don’t let adjectives do the work for you

I’ll slip in an “advice” post here in the midst of the politics of the day.

Writers have known for a long time that you have to go easy on the adjectives, which lead to lazy and overwritten prose. Philosophers ought to follow the same principle. In the past couple of months I’ve read a couple of things by people writing philosophical criticism who simply use dismissive adjectives about their opponents while presenting no arguments.

As I’ve said before on this blog, this can sometimes lead to a sort of “adjective shell game” maneuver. The most famous example of the shell game is the phrase “naive realism.” People don’t want to just call you “realist!”, because this sounds dogmatic, and they would also then be called upon to give arguments for anti-realism that they may not be able to provide. So, they call you a naive realist instead. Here they’re trying to let you know that they’re much too sophisticated to condemn all brands of realism; they only dislike the “naive” kinds, you see. But then comes the shell game. Their hands spin the shells while you aren’t looking, and having condemned only naive realisms at the start, suddenly all realisms are insinuated to be “naive.”

I saw a similar thing happen once in the context of an academic department. Someone proposed that a major decision be restricted only to those “with the most seniority and scholarly weight.” This seems to imply that some sort of calculus was being done, adding those two factors together somehow. But what he was after was that only the people with the most seniority (including himself and his closest allies, unsurprisingly) would decide the issue. The trick here is the same as with “naive realism.” He couldn’t have honestly proposed from the start that only the most senior people would vote, because the nature of the decision would have rendered this policy obviously absurd. It was an issue of research policy, and so the “scholarly weight” part, although difficult or impossible to quantify (and automatically invidious by nature) would at least have made some sense. So, he began by packaging the logical criterion together with his own selfish criterion as if they were a combined measurement, then pretended that they were one, and then utilized only the seniority portion of the equation to generate his proposed list of deciders.

It would be the rough equivalent of saying that “only New Yorkers and billionaires can vote for the mayor of New York,” and having established this, instituting a billion dollar poll tax to shut out most of the mere New Yorkers in the group.

There’s probably a pre-existing name for this trick somewhere, and I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that monkeys already pull some version of it.