This is going to be a little more spit-balling than making outright pronouncements. Also it doesn’t paint me in a great light, so I beg some indulgence. I invite you to view the following in that light.
When I speak words, there is something I am intending to convey. There can be a failure in successfully achieving the goal of conveying the message. The failure can be described as mine, “I didn’t describe it right”, or yours, “you aren’t listening to me”, but the failure occurs.
I can also successfully convey my meaning, and also express something which I didn’t intend. In fact, the logic inherent in my words may be pretty much inescapable, even though I honestly didn’t intend to convey the point expressed by said logic.
That’s probably too abstract, so let me give a real, concrete example. In the not to distant past, I have used the “r” word to describe people that I deemed annoyingly lacking in thoughtfulness and common sense. I did not literally think they were mentally handicapped, nor would any listener think I meant they were. I was just using the word pejoratively. I didn’t give it much thought. However, it doesn’t take much thought to realize that the logical implication of using the “r” word as a pejorative is that there is something shameful about being mentally handicapped. If you asked me 1 second before making the comment “Hey, do you think there’s anything shameful about being mentally handicapped?” I would emphatically and honestly said that I didn’t. Yet the logical implication of using the word as a pejorative is inescapable.
To what degree, would you say, I “meant” that being mentally handicapped was shameful? I mean there obviously has to be a distinction between my overt intents, which weren’t especially shameful, and the logical implications of my words, which were. On a scale, it would be far less serious than say, explicitly advocating for forced sterilization of mentally handicapped people. But it’s obviously not a morally neutral way of speaking either.
It’s not a coincidence that the word ‘retard’ becomes a pejorative, and that all of its successors and ancestors also become pejorative. The word derives from older antecedents that meant things like ‘slowed’, ‘delayed’, or ‘hindered’.
So you have a concept, namely slowness, and it is applied to human beings according to a metric. For example, perhaps children who scored less than 60 were called ‘retarded’. It’s common enough to categorize competence in such ways.
As soon as you label that sub-60 IQ you have a term for someone who lacks intellectual competence as measured by the IQ test. That word inevitably becomes a synonym for ‘stupid’ (and words like ‘stupid’, ‘dumb’, etc., all have objective correlates just like the slowness of retardation). We do a similar thing all the time by imputing blame with “phobias”—a suffix originally used for objective psychological diagnoses (e.g. “homophobia”).
Now whenever we blame someone, we will be blaming them for something which is bad. Whatever word is chosen for the sake of blame will itself need to be associated with some objective, non-culpable badness. For example, ‘retarded’, ‘shit’, ‘garbage’, ‘damnation’, etc. To try to blame with a word that has no objectively bad connotation would not work.
This is the mirror image of the fact that ‘good’ can indicate moral praise or a more objective quality. ‘Bad’ too can indicate moral blame or a more objective quality. When one is praising or blaming they must choose words which connote objective goodness or badness. The word for objective, non-culpable intellectual incompetence will therefore be a natural candidate to be used for blame when the subject is manifesting intellectual incompetence in a culpable manner.
This means that when the psychiatrist says that their patient is objectively and non-culpably retarded, and when the sister says that her brother is (culpably) retarded, both the psychiatrist and the sister are saying that someone is bad. The concept of badness, like the concept of goodness, stretches between what is culpable and what is non-culpable. Hence every time that we blame someone for something, we will be using a concept that could also be applied non-culpably. This is inescapable.
Given what I’ve said, it follows that if the sister calls her brother ‘retarded’, there is no reason to believe that she thinks it is per se shameful to be retarded. She might say to her brother, “You are retarded and you should be ashamed,” while the next minute turning to her cognitively impaired friend and saying, “You are retarded, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.” Although she would not say this to her friend, doing so would not be contradictory. The reason she would not say this to her friend is because it is impolite to call attention to someone’s privations without provocation, especially when the person is not at fault for the privation. The concept of slowness or retardation is being applied to the brother and the friend in very different ways, and it is always possible to apply concepts that bridge culpable and non-culpable realities in different ways.
But then one might say, “If she calls her brother retarded in front of her friend, then she may unwittingly call attention to her friend’s unwanted condition.” This is true, and therefore she might want to avoid calling her brother ‘retarded’ in front of her friend. Nevertheless, there is no simple solution where she can avoid the broader issue. She could abstain from ever using the word ‘retard’, but this will not solve the problem, for whatever way in which she chooses to blame her brother when he is exerting a sub-par cognitive effort, that way will run the same risk of calling attention to her friend’s condition. Language has no barrier between the evaluation of culpable acts vs. the evaluation of non-culpable acts. There is no word that is fit for one but not the other.
(Note too that someone like Joshs will therefore say that we must abandon blame altogether, presumably along with responsibility.)
I know that I know nothing ~ Socrates. The founding father of Western philosophy confessed to his own ignorance. He was deeply interested in grand ideas such as justice, morality, etc. On these matters he accosted people into conversations that typically ended in aporia. Just like you, we’re also using words, like “truth”, “good”, “love”, without knowing what they mean or what they imply. As for intent, it’s more mysterious than the others, completely baffles me 99% of the time. Inscrutable!!
I think you’ll find we know the terms well(‘truth’, ‘love’ etc), instinctively, but when we cross over the terms, we find that we don’t have a reasonable explanation for what they mean.
It’s not that we don’t know what ‘true’ means, on a first look, it’s our method of translation, crossing over the term, re-facing- discovery at its heart.
Perhaps they’re like collectable items. You progress the term, ultimately to measure it, but for now it’s a highly inflated term or collectable.
Possible, hypothesis non fingo. The meaning of words can be hard to pin down and that probably isn’t good. Also, instinct may not be the best concept to describe the situation. I can instinctively reach out to catch a branch but how does one instinctively know something. Perhaps something more mundane, like confusion, which you did refer to as crossing x with y. No?
Why would anyone use the word ‘retard’ as a pejorative unless they already knew that it would offend?
The negative connotations are obvious.
There is no real logic — it works only because of a long-standing stigma attached to disability.
You didn’t intend a judgment about people with disabilities, but your post shows that offence, embarrassment or shame can arise from an ill-considered word — especially when a term can so easily have different or unintended meanings.
Being aware of that helps us speak and listen with greater care and ask when unsure.
