If somoene claims that everything that happens is marred with racism, then racism is used as an empirical term because by definition he makes it impossible to find an instance that does fit the concept.
>The notion that the term "racism" is meaningless or that it is
"Meaningless" and "without empirical meaning" are two different things. "Witch" has a rather well-defined meaning, but that meaning happened not to be empirical - that is, no empirically observable characteristics exist that would allow to separate people who do from those wo do not belong the "witch' category. As a result, every woman can be labeled as a "witch" and there is no way to show that she is not.
>"epistemologically" defective is just another dimension of the denial of
>racism syndrome. It is a "left" method of denying racism, wrapped in faulty
I do not know of a better way of "denying racism" or for that matter, trivializing any term, than implying that every instance or situation fits it. Psychoanalysts tried that and that is why psychoanalysis today is a joke, except perhaps in literary criticism.
>theory of knowledge language. In this case, Wojtek seems to be going for a
>Popperian "lack of falsifiability" approach. But Wojtek's analysis fails.
To be more specific, Popperian "lack of falisifiability" approach pertains to statements rather than concepts. If I say "X is a racist" that statement is either true or false, depending if X possesses empirical characteristics that distinguish racists from non-racists. If I say "Everyone is a racist" that statement is either patently false if the term "racist" is taken as an empirically defined concept, or true by definition - in which case the trick lies in changing the meaning of the term "racist" from emprical to non-empirical (all-embracing). That trick may be accomplished in many different ways, for example, by implying very lax and fluid criteria that virtually everyone meets.
In any case, my quarrel is not with "racism" but with a ceratin use of language and discourse - which I define as 'religious' or 'metaphysical' and I do not find particiularly useful to explain social phenomena, such as Colorado shootings. Labeling it as "racist" or "evil" may express the speaker's emotions, but is not a very useful explanation of what happened - unless you can show that racists beliefs were the leading motive of the killings (as, for example, it was the case of Mr. King in Texas). Equating the motives of Littleton shooters with those of King is a good way of making the term racism void of empirical meaning.
Wojtek