Why aren't murder ''jokes'' as bad or worse than rape ones?

Firstly, my point was that concern for language as a site of social power is not unusual in any ordinary sense, but the culmination of a philosophical consensus borne out over the last century. It should not warrant clarification, although it does here given that you appear to fundamentally misconstrue the point, that this is a question of people becoming aware of - or valorising as a subject of intellectual concern - certain aspects of language in a particular way, not those aspects of language being new in and of themselves. As such, it is a patent strawman to say that the linguistic turn is nothing new given the historical social power of language. The question is one of a particular conceptualisation and approach to language, which is local to the last century (although anomalous traces can be found, most of all in Herder's critique of Kant), and has thus had effects previously absent. No one denies that the nature of language has not relevantly changed, and thus those aspects of power now conceived preceded their current conceptualisation.

Secondly, it is an empty caricature to impute the belief of a 'pro-rape movement' to those who acknowledge role of language and intersubjectivity in structuring thought and action. Firstly, no one thinks there a unified mass of persons subordinate to a formal structure, adhering to broad doctrines and conceiving of themselves as a movement. Secondly, no one thinks that people party to gendered language and social relations generally have intention or preference for rape; they merely think them implicated in a systematic linguistic context which perpetuates those practices. For those reasons, I think very few people conceptualise the problem as a 'pro-rape movement'.

Nope, it's because it involves prisoners. People think they deserve it because they're prisoners, not because they're men.

I'm not a continental philosopher so you're not going to persuade me that this is anything more than a verbose way of writing, "What people say influences others' political views." True but trivial.

Persecuting people for what they say is generally regarded as highly anti-social unless there is some overriding special circumstance, like interning members of the British Union of Fascists during WWII. If there's no significant pro-rape movement that needs to be strongly suppressed it makes no sense to persecute an elderly woman for making an obviously allegorical comment (she was presumably referring to the 'rape of the Sabine women' from Roman mythology).

So, I think it is incumbent on you to prove the existence of that movement if you want to defend this incident. If you are talking about something much more vague and weak, with few if any detectable current or likely future consequences, then it does not justify persecuting peaceful speakers.

This is hardly necessarily continental, if that category can be sustained in any sense beside; the late Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations entail as much (i.e. unanimously received as the most important philosophical work in the twentieth century). The point is best given in the context of the historical tendency to presume word senses unproblematically reference external objects, which found formalisation at the beginning of the linguistic turn in the logical atomism and then postivism of Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. The basic effort of which was to establish a logical syntax underlying ordinary language which directly mapped onto the external world, such that world-referencing signifiers attached to logical operators ('and', 'or', 'to', etc.) could yield propositional knowledge. Sentences thereby fell into three categories: those sentences whose constitutive semantics referenced external objects (i.e. cat, dog) in a way consonant with how the world was (i.e. a candidate for truth found truthful); those sentences whose constitutive semantics referenced external objects in a way non-consonant with how the world was (i.e. a candidate for truth found false); and those sentences whose constitutive semantics simply did not reference observable objects and were, as such, unverifiable and not a candidate for truth or falsity (i.e. pure nonsense, including value theory, aesthetics, metaphysics, various psychological statements, etc.).

In contradistinction, the late Wittgenstein neither saw language as isomorphic with reality, nor answerable to any external justification. He saw the rules constitutive of the intersubjective basis of any linguistic practice as defining the limits of sense. That is to say, utterances only hold sense relative to a given speech-community, and thus adherence to pre-given rules is a condition of intelligibility. Speech is in the first instances not world-referencing, but use-functioning; something that, like a tool, you do something with. Namely, perform a function relative to various contexts according to the rules of a speech-community. In the most obvious cases: exchanging vows in marriage is not simply referencing a psychological state, but doing something (marriage); a park ranger calling out to children skating on a frozen lake is not merely referencing a state of affairs wherein the lake is frozen, but doing something (warning). This pragmatic, context-relative conception of language when taken as definitive of language eases one into the above: that the canons of sense are relative to a speech-community in an important way. On this view, criteria of truth and falsity are internal to the rules constitutive of a language, for they simply hold no pre-linguistic sense. When uttering various everyday observations, such as the necessary form of the primary colours, one is not referencing a metaphysically independent reality, but merely stating the terms of sense of the linguistic game one is party to. Justification can only appeal to the resources internal to a language-game. An upshot of the absence of external linguistic justification is a certain cognizance about the contingency of any given linguistic context, and the practical and intellectual forces acting on and frequently distorting that context. Namely, if the terms and limits to our sense, which are requisites to justifying any thought and action, and are thus supremely consequential, are in the first instance mediated by social practices, then they are an unequivocal site of non-trivial social power. I should hasten to add, if only to defang the presumption of relativism which might premise your immediate disregard, that there are general limits to the kind of linguistic rules constitutive of our understanding: using language in certain ways inheres orders of magnitude greater utility than other ways, such that there are obvious pragmatic limits to language, while the biological composition of humans ensures common possession of a uniform set of capacities, which sets its own natural limits (i.e. our discriminatory capacities incline towards the division external reality into a certain number of categories).

As repeatedly stated, the point is one of systematic linguistic rules constitutive of the terms and bounds of sense of understanding, to which any thought and action must appeal, and which are thereby non-trivially defining of social relations. In view of this, certain tendencies within language have terrible effects, including but certainly not limited to its being gendered.

I call bull ****.

This is hardly necessarily continental, if that category can be sustained in any sense beside; the late Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations entail as much (i.e. unanimously received as the most important philosophical work in the twentieth century). The point is best given in the context of the historical tendency to presume word senses unproblematically reference external objects, which found formalisation at the beginning of the linguistic turn in the logical atomism and then postivism of Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. The basic effort of which was to establish a logical syntax underlying ordinary language which directly mapped onto the external world, such that world-referencing signifiers attached to logical operators ('and', 'or', 'to', etc.) could yield propositional knowledge. Sentences thereby fell into three categories: those sentences whose constitutive semantics referenced external objects (i.e. cat, dog) in a way consonant with how the world was (i.e. a candidate for truth found truthful); those sentences whose constitutive semantics referenced external objects in a way non-consonant with how the world was (i.e. a candidate for truth found false); and those sentences whose constitutive semantics simply did not reference observable objects and were, as such, unverifiable and not a candidate for truth or falsity (i.e. pure nonsense, including value theory, aesthetics, metaphysics, various psychological statements, etc.).

In contradistinction, the late Wittgenstein neither saw language as isomorphic with reality, nor answerable to any external justification. He saw the rules constitutive of the intersubjective basis of any linguistic practice as defining the limits of sense. That is to say, utterances only hold sense relative to a given speech-community, and thus adherence to pre-given rules is a condition of intelligibility. Speech is in the first instances not world-referencing, but use-functioning; something that, like a tool, you do something with. Namely, perform a function relative to various contexts according to the rules of a speech-community. In the most obvious cases: exchanging vows in marriage is not simply referencing a psychological state, but doing something (marriage); a park ranger calling out to children skating on a frozen lake is not merely referencing a state of affairs wherein the lake is frozen, but doing something (warning). This pragmatic, context-relative conception of language when taken as definitive of language eases one into the above: that the canons of sense are relative to a speech-community in an important way. On this view, criteria of truth and falsity are internal to the rules constitutive of a language, for they simply hold no pre-linguistic sense. When uttering various everyday observations, such as the necessary form of the primary colours, one is not referencing a metaphysically independent reality, but merely stating the terms of sense of the linguistic game one is party to. Justification can only appeal to the resources internal to a language-game. An upshot of the absence of external linguistic justification is a certain cognizance about the contingency of any given linguistic context, and the practical and intellectual forces acting on and frequently distorting that context. Namely, if the terms and limits to our sense, which are requisites to justifying any thought and action, and are thus supremely consequential, are in the first instance mediated by social practices, then they are an unequivocal site of non-trivial social power. I should hasten to add, if only to defang the presumption of relativism which might premise your immediate disregard, that there are general limits to the kind of linguistic rules constitutive of our understanding: using language in certain ways inheres orders of magnitude greater utility than other ways, such that there are obvious pragmatic limits to language, while the biological composition of humans ensures common possession of a uniform set of capacities, which sets its own natural limits (i.e. our discriminatory capacities incline towards the division external reality into a certain number of categories).



As repeatedly stated, the point is one of systematic linguistic rules constitutive of the terms and bounds of sense of understanding, to which any thought and action must appeal, and which are thereby non-trivially defining of social relations. In view of this, certain tendencies within language have terrible effects, including but certainly not limited to its being gendered.

Your argument is quiet impenetrable when put in this manner; you'd be understood better if you put it into logical form. That is, if it is your intention to be understood.

I find Humanitese actually quite easy to translate into standard English. Most of the words can be removed and those that are left simplified. It would be much harder to translate a mathematical paper even though the author will already have been aiming for maximum concision and precision.

I think you are right that the Humanitese dialect was created to reduce rather than aid understanding.

Humanitese? If think it is only continental philosophy that is as unnecessarily wordy as this, don't lump the other humanities in with it.

He could at least put it into a rigorous argument form ie 1, 2 therefore 3 etc.

He claims not to be relying on continental philosophy, and that may be right. I could break down his statements into something that is 1. sensible and even 2. true, just obvious almost to the point of irrelevance. A continental philosopher, on the other hand, uses verbosity to express (conceal?) an underlying meaning indistinguishable from nonsense.

Of course, unnecessary and obscurantist verbosity isn't common to every writer in the humanities, though the exact prevalence varies from field to field.

To put it another way, how does your view differ from or expand upon, "What people say influences others' political views."? I favour concision and clarity of thought.

Your argument is quite impenetrable when put in this manner; you'd be understood better if you put it into logical form. That is, if it is your intention to be understood.

Humanitese? If think it is only continental philosophy that is as unnecessarily wordy as this, don't lump the other humanities in with it.

He could at least put it into a rigorous argument form ie 1, 2 therefore 3 etc.

Then criticise what I wrote, which incidentally is a dim rehash of aspects of Philosophical Investigations. I'll try again. The meaning of language in nearly all cases is reducible to its use-function, that which its utterance does. Conventions or rules of use are relative to a particular speech-community; if you fail to adhere to a particular language-game you err into unintelligibility. That language is properly characterised by use-function and not correspondence to external objects entails that - in a sense - it is floating or baseless. It is not answerable to external justification, but is internally constituted. There is no pre-linguistic meaning. To repeat myself by way of example, any attempted justification of the necessary form of primary colours references not an independent metaphysical reality, but the rules constitutive of the relevant utterances. It's justificatory resources are internal to the speech-community, and are thereby circular. That internal structuring has the implication that language - the bounds of acceptable sense and thus intelligibility - is profoundly effected by the social forces predominant in the given speech-community. Conventionally legitimate thought and action must adhere to that linguistic context (i.e. to invoke negative liberty in a scholastic court is to confuse the context of ones possible utterances). The upshot of which is that language is implicated in social forces, which in turns shapes the limits of thought and action. This is the methodological frame at least implicit in much third-wave feminism, and its general suasion against gendered language.

This, as in the previous case, can be translated into standard English as, "What people say influences others' political views.". I don't disagree, and I'm sure few others would, but for that reason it is not a strong argument. Opponents of this sort of censorship do not oppose it because they believe that government control of speech would not influence society or political outcomes. Again, I would ask you to demonstrate a clear overriding harm caused by not exercising this sort of censorship; I think it likely that you did not respond to that argument previously because you cannot.

This sort of writing is almost always used to lend undue credibility to a weak argument.

Rape is a crime in which the victims continue to suffer through shame and humiliation long after the assault occurs. The added stigma towards rape jokes, is a result of a "social conscience", which seeks to discourage any behavior that potentially contributes to that enduring humiliation and shame.

Murder victims require no such protection.

The word I used was influence, not persuade, and covers both meanings, though I'm not convinced there's a clear dividing line between them. I have repeated my response because you have merely repeated your argument, and that argument seems to be entirely trivial. Here you go a bit further, not only claiming that language can influence people (so what?), but alleging that in this particular instance Cllr Driver's language "normalised" rape. I contend that everyone who heard her comment was just as opposed to permitting rape, de-jure or de-facto, as they were before. In that case, I think Cllr Driver was subjected to a witch-hunt: an attempt to find a perpetrator where there had been no crime.

It's not merely influencing (which is an indeterminate concept inclusive of trivial and absolute causal determination, conveniently giving you space to claim just about nothing). The point is that in the absence of extraneous justification, the rules constitutive of language is internally constituted and thereby definitionally liable to social distortion. A condition of thought and action is justification in the terms intelligible to a given language game. Ergo, thought and action is limited by linguistic context of social contrivance. Where's the problem?

I haven't said anything about Cllr Driver, who I know nothing about; nor do I care about the details particular to their case. It's completely incidental to the discussion at hand: whether third-wave feminism's concern with language is a predictable consequence of the shape of philosophy and social theory in the twentieth-century (via which I have given various arguments). Please don't make things up.