This kind of meta-linguistic analysis is reminiscent of what I call “linguistic philosophy” that was popular in the mid-20th century as a reaction to the postmo

This kind of meta-linguistic analysis is reminiscent of what I call “linguistic philosophy” that was popular in the mid-20th century as a reaction to the postmodernists. This school of thought is largely viewed as a dead end — words don’t have fixed meaning across time, audience or geography. Even translated words can have very different contextual meaning between languages that cannot be generalized outside of the context of a specific speaker in a specific context. To try to analyze them as if they tell us more about the world than an author’s state of mind is folly. Furthermore, the last 50 years have been a real reckoning that people don’t make decisions based on facts; they make them based on feeling. This has always been the case; what happened in the 60s was people started questioning the ex post facto “rationality” applied to decisions made by those who comprised the ruling power structures. Much of the discourse prior to that time were emotional in nature but clad in the language of rationality because that’s what the culture at the time would accept. That there were “rational” arguments in favor of segregation or prohibition doesn’t mitigate that they are failed policies. Historically, “rationality” has just been a code word for “the dominant viewpoint of the ruling class”. If anything, the change in language usage is simply following a cultural recognition that they were never rational arguments in the first place, so they’re just not spoken about as if they are authoritative anymore.