually happens
Is a question for sociologists and social psychologists, not for philosophers.
It's a question about how you change by social political action people's attitudes.
I think the case of gay and queer have been, you know, paradigm examples in which that's been done very effectively.
Most pejoratives, when they change to being non-pejoratives, just kind of drift out of usage.
You know, one's like
Like
Limey, for example, or frog, or you know, the ones that were all popular during, you know, the middle of the twentieth century, particularly for, you know, uh national groups.
And those just become rather archaic and quaint.
Showing 241–260 of 328 · page 13 of 17
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