on the abuse of adjectives, scare quotes, etc.

Somewhere within the past two years (it may even have been Leiter’s blog) someone said that one way to write a philosophy paper is to look for a place where someone says “obviously X is true,” and then write a paper showing that it’s neither obvious nor true. That’s not a bad idea. Calling something “obvious” is one way that people have of forestalling objections, of disarming in advance those who don’t agree with their own prejudices about what is obvious.

There are other such techniques. One is the use of scare quotes to mask the fact that one does in fact believe literally in the word inside the quotes. If someone writes, for example, “against contemporary relativisms, we must defend a ‘Platonic’ conception of eternal truths,” then they are trying to have it both ways– claiming Plato as an ally while also distancing themselves from his dubious reputation in some contemporary circles.

Adjectives can also play a distracting/masking role, as I’ve said on this blog before. Accusing someone of naive realism isn’t just invective. It’s also a way of masking the true charge: realism. The true charge is that the person is a realist. But since the accuser has no good argument against realism, they create a distraction by denouncing naive realism, leaving us to assume vaguely that the person isn’t so extreme as to hate all realism, but only the “naive” kind, whatever that might be in opposition to the less naive kinds.

I knew of a situation in a university where someone proposed a certain committee to review the quality of all publications in their department. The stated criterion was that the committee should represent those with “the most seniority and intellectual weight” (emphasis added). And of course, the committee ended up being all the buddies of this guy who happened to be over 60 years old, just like he was. He couldn’t just openly say “the committee will be chosen by seniority,” since seniority has no automatic relevance to judging the quality of publications. But by first fusing them together as “seniority and intellectual weight,” then choosing them all according to seniority, he was able to have his cake and eat it too– borrowing the prestige of the words “intellectual weight,” while ensuring that only his own cronies stocked the committee thanks to the “seniority” part of the principle. It was a nice little sneaky trick that failed only for other, peripheral reasons.

Well, consider the use of the adjective “bad.” Sometimes advocates of scientism or mathematism will claim that unless the principles of science and mathematics also govern philosophy, we will be left with nothing but “bad poetry.” The word “bad” here plays much the same role as “naive” in the phrase “naive realism.” They don’t want to warn us against the perils of poetry tout court, partly because that would make them look like uncultured boors, and partly because they might then have to mount a coherent assault against the cognitive claims of poetry per se. So instead, they claim on the surface to assault nothing but “bad poetry,” thereby laying claim to refined aesthetic tastes, even while they are actually dismissing any cognitive claims by poetry at all– and indeed, by any of the arts.