ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
Great post comrade.
To give some theoretical oomph, the chain of metonymy is the problem here -any replacement for your example will also be inextricably related to the term it’s replacing. So “doh” is a great example since it’s in theory harmless, but its associations (with both the word replaced and the caricature) mean that we can’t ever imagine a “pure” word completely divorced from its problematic versions.
However, I think that there’s a degree between calling something “dumb” (perhaps the least offensive of all of these? It hasn’t been in the ableist usage for a long time…) and then more problematic ones like specific conditions (for conditions in the DSM now) or other more “charged” terms.
Should we still recognize the history? Yes. But as Fred Jameson says, history is what hurts, and we can never get out of it. I don’t think it’s worth fighting over some of these more benign ones that history has sanded down, at least not when there’s more appealing targets.
Real shit: should we be “normal,” bring about communism, and a better life for disabled people everywhere but occasionally call something stupid?
Or should we legislate every aspect of language before we do anything material.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t strive for both, but you’re totally right that if we alienate ordinary people (who don’t see calling actions “dumb” as ableist) before a revolution with the most labored HR language, what the fuck are we doing?
I know we’re not actually doing praxis here but this is a great thing to keep in mind. Self crit is good though, this has been a really interesting thread.
Edit a good point was made elsewhere on the thread that the forum is really good about apologizing when called on shit, and I think self policing (i.e. if a comrade were actually mute irl and felt specific offense at “dumb” and expressed it I’m sure all of us would apologize to them and try to do better)
I mean the only relevant critique is the Hard Problem of Consciousness , which doesn’t really contradict materialism as such, just its crudest forms (i.e. feelings of love are just chemicals in the brain durrr hurrrr)
From the SEP
The How question thus subdivides into a diverse family of more specific questions depending upon the specific sort or feature of consciousness one aims to explain, the specific restrictions one places on the range of the explanans and the criterion one uses to define explanatory success. Some of the resulting variants seem easier to answer than others. Progress may seem likely on some of the so called “easy problems” of consciousness, such as explaining the dynamics of access consciousness in terms of the functional or computational organization of the brain (Baars 1988). Others may seem less tractable, especially the so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it’s like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain.
That’s exactly how I understand it. We can get the “scientific” explanation of how visual stimuli arrive at the brain. But the question of how visual stimuli are perceived and felt - what it means to see a flower in a phenomenal sense rather than a scientific sense - is far harder to “prove” or ground in a material conception of consciousness. Basically, how does my feeling of hunger come about from the stimuli that are causing hunger (which are material and scientific)
:stalin-feels-good:
I’ll admit my reading might be wrong btw. The way I see it tho is that it’s really the question of how the scientific neural stimuli we understand as key to our experience of the world become “consciousness” as we understand it - and there’s no clear answer to it.
Granted I’m very influenced by people like Andy Clark and the idea of “extended mind” (i.e. our minds aren’t merely the meat in our brains), so I’m a bit ideosyncratic
