the abuse of adjectives and conjunctions

Adjectives can obviously be used as intensifiers no less than as qualifiers, though there are those who ignore this. Refer to someone as a “stupid idiot” and someone else is bound to smirk as they ask: “as opposed to a smart idiot?” The fact that this sort of thing ceased being truly funny at about age 11 doesn’t stop it from occurring among holders of advanced academic degrees on a regular basis.

But more importantly, abuses occur when the two different uses of adjectives glide into one another. Consider the phrase “naive realism.” Instead of just attacking realism, it is common to want to attack something called “naive realism.” Initially this looks like a prudent limitation. “Hey, I’m not saying that all realists are bad, just the naive ones.” But the phrase also subtly implies that all full-blown realisms are automatically naive. The adjective “naive” is asked to do all the work of thinking, and to serve in lieu of a convincing critique of realism. Among phenomenologists, one of my own tribes, there is a constant dismissiveness toward a “naive” realism that phenomenology, in fact, has never successfully addressed, let alone refuted.

Conjunctions can be abused in the same way. In one case known to me, the senior members of an academic department wanted to stage a power grab. Since their major vulnerability was that they were being outpublished by their juniors, they needed to seize control of the publication system. So, they proposed that all publications would henceforth be rated by those “with the most seniority and intellectual weight.” The effect of this proposal, obviously, would have been to base it all on seniority. But you obviously can’t say “henceforth, all intellectual products of the department will be judged by those with the most seniority,” because that’s obviously laughable logic. And you can’t say “henceforth, all intellectual products of the department will be judged by those producing the most intellectual work,” because that was precisely what they wished to prevent. So you set up a mushy, alchemical middle ground where the two terms being linked by the conjunction are both the same and not the same– the same trick, really, as combining the words “naive” and “realism”.

We could try this with elections… “The next President of the United States will be the candidate with the most electoral votes and the support of three key charismatic Army generals.”

in Hollywood: “The lead actress for this film will be the one who had the best audition and the closest personal relationship with the film’s director and/or producer.”

Or to look at the adjective side instead, we could just start attacking “naive deconstruction,” or “naive correlationism.” Or the intelligent design people could start attacking “naive Darwinism.”