a common sleight of hand

There may already be a known rhetorical term for this trick, but I’ve only just started to notice it in the last few years. It’s quite common and quite insidious.

It has to do with packaging two words together, and subtly transferring the virtues or vices of one word to the other. I’ve given a few examples of this in the past. Just to review.

1. At one point I knew someone who was the senior member of an academic department. It was to his advantage for the senior people in the department to make certain key decisions, but in the case in question seniority was obviously no qualification for what had to be decided, and to claim otherwise would have been obviously naked self-interest. So what he did instead was use the word “and” in a rather insidious way. He said something like: “the decision in question should be made by faculty with the most seniority and international scholarly weight.” But the people he proposed as deciders were distinguished solely by seniority. By making it a combined rating, as if adding up seniority and international status, he borrowed the prestige of the latter while somehow magically cancelling it in the calculation. It was a sort of embezzling of one word’s power, which was subtly transferred to the offshore account of another.

2. I’ve mentioned this example before: “naive realism.” If Person A defends a realist position, Person B calls it “naive realism.” Notice that person B doesn’t just criticize the position as “realism,” because then the burden would be on them to prove that realism is bad. And they don’t just criticize the position as “naive,” because that would be ineffective name-calling and would also do nothing to damage the world “realism.” By using the phrase “naive realism,” the illusion is created that the critic objects merely to this specific, local, unfortunately “naive” form of realism, when in fact they are trying to subtly insinuate that all realism is ipso facto naive.

3. And so it is with the phrase “the furniture of the world.” It’s similar in structure to “naive realism.” The critic can’t just say: “I hereby call a moratorium on any philosophical discussion of the world,” because this sounds like a brazen call for idealism and the critic is now immediately on the defensive. Nor can the critic say “I hereby call a moratorium on any philosophical discussion of furniture”– not just because it sounds corny out of context like that, but also because “furniture” (in the metaphorical sense of an itemized list of categories or entities) is what all philosophers do give us, though often it is the furniture of language, the mind, or science, rather than of the world.

But by saying “I hereby call a moratorium on philosophical discussion of the furniture of the world,” a clever rhetorical note is struck. All discussion of the world is associated with “furniture,” which has rather homely and silly undertones as a subject of philosophical study.

There must be a name for this technique. It’s a form of the old bait-and-switch routine.