Bertrand Russell once went on a radio program and suggested, as an example of conjugating an irregular verb, “I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool.” It’s nice that he did this on radio, because it meant the masses got treated to a wonderful bit of linguistics, but it’s a shame the great philosopher never discussed the issue at length for academics, because it seems an under-studied area of semantics.

We regularly get quite worked-up about words that don’t differ at all in meaning, but only differ in their associations. I recently read a book in the business self-help genre that offered up advice to the effect of “focusing on self-enjoyment doesn’t mean being selfish or hedonistic.” I cannot for the life of me tell what the descriptive difference between these two things, but in terms of associations, they differ greatly.

The most frustrating cases of this are when people take words with strongly negative connotations and use them in… very strange ways. Consider the “Rapist Checklist” that made a splash on the internet a few years back:

1. You are a rapist if you get a girl drunk and have sex with her.

2. You are a rapist if you find a drunk girl and have sex with her.

3. You are a rapist if you get yourself drunk and have sex with her. Your drunkeness is no excuse.

…

46. If you don’t believe a woman when she says she was raped then you’re encouraging rape.

My gut instinct as a philosophy student for 1-3 is that they’re inconsistent, or if we want to use more sophisticated language, that they are logically consistent but violate principles of universalizability, or make an unprinciple distinction or whatever you want to call it. But, while that would be a perfectly sensible response if 1-3 were intended to express propositions–things capable of being true or false–I wonder if that’s the right approach. They seem to be more about browbeating people (and making the author feel good about herself) by throwing around words with big negative connotations than about trying to make claims up for debate.

Similarly, what is meant by 46? The principle “always believe a woman who claims to have been raped” would be a good one if we wanted to make life as difficult as possible for rapists, and didn’t care about anything else, but as a matter of fact we should care about other things, such as not ruining the lives of innocent people with bogus accusations. Here the nutty feminist shouts back: “Not doing everything we can to prevent rape encourages rape!” Well, in a sense, maybe. But the only purpose of such a statement is to keep something tarred with a negative association, it doesn’t lead to any kind of intelligible debate.

It would be oh so nice to write off loopy talk about rape as an isolated issue, but my impression of college campuses is that you could find this kind of crap on most campuses, if you dig deep enough into the darker corners of the campus feminist groups. To leave you with one more example – consider these angry letters that Dan Savage got in response to one of his columns:

Corporations are economic rapists. Advertisers are mental rapists. Your narrow definition of rape heaps condemnation on certain types of rape while excusing others.

****

SHUT THE FUCK UP, DAN! Rape can be rape in hindsight because rapists can drug, manipulate, and confuse the women they are assailing.

A similarly phenomenon happens with the word “racist.” I’ve used this blog to document a number of instances of people getting called racist for criticizing religious groups. You also see this word thrown around against people who want to restrict immigration or criticize Israel’s policies in Palestine. Oh, and then there’s this:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)”

“A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called “blaming the victim”). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent.”

Again: it’s not clear we should dignify these utterances as claims. They’re about trying to juice a word’s negative connotations in the service of an unusual purpose. While I’ve picked out extreme examples of this to make a point, fighting rhetorical battles through connotation words is pretty common. UW-Madison has a course called “Reason and Communication,” which uses the textbook /Critical Thinking/ by B.N. Moore and R. Parker. The introduction to the version of the text I’ve seen explains how in earlier editions, they had been very puzzled by how so many “arguments” are hard to classify qua arguments, and had to end up adding a chapter on “non-argumentative persuasion.”

This is a problem worth trying to work out in a little more depth for several reasons: first, the language of morals and perscriptions already puzzles philosophers, and a lot of moral and perscriptive debates make especially large use of connotation words. Second, a lot of this talk is obviously troubling, but some of the reflexive critiques of it don’t work. It doesn’t work to say “Such-and-such is how we use language, but this-here doesn’t fit such-and-such, so this-here is wrong.” The problem is that milking connotation words for all they’re worth is also part of the usages of language. We need to understand them, even if we don’t like them.