Editing Philosophical Research:Schizophrenic point of view (section)

=== Don't use Lexemes to codify slurs ===

In most cases, Lexeme entries should encompass nearly every possible connotation of a term used by more than a couple people, or simply used extensively and seriously enough to a point that someone will have historically documented them. One of the very few exceptions for when the arbitrary connotations of a term should not be codified onto Lexemes is when the Lexeme primarily refers to a unique real-world entity which is considered a demographic identity, or in other words, a characteristic of individual human beings that sorts them into physically-unique populations. The notion of demographic identities may be defined by different people in different contexts to include or exclude various kinds of "groups of people", but here it is used in the broadest sense of the term that almost solely excludes unique populations which strictly exist as non-unique realization processes. Thus, "French", "Buddhist", "Arab", "transgender", "autistic", "bisexual", "Inuit", "pre-Columbian", "deaf", "Third-World", "middle-aged", "Soviet", "United-States", and "atheist" or "nonbeliever" are demographic identities, but "Tory", "rationalist", and "string theorist" are not. Some populations may sit in the gray area between being demographic identities and not, such as "Trotskyist" and "anarchist" — on the surface these are political ideologies defined by non-unique realization processes, yet in the process of realization, they invariably attempt to create physically-unique populations that as [[redlink - Social-Philosophical-Material System|physical civilizations]] existing at particular times may be considered demographic identities in some contexts. The status of how these unique philosophical populations will vary at different times; at some times there may be a legitimate concern about not putting insulting definitions on variations of "Trotskyist" or "anarchist", while at other times it may be acceptable to add definitions that tear apart the concepts or models of these ideologies as ideologies.

One edge case where the activity of documenting the association of written signs to stereotypes may be perfectly allowed is in the case of slurs themselves. If, for instance, there is a Lexeme "bitch", and it usually refers to a mostly benign concept used in animal breeding, but there is another sense in which somebody has assigned the term to an objectionable stereotype, it is acceptable to add this Sense to "bitch", especially along with an illustrative source citation, in the interest of documenting and exposing hateful language usage. The difference here is that (despite what anybody may think) "bitch" is not itself a demographic, so adding potentially offensive Senses to it is not a problem.

On the other side of this, if something <em>is</em> the name of a unique population, that population does not necessarily always have the inherent right to declare an association which is not made with the intent to insult or offend to be a problem. If a Trotskyist tries to tell you that information about Trotskyism can only be put on "Leninism", this should not immediately be taken as a valid argument given that <i>Trotskyist</i> is not inherently an insult, any more than "Communist" or "Stalin-follower" is an insult. Likewise, if Martin Heidegger were to tell you he should not be grouped under the definition of the early-existentialist tradition, he would not necessarily be correct about the category of his own work purely because he said it.