don’t let adjectives do your thinking for you

A few months ago there was a discussion on this blog and some nearby blogs about ways of looking for weak arguments. I was mostly repeating some good ideas I had read elsewhere about this.

There was the interesting commenter on a Brian Leiter post (I wish I had copied and pasted the comment at the time) about how any time a philosophy author says “obviously,” usually the point is not so obvious, and you can write an interesting article simply by showing that the alternative is not obviously wrong, but may in fact be the stone cold truth.

Daniel Dennett once made the nice point that he tells his students that rhetorical questions often cover failures to make an argument, and should be challenged. I never liked using rhetorical questions much anyway; they somehow seem a touch passive-aggressive. But since reading that I’ve made an effort never to use them at all, because I think Dennett’s point is basically correct.

My own favorite rule of thumb is that anything in scare quotes often represents the author trying to use the term in quotes literally while also using that gesture of irony to pretend that they’re not quite using it.

Another rule occurs to me now, which is that quite often people try to let their adjectives do their thinking for them. I’ve often cited “armchair philosophy” as a particularly egregious example of this technique. Consider what’s going on here. There is actually quite an interesting philosophical debate to be had about the virtues and vices of a priori argumentation. But the adjective “armchair” tries to land-grab without a fight by merely asserting that a priori philosophical work gets us nowhere, and in that sense it’s really just an insulting name for a conclusion that the speaker happens not to like. This can be rhetorically advantageous, since it gives the impression of a fait accompli, while expending no energy on any actual philosophical work. But in a classic case of the return of the repressed, those who denigrate armchair thinking usually offer up doctrines that are utterly riddled with a priori assumptions, and often very weak ones at that.

More generally, imagine that you’re reading a review of some philosophical book and the reviewer describes it as “lame neo-Platonism,” or something like that. (Real-life examples are usually more complicated.) Again, this can be rhetorically useful— and I don’t think rhetoric ever means “mere rhetoric,” by the way. But what is happening here is that the reviewer has probably not proven that the book is “lame,” nor done the work of showing that the book in question is “neo-” anything. It’s a simple attempt to put the book in question on the defensive without having done the work required to that end.

This is related to my dislike for the phrase “bad poetry” when used to describe works such as those of the late Heidegger. It’s true enough that some of the material of the late Heidegger seems to meet that description. But people who are quick to throw around the phrase “bad poetry” are usually not people who will praise anything as good poetry, at least not in a philosophical context. They tend to be people who think that literature has no genuine cognitive value at all, and on that point I think they are greatly mistaken. The mistake of holding that either truth is discursive propositional truth or it’s a poetry slam free-for-all is, roughly, the same mistake as Meno’s Paradox: either you know something or you don’t. But here I side with Socrates.