Mud begets more muddlement

Excerpt from “A Compendium on Naravost, Volume 4: Religions and Cultural Practices”:

If one ascends the northernmost peaks along the eastern coast of the continent, about a week’s ride north from Thades, one will find a most curious community scattered in stony keeps along ledges and outcroppings. There, the insular scholar-mages of the Kel-nu-thet, known as the Kel, have devised a peculiar school of philosophy. The Kel claim to have unique insights into “true magic,” a form of magic that represents the most abstract and fundamental of the arcane arts. True magic, they insist, is neither divination nor conjuration, neither alteration nor abjuration. True magic transcends all these “lesser” arts. Yet if one spends any time among the Kel, or requests a demonstration of this most esoteric of arts, they will discover something most interesting—nobody outside of the Kel-nu-thet has ever seen any outward sign of magic used by the Kel: no enchanted artifacts nor feats of wonder nor hurling of fireballs.

If pressed, the Kel will scoff, insisting that true spells need not do anything, that one need not observe them at all, and that only the crudest and most vulgar of magics are made manifest in some observable way. Pressed on the details of true magic, the Kel insist that one must join the sect to truly comprehend them. Those who have expressed doubt as to whether true spells are real are met with polite dismissal, and are quickly reminded that all the masters of Kel-nu-thet are experts in true magic, and that it would be absurd to insist that so many experts on the matter could be so profoundly mistaken.

Yet to this day, the Kel-nu-thet remain isolated and obscure. No practitioner of true magic has ever ascended the ranks of the College of the Arcane, contributed to the Grand Archivist’s grimoire, or claimed victory in the fighting pits of Tyros. Their tomes display all the hallmarks of erudition, and yet not one of the Towers teach true magic. On occasion, one will encounter a hedge wizard who claims to have discovered true spells, yet such rumors are swiftly confirmed as the ravings of madmen or the empty boasts of charlatans. If true magic is real, its nature remains a mystery. Yet there can be no doubt about its influence on the world: none at all.

1.0 Forty foot, and full of sway

The post “College English Majors Can’t Read” went a bit viral some time ago. I’m not here to discuss the post. Instead, I want to draw attention to a passage presented in the post. Students were presented with the first paragraph of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and were asked to interpret it. Here is the passage:

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

How well did you interpret this passage? The Biblical references, figurative language, and a handful of archaic ways of using terms (e.g., “wonderful”) may prove a challenge for many people. With time, English will evolve, and a passage like this will become almost completely incomprehensible to latter day English speakers. Would this mean that the words used in the passage would become literally meaningless?

No. Of course not. Dickens had an intent when writing the passage, and were Dickens fluent in contemporary English vernacular, he would have little trouble conveying, or “translating” the passage into Gen Z speak. In contrast, Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky will always be mostly nonsensical. Consider the first quatrain:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Some of the words here are ordinary English words: and, then, did. Yet there are many nonsense words here: brillig, slithy, outgrabe. These words don’t mean anything. As a result, the passage as a whole is nonsensical, for much the same reason one could not make complete sense of the demand that one “Please put the leerigs in the meldrif.” Yet, curiously, it mirrors meaningful language closely enough that it is still capable of giving the odd sense of being almost meaningful. To me, the passage sounds like a description of a calm nature scene. If I had to translate it, maybe I’d get something like this: It was calm, and the tall grasses blew back and forth in the gentle wind. All was peaceful deep in the woods, and the creatures of the forest were still.

I don’t know what vibe I was supposed to get, if any. Maybe the passage reads as ominous to you. But it doesn’t matter. This is a nonsense poem, and many of those words don’t mean anything. If you really wanted to, you could Jabberwockify the passage from Dickens and get similar nonsense. I asked ChatGPT to do so, and this is what I got (I repeated the first quatrain at the end since ChatGPT didn’t do this):

‘Twas brimbly term, and Chancellor-snoot
Sat stately in his Lawgish hall;
The Novem-blight did drearily root,
And mudflumps gobbled all.

The cobble-slicks were glabberous-grey,
As if the seas had slurped away;
And up came lizzigants to play—
Forty foot, and full of sway.

From chimble-pots the smog did droop,
A sootish flurry, dark and wide,
Like snowflakes dressed in funeral goop
For Sol’s expired pride.

The hounds were blobbed, the horses glooped,
With blinkers drenched and tempers yowled;
While footers bumped and brollied, swooped—
Umbrellæ intergrowled.

At corner-clumps they slid and skrit,
Where layercake-muck did ooze and cling;
Each slopstep laid a sludgy writ
That pavements still would bring—

For mud begets more muddlement,
In dribble-depths of pasty rent;
And every foot a payment lent
To Earth’s own soggy bankament.

‘Twas brimbly term, and Chancellor-snoot
Sat stately in his Lawgish hall;
The Novem-blight did drearily root,
And mudflumps gobbled all.

There’s a lot of nonsense there, and yet it still paints a picture of a dreary, muddy scene. There’s something to that. When apparent nonsense is inserted into a context, the surrounding context can often bleed into the nonsense terms, giving them a semblance of meaningfulness. But how and why we can extract a semblance of sense from nonsense is a discussion for another dronder. For now, I want to focus on the definitive nonsense. Terms like “lizzigants” and “outgrabe.” These words are meaningless. But what does that mean? What does it mean for a word to not mean anything?

I’m not sure. That’s different from saying I have no idea. But I have some hunches, ironically difficult to articulate in their own right. I’m still grappling with the notion, and perhaps, with time, I’ll have more of substance to say. But I want to say a bit about this now, before I’ve organized all my thoughts and dedicated more time to studying language and meaning more thoroughly. Perhaps then I’ll be confident enough to say something compelling. The sort of thing that would make others bustle out of my way, as if I were forty foot and full of sway. But for now what I’ll do is share my rough sentiments and suspicions.

2.0 The Lizzigants are out again

I don’t think words, sentences, phrases, and so on mean anything. Not literally. That might sound insane, but I don’t think that it is. I actually think that views to the contrary are a bit odd. What I mean is this: I don’t think the words themselves mean things. I think people mean things, and the words they use are a method of conveying what they mean. I’ve been repeating this slogan for some time now: Words don’t mean things; people mean things. What I mean by this is that language is a behavior that agents use to achieve their goals. For humans, language arose as a sociocultural technology largely developed to communicate with one another. It isn’t just about communication, though. As I said, I see language as a tool we use to achieve our goals.

This has yielded a host of benefits for us. It allows us to coordinate our actions. We can issue warnings, state what we need, negotiate, trade, argue, console, threaten, encourage, and on and on. Language is for doing. Words arose for us to do things. They are every bit as much a behavior as running or jumping or throwing a spear. Language is not some isomorphic mapping of mouth sounds or symbols onto some platonic realm of concepts.

This also doesn’t mean that language is necessarily used to communicate effectively. Lies provide a simple example. The goal of a lie is to cause others to believe things you yourself think aren’t true. It is intentional miscommunication. More generally, our goals are not always aligned with communicating with others, since there are times where it serves our interests to miscommunicate, or not communicate at all. Justin D’Ambrosio argues in this post that:

[…] language is often able to serve as a tool of influence only insofar as it does not function as a tool of communication.

D’Ambrosio then provides an example:

Suppose that I’m a politician, you are a member of my constituency, and we meet at a town hall. Your goal is to come to know my policies and plans, and whether you vote for me will be determined by whether you think our positions are aligned. My only goal is to get you to vote for me. You ask me what steps I plan to take concerning gun control, but I have no knowledge of what your background views on the subject are, and you have no idea whether I intend to be forthright about my plans.

D’Ambrosio goes on to argue that in such circumstances it is helpful for the politician to “use language that is practically meaningless,” though from his description (such language is flabby, amorphous, and noncommittal blather) this appears to either be a distinct instance of meaninglessness that would fall within the scope of my conception of the term, or a somewhat nonoverlapping notion. It’s hard to say.

The point I want to illustrate, in either case, is that language is serving in these situations as a tool, and that tool need not have one purpose: it will serve whatever purposes its users can effectively deploy it to achieve, and communication isn’t the only effective use of language.

Put a little differently, language is a type of behavior employed by people to achieve their goals, and since people have different goals, their communicative aims with any given use of language will differ from one context to another, even if precisely the same words are used as they are in other contexts. This shouldn’t be that complicated. It is no more complicated than noting that a stick can have multiple purposes, and that one might use a stick to do one thing in one situation, but something else in some other situation, even though it’s the same damn stick.

Yet many philosophers treat words as mysterious incantations that have the power to pick out inscrutable concepts, concepts the meaning of which can never be conveyed. One simply has a particular concept, and some word reliably refers to that concept. These concepts are variously described as unanalyzable, properly basic, bedrock, or primitive.

One must be careful not to conflate usages of these terms with other notions. For instance, primitive concepts usually refer instead to concepts the meaning of which cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of other concepts. One might think of these as atomic concepts: concepts that are not themselves composed of other concepts. Perhaps there are concepts like this, but this is a distinct notion from whether a concept’s meaning cannot be conveyed in or communicated at all. The latter notion, the one I am dealing with, is ineffable: its meaning cannot be conveyed at all, at least not through conventional means. One’s access to it is an entirely private affair. Perhaps one could provide some guidance in accessing the concepts in question, perhaps by gesturing at examples that can prompt one to acquire the concept.

3.0 Ineffability

The ineffability of a concept is a problem for me, but it does not appear to be a problem for many people who discuss philosophical matters. As I’ll understand the concept here, an ineffable concept is one whose content cannot be articulated in principle. Consider the concept of an apple. The concept of an apple isn’t atomic, because it can be broken down into sub-concepts: fruit, food, plant, organism, and so on. How do we acquire the concept of apple? I don’t know the exact psychological picture, but I don’t find it too much of a stretch to suggest experience plays some role. You don’t need to directly experience apples. You can hear about them from others. And provided they fit into your broader picture of the world, their coherence or consistency with your other concepts will be a factor as well. What about more abstract notions, like justice? I’m not sure how we acquire these concepts, but I again believe experience plays a pivotal role. One does not see justice directly or literally as one might an object. One might see justice in the sense of seeing someone get what they deserve, though. And in this respect, there’s nothing especially mysterious about seeing justice in at least one respect. Yet some concepts may require special training to grasp. Some concepts require special training or scaffolding on the basis of more sophisticated prior knowledge to acquire the concept, e.g., certain concepts in math or science, such as general relativity. But notice that in the case of the sciences, one could in principle acquire these concepts even if in practice people are often unable to do so, whether due to lack of educational resources or because they don’t have the requisite cognitive capacities (e.g., because they are babies). But in the sciences, what distinguishes one theory, concept, or account from another is that it makes different predictions about what we experience. While I may not understand general relativity, supposing I could, part of understanding it consists in understanding how a world in which general relativity operates differs from a world where it doesn’t.

Not all terms and phrases we use make a direct difference like this. Think of a term like the or and. Not all parts of speech pick out putative features of the world. But the concepts I take issue with among philosophers do. I’ll focus here on irreducible normativity.

Irreducibly normative facts are facts which cannot be reduced to or cashed out in non-normative terms. These normative truths are often said to give us reasons, and these reasons in turn are not contingent on or reducible to our stances. For instance, it may be an irreducibly normative truth that you ought not cause suffering for pleasure. While I would cash out the sentence:

“You ought not cause suffering for pleasure.”

…In purely descriptive terms, e.g., it would be inconsistent with [some specified normative standard] to cause suffering for pleasure, proponents of irreducible normativity insist this isn’t adequate.

Normative language is a familiar part of ordinary English: ought, should, must, good, obligation, prohibition, and so on. I believe these ordinary language terms are, like all language, deeply embedded in our everyday practices, which are inescapably practical and goal-oriented. Such language, when used by ordinary people, is used to do things. To cajole, condemn, persuade, boast, intimidate, assuage, and so on. We are not proposition engines that trundle about spewing propositions to no end. Even if we take our normative claims to be true in some sense, we wouldn’t use normative language unless it was for something. Whatever this language means, I contend that it must be practical. That is, their use, and by extension their meaning, depends on our goals, standards, and values.

Irreducibly normative truths are incapable of playing this practical role, at least in any direct way. They are, by design, completely divorced from practical considerations. Irreducibly normative truths about what we should or shouldn’t do, what’s good or bad, and so on are truths that are somehow “applicable” to us independent of our goals, standards, and values. That’s not some implication or extrapolation. That’s part of their definition, and is thereby a non-negotiable feature of the very concept of an irreducibly normative truth. They’d be applicable to us and thus “bind” us even if we didn’t know or care about them.

Consider a world in which there are such norms. Now consider another world in which there are no such norms. What possible experiences could we have that would allow us to distinguish one world from the other? None whatsoever. The existence of such norms would make no practical difference at all. This is altogether unlike scientific theories, which are distinct precisely in terms of making different predictions about what the world is like. Yes, there are different theories for what accounts for a given set of observations, e.g., the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. I find myself firmly in the camp that either these theories make predictive differences or there is no meaningful distinction between them. Even if philosophers balk at such a notion, ordinary language and ordinary thought is a thoroughly practical affair, not an abstract, theoretical one. Morality is for doing. I at least think our default assumption should be that folk morality should be heavily constrained by pragmatic considerations like the simple heuristic of making a difference.

4.0 You can’t bootstrap truths

Some critics may insist such irreducibly normative truths could or would make a difference. I don’t believe they would. The truths themselves never impinge on experience in a way independent of our reaction to these truths. Their only practical relevance must be mediated through the beliefs of agents. For comparison, if I leap into a bonfire, my beliefs or desires are irrelevant: I am going to burn. Conversely, even if I acquired knowledge that “I ought to” do something, what happens if I don’t care and simply ignore this alleged truth?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Irreducibly normative truths have no teeth. No power to compel. What would make a practical difference is if we wanted to comply with them. Or if we were motivated to comply with them through some involuntary means. In the former case, such truths have no force independent of our own stances. Now consider the practical difference between these two scenarios:

· Alex believes she irreducibly ought to be kind. It is an irreducibly normative truth that she ought to be kind. She is motivated by this belief and acts accordingly.

· Alex believes she irreducibly ought to be kind. It is not an irreducibly normative truth that she ought to be kind. She is motivated by this belief and acts accordingly.

The truth itself doesn’t do any direct work. It is belief, and its connection to motivation, that does the work. The facts themselves cannot make a difference. A critic may argue that this distinction overlooks that certain truth-conducive epistemic practices may only result in acquiring a justified belief that one has an irreducibly normative obligation to act in a given way if there, in fact, are such truths. As such, the epistemic situation in these two cases would be different. It would be too much of a digression to fully address this here, so rather than lay out an extensive argument to the contrary, I’ll put my pragmatist cards on the table and say this: I believe this gets things backwards. Truth is subordinate to and emerges from the practical cash value truths have in regulating our decisions and facilitating accurate predictions with an eye towards goal success. Irreducibly normative truths don’t make any predictive differences nor impinge on our experience independent of our reactions to them in the way that a sharp knife or burning fire do. We learn knives are sharp and fires burn by interacting with the world in ways that are not directly responsive to our wishes. Knives don’t care if you don’t want to be cut, and fires don’t care if you don’t want to be burned. They make a difference all the same, and these experiences are how we learn we’re not omnipotent, and why it makes good pragmatic sense to believe in an external world that is largely indifferent to your wishes. But irreducibly normative truths aren’t like this. If you don’t care about them, and don’t react to them, they effectively go away.

Scientific models are endorsed on the basis of their ability to make predictions. We favor the ones that do better. But a person operating on a belief in irreducibly normative truths and a commitment to abide by them is not able to make any better of a prediction about what will happen in the future than someone who denies such truths. They simply fall outside the scope of making a direct practical difference. Whatever practical difference they make must be and can only be mediated through beliefs about them. But this is trivially true of any belief one treats as motivationally relevant.

A person with severe paranoia may believe they’re being followed, and act accordingly. Would this entail that such a person is in fact being followed? No, it would not.

A population may worship a God that demands ritual human sacrifice, to which they oblige by carving out the hearts of thousands of victims. This belief makes a practical difference to their behavior, but does it entail that such a God is real? No, it does not.

In both cases, provided the person or people stop holding the belief, they will stop acting as they did. The beliefs are doing the work. Beliefs cannot be used to bootstrap truths into existence. Epistemic practices can’t simply latch onto truths, then because one cares about the truth, it thereby has practical value, and then appeal to this practical value to establish that the truth in question was true in the first place; that it made a practical difference in the first place was the criterion for establishing its existence. If pragmatism was obliged to anoint as true beliefs of this kind, they’d be required to acknowledge as true any set of normative standards a person found themselves believing in and motivated to comply with.

Or maybe they can. Maybe a good pragmatist should acknowledge that if the beliefs somehow work for you then in that respect they can earn the pragmatic badge of truth. This would still be anathema to the very picture normative realists who advocate for irreducibly normative truths are putting forward. Why? Because this would mean that these irreducibly normative, and ultimately stance-independent truths were somehow paradoxically (and, I think, impossibly) contingent on our stances, i.e., on our own subjective, stance-dependent goals and values, and what works for us personally. While pragmatists are not radically relativistic, pragmatism has an inescapably perspectival element.

The only way to attempt to derive any truths out of the pragmatic method will thus turn partially, though ultimately, on our stances. This is why I don’t think classical, or standard analytic conceptions of irreducible normativity play nicely with pragmatism; I suspect their proponents are committed to an anti-perspectival perspective. The pragmatic version would likely be seen as an inauthentic downgrade at best, and at worst confused, nonsensical, and utterly missing the point. If the critic wants to instead appeal to some non-pragmatic standard for establishing the reality of irreducibly normative truths, well then we’d have to have that discussion. They’re certainly not entitled to presume such standards are true without an argument if they want to persuade a pragmatist.

5.0 Insularity and Collective Delusion

The preceding considerations are not enough to establish that irreducible normativity is an unintelligible, or meaningless concept. Personally, I’m satisfied that the concept is nonsensical in part because its proponents cannot explain what it means, and because its putative truth would make no practical difference. But many readers may find this unsatisfying. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Putting forward the thesis that a given account is false is often a fairly straightforward affair. Demonstrating that a term or phrase is nonsensical is much trickier. It’s easy in the case of intentional gibberish inserted into a poem, but many people recoil at the suggestion that serious academics could be so thoroughly confused as to believe actual nonsense.

I want to disabuse people of this notion. For whatever reason, it’s apparently considered entirely acceptable to claim that a rival philosophical position is false. But to suggest that it is meaningless is considered more extreme, less charitable, more objectionable, and somehow a greater indictment of the people who hold such a view than “merely” claiming they’re mistaken.

This doesn’t make much sense. When a person is saying meaningless or nonsensical things, this can be and often is as much the product of confusion as being mistaken is. In many cases, it makes more sense.

Many of us are now familiar with the principle: garbage in, garbage out. The rough idea is that if you use the wrong method, you’ll consistently produce an output of little value. Many of my objections to analytic philosophers turn not on the premises of their arguments, but turn instead on the methods or background assumptions they rely on. If those more fundamental assumptions are misguided in a way that compromises their methods, then philosophers may be without an effective method. If their methods are garbage, they’re only going to get garbage out of them. I believe some of these metaphilosophical errors are rooted in misapprehensions about language, meaning, and human psychology. The result is a metaphilosophy that often leads philosophers into conceptual confusions. Does this mean these philosophers are stupid or incompetent? No. The mistakes are subtle, difficult to recognize, and fall outside the scope of mainstream analytic philosophy. They’re by no means obscure; far from it. Many of my objections are roughly similar to Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy, and he is widely regarded as the most influential and important philosopher of the 20^th century. I don’t think Wittgenstein’s pessimistic read is easy to understand, and just as importantly, its implications are so threatening to standard philosophical practice that it would be an understatement to describe it as a bitter pill to swallow. It’s more of a suppository.

Now consider the alternative. Suppose the methods of analytic philosophy are entirely suitable to solving the problems it sets itself to, and suppose philosophers are in possession of the relevant facts and considerations. They should be, since those facts and considerations are typically non-empirical and are thus immediately available on proper introspection. Within this framework, everyone has the right tools for the job, and yet philosophers don’t agree about anything and constantly accuse one another of being incorrect.

In short: I am accusing philosophers of making mistakes that are rooted in them using the wrong tools for the job, whereas they are accusing one another of failing to use the right tools appropriately. This is a qualitative difference. It’s not immediately evident the former is somehow the more severe error. I think it’s more severe in one sense: It’s deeper and more systematic. Accepting my critiques would require a complete paradigm shift, a total upheaval of one’s existing views. Whereas recognizing that one was mistaken about this or that ancillary matter is far less threatening to the broad scope of one’s perspective. But I also think balking at such a suggestion and continuing to make this error is far more understandable, and thus far less an indictment of one’s character or competence, then having all the tools for the job but failing anyway. Who would you consider more of an incompetent oaf?

• A man who cannot build a house and keeps failing to hammer nails because he was given a wrench, and it isn’t very good at nailing boards together

• A man who is given a perfectly good hammer but keeps failing to hammer nails into the boards properly

The first may be a fool for failing to realize he needs a hammer. But if you were told a wrench is the only proper tool, and were trained to use it for twenty years, it’s understandable if you’d fail to appreciate that a hammer would get the job done better. Conversely, what excuse does the latter person have? None, it would seem. He’s bad at using the proper tools.

An analogous context applies to my unintelligibility thesis. Whereas I maintain that philosophers have spent years committing themselves to and internalizing a flawed metaphilosophy that reliably leads to error, part of which includes nonsensical concepts, the alternative strikes me as worse: philosophers arguing with one another apparently believe they’re in possession of the proper methods (they all have hammers) but are still reliably failing (they still can’t hammer boards together).

It would be difficult for me to show that philosophers are making the sorts of errors I claim that they are, but I want to make two observations. First, people often balk at my suggestion that analytic philosophers might have unintelligible or nonsensical views. Yet there is considerable irony in both these philosophers and their defenders reacting with such open hostility towards this suggestion. Often the reasoning is something like:

How could so many experts be collectively mistaken?

Why is this ironic? For the simple reason that analytic philosophers have consistently gone out of their way to distinguish themselves from continental philosophy, frequently and specifically because they charge the latter with being full of unintelligible nonsense. Well, there are a lot of continental philosophers and fans of continental philosophy. How could all these experts be so confused?

Apparently they can be, according to analytic philosophers and their defenders. So why is it such an outrage to suggest that something similar could be in play, in a few narrow instances, in analytic philosophy? The two share common roots and are similarly disconnected from practical affairs. If apologists for analytic philosophy can be so quick to gleefully disparage continental philosophy by hurling Judith Butler quotes at us like hand grenades, it’s ironic, hypocritical, and more than a bit revealing that members of this same community would be so dismissive and even offended at the far more modest and narrow suggestion that there are a few isolated instances of confusion among analytic philosophers (in contrast to continental philosophy, which is often depicted as more broadly confused, pretentious, and nonsensical).

Second, I want to end by returning to the beginning of this post. I described a fictional community, the Kel, who claim to practice the truest form of magic. Most readers will recognize that I am hinting at the Kel being a fraud. Not a conscious one. Not a malicious one. But it’s strongly implied that their claims to possess real magic are a sham. The question is: how could such a sham persist in a world with actual magic?

I believe part of the answer is collective insularity. An isolated individual may arrive at a host of confused and nonsensical views, but few others would take such a person seriously. Yet when a community forms, the community can serve to collectively reinforce whatever errors they are committed to. The social approval of one another can enhance one’s confidence and lead to feedback loops that drive insular communities towards ever more detached ways of thinking from the rest of the world. I believe this is part of what has gone on with academic philosophers, and that it is part of how philosophers have ended up with what I and others have diagnosed as deep confusions that have led them to endorse notions that are not even false, so much as unintelligible.

This isolation isn’t entirely physical. Philosophers don’t typically live in remote locations. But it is intellectual and social. Philosophers adopt unique jargon, shibboleths, and ways of thinking and speaking. They immerse themselves in a shared canon of readings. They treat specific figures as central to the discipline. Philosophers are trained on a similar corpus, and are trained to speak, think, and write similarly. They even adopt similar mannerisms as one another. See this clip, which does an excellent job of capturing philosophical affectations:

Philosophers frequently (if not usually) adopt being a philosopher as part of their social identity, and it becomes central to who they are as people. Philosophy is like art in that respect. One is an artist, first and foremost; that one’s art is also one’s profession is only fortunate happenstance. The artist gets paid to do what they wanted to do anyway. While this is true of many other professions, I doubt many people familiar with philosophers will fail to appreciate that philosophy is a way of life, a personality, a vibe, a state of being; it is far more than a job one clocks in for.

What I propose is that specific terms used in the cloistered contexts of philosophical theory have become so disconnected from everyday life that they fail to be about anything, to mean anything, to refer to anything, to make any potential difference in principle. Some of my critics may operate under the misapprehension that this is implausible precisely because this language is used “successfully” within academic contexts. Even nonsense can be successful within a narrow context. My daughter is 10 months old. She still babbles. She may say something like:

“Agoobagoo dah dah.”

I often respond as though she is engaged in real speech.

“That’s an excellent point. I completely agree. However, I am not so sure about your earlier remark, that bagoobagoo BAH! I believe that was a bit of a stretch.”

I don’t actually think she said anything meaningful, but I suspect in addition to being fun to talk to her it may also help stimulate linguistic development to engage with her in this way (I don’t know, I haven’t looked into it much). Nonsense can have a function in this respect. So, too, can nonsense be used to entertain, or befuddle, or manipulate. Language can and does serve roles independent of it referencing features of the world or describing anything we might experience or encounter. But this isn’t enough to secure the kind of meaning those who endorse irreducible normativity or qualia (two notions I reject as meaningless) are after. They believe they are capturing phenomena, properties, features of the world, and important ones, no less.

The non-technical discourse of everyday language emerges in far more grounded contexts. It is always for doing something. What works is preserved and what doesn’t is discarded. But even in everyday interactions people are sometimes confused or talk nonsense, even if they are generally competent. We shouldn’t be so allergic to the suggestion that people could be speaking nonsense. Though I suppose the objection is to the notion that a bunch of very smart people could consistently speak nonsense over an extended period of time. I don’t think nonsense language would be employed in everyday contexts for an extended period of time for the simple reason that if it proved useless in the pursuit of people’s goals, they’d stop doing it. Reality has a way of teaching us lessons. It gives us feedback. Terms and concepts emerge organically in response to this feedback.

The same is not true of technical concepts like irreducible normativity. They are not a direct response to the feedback of the world. I say “direct” because they do emerge to solve problems, but they are “problems” of an abstract, intellectual kind.

The kind that isn’t the direct product of the world giving one feedback, so much as the socially constructed feedback that emerges exclusively and entirely within certain intellectual contexts. This puts distance between the emergence of such terms and the grounded, practical realities of everyday life. This is why I think nonsense can emerge in academic contexts. There’s no feedback from the world itself. Scientific terms and concepts respond to and evolve directly in response to testing our predictions against the world: against rocks and rain and trees and air and fire and water and wind. But philosophical concepts only respond to the feedback of other philosophers. And this risks these concepts emerging not to solve any substantive practical problems, but to plug a gap in a syllogism or paper over dubious reasoning. Whereas proposals for new elements or new laws of physics are tightly bound to their predictive fidelity, the capacity to propose concepts in the platonic void in which philosophers operate is boundless and empirically untestable; one’s only checks are the crude sense of satisfaction one has when proposing them; some sense that one’s intuitions have been mollified.

These errors are exacerbated when they are proposed by respected figures within the field, such as Derek Parfit. Philosophy hasn’t simply created a subculture. It props up particular figures, both historical and contemporary, around which people gravitate and form allegiances. This already fosters a tribalistic and ideological mindset among philosophers, who come to identify not just with particular philosophers but with schools of thought, methods, specific positions, specific universities, programs, and so on. The professionalization of the field has only further amplified the tendency towards fashionable trends, since it funnels career advancement through the narrow bottleneck of whatever happens to be trending in publication in philosophy journals.

There are significant psychological, cultural, and sociological forces that account for the state of contemporary academic philosophy. A desire to signal one’s intelligence, maintain a particular identity, pursue a particular career, enjoy engaging in particular problems, to feel a sense of belonging to a particular community…all of these forces militate against receptivity to a line of critique that would unravel it all. And this is what I think is at the heart of hostility towards critiques on the basis of unintelligibility. That and simply not taking the time to engage with the position and regard it not as an unmotivated, ignorant, and radical thesis, but as a serious and sober position that deserves a seat at the academic table.