Humanities

In week 3 and 4, the class examines the philosophical ideas of human nature, and the languages of human society, seeking to answer the theme “What makes human bad”. Among the classmates, the answer to the theme varies depending on how individuals possess the knowledge through experience and critical thinking and how the individuals approach the theme in different disciplines. For this week’s post, I want to focus on the area of linguistics and describe how the excerpt from an Introduction to Language and Society written by Martin Montgomery widened my views on the anti-language.

I had a mere true belief that profanity is a bad language. What I mean by bad language is that there are languages that are wrong in our society. However, I found that Montgomery rejected my belief in his book an introduction to Language and Society. On chapter 5, the anti-language is defined as the languages spoken by the subcultures who has antagonistic relationship with society and created by relexicalization. Relexicalization refers to the process of making new words to replace the word that means the same. One of the major anti-language is the hip hop language. Hip hop language seems to create solidarity especially among black community and it had been pushed out from the main stream society. The emotional attachment in hip hop language may be one of the motivations that create the social identity among groups, but what makes the hip hop different from other languages is the use of profanity. I do not agree that people should use profanity for any reason or circumstances, but the hip hop language seems to use profanity to express their anger and resistance towards society who pushed them out. And I partially agree that there are no other words which can replace the profanity to express their feelings.

Work Cited

Martin Montgomery, An introduction to language and society. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 2008.

LS 301 - Inquiry blog: My understanding on the theme "What makes human bad"

      Reading the books and articles from different authors and discussing about the theme “What make human ‘bad’?”, I noticed that everyone came to their own answers using different sources and approaches from their knowledge. My understanding of this theme changed over time as I heard other’s opinions, shared my thoughts, and gained the interesting facts about the consciousness from the book “Consciousness” by Susan Blackmore. 

      I thought the idea of philosopher’s zombie from the book was interesting and really liked what Daniel, one of my classmate, said. In the book, Susan acknowledges humans are conscious and differentiate humans from the zombies who are not conscious. A zombie is someone who has no private, conscious experiences; zombies are easy to imagine, but many people reject its existence. Daniel said that if humans are zombies, unconscious beings, then the concept of goodness and badness will not exist because we no longer are humans, but animals. From this idea, I could lead into this thought that individuals could have the capability to be good like Mother Teresa because she was a human being like others. However, humans could be evil like Hitler as he was also a human. And I concluded that it could be our consciousness that make human bad.

Personal Knowledge Inventory

Type of knowledge	Source	Method of Acquisition	Description	Date last evaluated
Mere true belief	Bible	Church	Humans are naturally sinful because humans decided what was good and evil.
Mere true belief	Breaking Bad	Watching few scenes	Humans might turned bad because the environment and circumstances were full of evils. Walter White who struggled with medical bills for his lung cancer decided to make drugs for his family’s financial future. In the process, he murdered many people and did not stop making drugs.
True belief	Consciousness by Susan Blackmore	Thinking	Humans are conscious beings that has private experiences for oneself.